Description:
"This is a wonderful, absorbing, moving book."--Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis
"An original and significant work that is beautifully written and passionately engaged with material that is fascinating from start to finish. It is one of the best first books I have read in a long, long time."--Steven Caton, New School for Social Research
"A telling analytical juxtaposition of texts in family oral history, saint's legend, autobiography, and edict, amounting to a new approach to Middle Eastern discourse analysis and social history."--Margaret Mills, University of Pennsylvania
Review Quotes: "Making a virtue of necessity is perhaps the most important lesson an ethnographer has to learn, and David Edwards has learned it brilliantly. Unable to pursue his planned research in Afghanistan due to the ongoing warfare there, he was obliged to remain in the refugee camps of Pakistan. There, dispossessed Afghan men, seeking to retain some purchase on their past, told stories of great heroes and epic battle of the last century. Edwards provided an audience for these narratives and uses them as the centerpiece for his striking portrait of this much brutalized society. . . . The whole book is well structured, gracefully written, and convincingly done. I envy Edwards's ability to convey the central ethical options of Pashtun men so skillfully. . . . In this fine book David Edwards has raised disturbing and important questions about the very nature of culture and of morality."--"American Anthropologist