to maintain men’s houses in which they fed their supporters. The chief
point here is that supporters could shift their allegiance to another men’s
house so that leaders were in competition with one another. The ability to
mobilize supporters for force in social action was crucial. So choice was not
just random individual action. It was strategic, linked to political econ-
omy, land ownership, surpluses, and access to resources.
Attracted by the idea of a systematic game theory analysis, Barth went on
to propose that the process of competition led generatively to the emer-
gence of two large political blocs. Apparently these blocs existed and were
recognized by the actors, but could not be explained by any narrative rules
or traditions. Other questions arise: were these blocs stable or unstable?
What was the outcome of their emergence: a balance of power or a
perpetual disequilibrium? Formal game theory by itself may not be able
to explain these matters, since they are likely to be contingent on history.
These same questions, however, are very relevant to what has happened in
tribal politics among Pashtun speakers subsequently. Afghani and Pakistani
politics have been characterized by the emergence of large blocs in regular
conflict with state governments. These blocs clearly have some underlying
structural features that correspond to large-scale tribal coalitions, but they
appear as ideological units in conflict with other such units. Fredrik Barth’s
modes of analysis clearly, therefore, relate to the emergence of entities such
as the Taliban, that have subsequently preoccupied international concerns,
but their relationship to ethnographic work is what would be needed to
turn Barth’s work to further advantage today. (He himself explored these
topics in a work published in Norwegian.) The tragic events that have
overtaken the Swat Valley where Barth did his seminal work underscore
the need to understand these processes and how they do or do not intersect
with introduced Islamist military ideologies.
Several other points arise here. First, what is left out? A feature of Swat
social organization that appeared in Barth’s( 1959 ) ethnography was the
significance of‘saints’(pir) as mediators in social relations, including
relations of conflict. Religion and ritual therefore enter into the analysis
at this point, but how exactly does this modify the way we may view the
whole analysis? Second, Talal Asad made a critique of Barth’s work from a
basic class-based Marxist framework, pointing out the great inequalities
between persons and groups in the Pathan society. Barth notes that he did
notfind himself much attracted to such Marxist recensions of his materials,
and it is not hard to interpret why, because his own analysis concentrated
on the leaders as political players and did not require a class-based analysis
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