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When you buy a book in your field — in my case women — you often do so simply because it is there and you have to have it. It is only when you get it home and start to weigh it up that you start to form judgements. If it concerns something I am writing about at the time, I look first at the bibliography and index. More generally, I look first at the illustrations to get a feel of a book, then at the preface and acknowledgements to get a feel of the writer. A book concentrating on marriage from whatever perspective, or about wherever in the world, should give out a whiff of something fascinating in that distinctive aspect of society. In this respect, The Bartered Brides starts well. There are three pictures captioned ‘A married couple ask to have their picture taken’ (p. 135). If in that particular case the bride was bartered, then both partners were, it seems, happy with the deal. Their warm feelings for each other, and their sense of fun, are delightfully apparent.
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The author, anthropologist Nancy Tapper, from whose doctoral thesis the book is derived, starts her acknowledgements, 'My debts to Richard Tapper are limitless' (p. xix); she then elaborates on their long and fruitful collaboration in both fieldwork and writing among the Maduzai of Afghanistan. ‘This woman has a head start in an attempt to analyse marriage,’ was my reaction, whether or not she is going to find for or against the marriage system of the tribal people about whom she writes, "We care very deeply for them" (p. xx). What is more important about this book is that, since the recent upheavals in Afghanistan, it is a unique record of a way of life that has inevitably disappeared; it is a memorial.
This introduction may have given the impression that Bartered Brides is a book for the general reader; that is not so. It is an academic one — scholarly, indeed — intended for those actively pursuing interests in gender studies, anthropology (including politics and economics), and Afghanistan. This last category includes Central Asia, for the Maduzai, one of the major tribes of the Durrani Pashtuns, are an Islamic Turkic people.
The problems of the anthropologist in observing a society and then of explaining it to the reader start, as Tapper explains, with translation. The fact that some terms are apparently easily translatable into English brings its own difficulties with, for example, the term 'marriage' itself. To point out such difficulties is to hint at the...