Download or read book Buzkashi written by G. Whitney Azoy and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has happened since Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan first appeared in 1982; the past three decades have devastated Afghanistan. What began as the ethnography of a game has grown into a study recognized worldwide as the preeminent analysis of Afghan political dynamics. Replete with significant updates, including a new chapter featuring interviews with warlords regarding their sponsorship of buzkashi, this richly illustrated Third Edition remains the first and only full-scale anthropological examination of a single sport, as well as a beautifully written longitudinal case study about the games social significance. A master storyteller, Azoy first shows how the game of buzkashi is played and introduces readers to its rich history, its roots in tradition, and the implicit and explicit meanings attached to it. Next, readers learn how the author shifted from his Kabul diplomatic life to rural fieldwork in northern Afghanistan and a 40-year journey toward understanding the complexities of this ancient wild card game. Vivid with firsthand descriptions, Azoys book reveals buzkashi as a metaphor for chaos and an arena in the struggle for political control. This new edition, as one reviewer puts it, turns a great book into a classic.
Download or read book Guests in the Land of Buzkashi written by Miriam L. Stratton and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1972-73, the author lived with her family in Kabul, Afghanistan during the period when a coup replaced the monarchy with a republic. The resulting instability of the government alarmed the Soviet Union which began to apply pressure on the government to replace all westerners with Soviet workers. Consequently, many foreign aid projects fell by the wayside. This is an insider view of Afghanistan at a formative period of its history and gives background to understand today's rule by the fundamentalist sect, the Taliban. Stratton mixes humor with frustration as she meets inflexible male Afghan attitudes toward women, particularly the male servants in their home, as well as how foreigners seek to create a slice of home in alien circumstances. Gathering around the pool to trade rumors following the coup, learning one's telephone is tapped, mixed signals between cultures, having a servant threaten to kill for one for his having been fired. All these and more give the reader insight into living abroad in a third world country. Stratton and a female friend risked the hostile elements to travel around the country on their own, in an unreliable car that put them in peril more than once. They lived through their experiences...perhaps by Grace extended to naïve fools.
Download or read book Chasing Tales written by Corinne Fowler and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chasing Tales is the first exclusive study of journalism, travel writing and the history of British ideas about Afghanistan. It offers a timely investigation of the notional Afghanistan(s) that have prevailed in the popular British imagination. Casting its net deep into the nineteenth century, the study investigates the country's mythologisation by scrutinising travel narratives, literary fiction and British news media coverage of the recent conflict in Afghanistan. This highly topical book explores the legacy of nineteenth-century paranoias and prejudices to contemporary travellers and journalists and seeks to explain why Afghans continue to be depicted as medieval, murderous, warlike and unruly. Its title, Chasing Tales, conveys the circulation, and indeed the circularity, of ideas commonly found in British travel writing and journalism. The 'tales' component stresses the pivotal role played by fictionalised sources, especially the writing of Rudyard Kipling, in perpetuating traumatic nineteenth-century memories of Afghan-British encounter. The subject matter is compelling and its foci of interest profoundly relevant both to current political debates and to scholarly enquiry about the ethics of travel.
Download or read book Buzkashi Game and Power in Afghanistan written by G. Whitney Azoy and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Not only the first full-scale anthropological examination of a single sport, but also a beautifully written case study about a place and a people that have been largely ignored in the social science literature. Buzkashi, perhaps the wildest game in the world and a vivid feature of Afghan life, entails the aggressive struggle of hundreds of horsemen over a mutilated calf carcass."--Back cover.
Download or read book Buzkashi Riders written by Ronaldo Dizon and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzkashi Riders is a story about Johnny Czar and Brett McDonagh who live at opposite ends of the world and come together through the thread of coincidence. Their chance meeting starts a chain of events that take them to Afghanistan, the Land of the Buzkashi Horsemen. It is a story where impermanence is the main ingredient that makes us human and that the thread of coincidence connects all of us to those whom we touch during our lifetime. It is a story where change results in adventure and challenges are commonplace to lifeâÂÂs experience.
Download or read book Games without Rules written by Tamim Ansary and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of Destiny Disrupted: an enlightening, accessible history of modern Afghanistan from the Afghan point of view, showing how Great Power conflicts have interrupted its ongoing, internal struggle to take form as a nation
Download or read book All the Treasures of Libya written by Yaw Asomaning and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a huge sack of money with the color of blood. A skilled assassin wants it and will murder his way towards it. A terrorist wants it and will stop at nothing to have it. Libyan Intelligence wants it and torture will be employed in a brutal quest to find it. Armed robbers want it and will not rest until they have it. Out of this lot it is a hapless refugee who has the blood red sack of money. The guns of war roar amidst the birth of a violent revolution. Out of this chaos the hapless refugee attempts to escape from the war with the prized loot. Will he be able to escape from the war with his priceless treasure and perhaps the most precious thing of all, his life?
Download or read book Sports Why People Love Them written by Tim Madigan and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2009-05-16 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do billions of people around the world love sports? The popular media is increasingly dedicated to the heated rivalries of sports teams, academic institutions are held in its thrall, sports metaphors are commonplace in our language, and most individuals participate in athletics or follow a team sport in some variation. This entertaining and informative book attempts to find out why—by examining sports in all its facets. The authors provide an overview of the history of sports, with a constant focus upon the social conditions through which sport arises and by which it continues to thrive.
Download or read book Afghan Village Voices written by Richard Tapper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazârajât mountains. The book comprises a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.
Download or read book Land of the Unconquerable written by Jennifer Heath and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reaching beyond sensational headlines, Land of the Unconquerable at last offers a three-dimensional portrait of Afghan women. In a series of wide-ranging, deeply reflective essays, accomplished scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and journalists—most with extended experience inside Afghanistan—examine the realities of life for women in both urban and rural settings. They address topics including food security, sex work, health, marriage, education, poetry, politics, prisoners, and community development. Eschewing stereotypes about the burqa, the contributors focus instead on women’s empowerment and agency, and their struggles for peace and justice in the face of a brutal ongoing war. A fuller picture of Afghanistan’s women past and present emerges, leading to social policy suggestions and pragmatic solutions for a peaceful future.
Download or read book The Lie of the Land written by Ross Hunter and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maps are great, if shy, historians; their borders tell stories. Tales about the land, tales about people who drew them. They have lasting consequences. This book explores some of those borders with the most to tell us. History, biography and politics all play a part. Some of the oddest frontiers and some of the most painful consequences are examined, from Palestine to The Punjab, by way of Ireland, The Caucasus, The Balkans and Africa. Not all stories are peaceful, and the too-forgotten fights of the Opium Wars and Kurdistan are examined, along with the people who made the decisions. This book is for anyone who has spent a happy hour reading a map, and wondering just how and why some of those lines got to be where they are – mostly boundaries, but also other oddities and curiosities, and for anyone perplexed by a news story from an exotic land, far away in place or time. Copiously illustrated with maps and pictures, it is illuminating, enjoyable and, hopefully, disturbing.
Download or read book Land Beyond the River written by Monica Whitlock and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-10-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the first original accounts of Central Asia in Modern Times
Download or read book The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
Download or read book Peace Meals written by Anna Badkhen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides not only an unsparing and intimate history of some of the last decade's most vicious conflicts but also the most human elements that transcend the dehumanizing realities of war: the people, the compassion they scraped from catastrophe, and the food they ate. Making palpable the day-to-day life during conflicts and catastrophes, Badkhen describes not just the violence but also the beauty of events that take place even during wartime. Throughout Badkhen's stories, punctuated by recipes from the meals she shared with the people she encountered, emerges the most important lesson she has observed in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Chechnya: that war can kill our friends and decimate our towns, but it cannot destroy our inherent decency, generosity, and kindness--that which makes us human. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Afghanistan Ancient Land with Modern Ways written by Afghanistan. Vizārat-i Plān and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Places in Between written by Rory Stewart and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the author's 2002 journey by foot across Afghanistan, during which he survived the harsh elements through the kindness of tribal elders, teen soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers whose stories he collected along his way. By the author of The Prince of the Marshes. Original. 20,000 first printing.
