A Visual Ethnography

Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper

In the early 1970s Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Richard Tapper spent a year living with the Piruzai, pastoralists and farmers in northern Afghanistan. They joined the Piruzai in the spring pastures, trekked with Piruzai families, their camels, horses, sheep, goats and dogs, to the high mountains of the Hazarajat in the summer and returned with them to their farmlands in the autumn. And they took hundreds of photographs.

This book reproduces 380 of those photos, most in colour. It is a visual ethnography of the beauty of the people they met and the landscape in which they lived and travelled. The pictures are an evocation of a time of peace before the country was engulfed in nearly fifty years of war, and an historical record of the lives of people who have since had to cope with great tragedy and whose relatives and descendants have been major actors in more recent events.

This book is also a work of art. The landscapes are simply spectacular. But equally striking are the pictures of family groups, of people working and the intimate portraits of women and men and children. All too often Afghans have been stereotyped for other people’s political purposes, but here you meet warm, clear-sighted individuals who can laugh at themselves and are kind, curious and wise about others.

This book is published by the authors in association with The White Horse Press.

As this book is large and heavy, postage outside the UK will be expensive. Please contact books@whpress.co.uk for a quote.