o - Aceh Books website

PUSHTUN 623
or herdsmen. They raise wheat or barley and herd sheep, goats, cattle, camels
or horses. In some regions, they have specialty occupations. For instance, in
the North-West Frontier Province they grow sugar cane; in northern Afghanistan,
cotton. Several groups in Paktyia (Afghanistan) monopolize the lumber trade
between Afghanistan and Pakistan; the Andar Ghilzai in east central Afghanistan
specialize in construction and repairing underground irrigation canals.
Most Pushtun are evolving towards either semi-nomadism, in which more
than 50 percent of the group moves from winter (kishlak) to summer quarters
(yaylla) with the herds while the rest remain behind to farm, or semi-sedentariness,
when fewer than 50 percent make the annual trek. Before the 1979 invasion,
more than 300,000 nomads crossed annually into Pakistan.
More enterprising herders use the annual move as a time to engage in commercial
activities along the route by trading or lending money to needy farmers.
Improved road networks have made it easier for some to haul heavy equipment
such as tents and poles in trucks, but the camel and donkey are still important
beasts of burden. Horses are prestige animals everywhere.
Pushtun on the move live in black goat-hair tents supported only by a guy
rope. An entire camp of these portable dwellings can be set up or struck in less
than an hour.
Houses in the winter quarters and sedentary villages vary with the terrain and
available building materials but almost always occupy non-productive land. The
most common house is square or rectangular, made of sun-dried brick covered
with mud and straw plaster. Bricks are made in wooden molds and placed on
the ground to dry. Flat roofs of rammed earth interlaced with twigs are supported
on mat-covered beams. In mountainous regions, most have stone foundations.
Extended families live in several huts surrounded by a high pise, a pressed mud
wall, with tall, cylindrical watchtowers overseeing the village complex. Enemy
surprise attack is a much-used tactic in Pushtun warfare, and survival depends
on constant vigilance.
In general, Pushtun society can be categorized as patriarchal (authority of the
spin geray, white beards or old men), patrilineal and patrilocal, with strong
matri-influences. The preferred marriage mate is father's brother's offspring or
another near relative. Since endogamy is preferred, women seldom move far
from their female kin, so the matricore remains intact. Pushtun women have
little formal power and seldom appear in public when strangers are in the area.
However, behind the mud walls and inside the tent, their influence is great, not
only in decision making concerning domestic affairs but often also in influencing
their husbands and sons on political and extralegal issues discussed at local jirgah
(village camp or councils). Divorce is rare, the levirate still occurs and polygyny
is permitted but seldom practiced except by the wealthier khans or chiefs.
A vertical kin system stretches from the nuclear family to the ethno-linguistic
group. Each unit embodies a system of reciprocal rights and obligations concerning
society, economics and politics. The system involves a genealogy of