Tribal Region Quotes

the territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan’s tribal region.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There’s a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White

There were spaceships again in that century, an dthe ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species that considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers.

The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in." So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

For crying out loud, Baker, what rock have you been living under? Oh, yeah, you're from Kansas." He said it as if Kansas were in some remote tribal region inhabited by illiterate natives like the ones in my National Geographic magazines.

if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we are all migrants, and we are all mixed.

What we take from granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign. Rural Mexicans don't have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese. They don't smother their food in mounds of sour cream. Who would pay for it? They have never seen "nachos." In some regions of the south, they eat soup with bananas; some tribal folks not far from Veracruz eat termite tacos; turkey, when there are turkeys, is not filled with "stuffing"―but with dry pineapples, papaya, pecans. Meat is killed behind the house, or it is bought, dripping and flyblown, off a wooden plank in the village market. They eat cheeks, ears, feet, tails, lips, fried blood, intestines filled with curdled milk. Southerners grew up eating corn tortillas, and they never varied in their diet. You find them eating food the Aztecs once ate. Flour tortillas, burritos, chimichangas―it's foreign food to them, invented on the border. They were alliens before they ever crossed the line.

There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speechmakers.

America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and region—became clear.

According to estimates presented by scientists from across the globe at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016, of the fifty-five lakh deaths caused by air pollution in 2013, over half were in India and China. India alone accounted for fourteen lakh of those deaths. Air pollution, scientists say, is the fourth-highest risk factor for death globally, after high blood pressure, poor diet and cigarettes. We can only hope that the dying poor of the tribal regions are at least counted in these statistics.

is highly probable that Kurdish language and culture began to develop during the fourth ice age (20,000–15,000 BC). The Kurds are one of the oldest indigenous populations in the Middle Eastern region. About 6,000 BC they became distinct from other cultures. Historiography first mentions the Kurds as an ethnic group related to the Hurrians (3,000–2,000 BC). So it is assumed that the predecessors of the Kurds, the Hurrians and the descendants of the Hurrians – the Mittani, the Nairi, the Urarteans and the Medes – all lived in tribal confederations and kingdoms at the time. Kurdish society at

The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US’ regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington’s budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead

The inescapable and troublesome conclusion was that if there was a political entity in tenth-century Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, and that Jerusalem was a fortified stronghold. It is possible that the tiny kingdom was ruled by a dynasty known as the House of David. An inscription discovered in Tell Dan in 1993 supports this assumption, but this kingdom of Judah was greatly inferior to the kingdom of Israel to its north, and apparently far less developed. The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan—Shechem and Jerusalem—and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The plentiful archaeological finds unearthed in the West Bank during the 1980s reveal the material and social difference between the two mountain regions. Agriculture thrived in the fertile north, supporting dozens of settlements, whereas in the south there were only some twenty small villages in the tenth and ninth centuries BCE. The kingdom of Israel was already a stable and strong state in the ninth century, while the kingdom of Judah consolidated and grew strong only by the late eighth. There were always in Canaan two distinct, rival political entities, though they were culturally and linguistically related—variants of ancient Hebrew were spoken by the inhabitants of both.

Our core is our programmes, whether it is the remotest corners of the region or the most disaster-torn or dangerous areas what we are doing is for upliftment of humanity which has turned an ugly face since few decades. Ours is a sincere effort to help the needy ones”Khadim Purgi (Chairman Ladakh Tribal Foundation).

tribal leaders were crucial in destroying a significant proportion of the human trafficking networks operating in the North Sinai, the profits of which help to fund terrorist activity in the region.

Fear that Fascism might return to the continent where it was born is what spurred the drive for European integration, but the origins of that sentiment are now more than seventy years old, and anxieties, like human beings, eventually show their age. Virtually every state in Europe is the product of a nationalist movement that flowered in the nineteenth century or earlier. Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination gave a boost to the idea that wherever there dwelled a people, there should be a state—however impractical that concept would be to implement in a region where the movement of people and the wondrous spontaneity of romance have conspired to link some very different family trees. The whole notion of pure blood is laughable, but that does not stop tribal instincts and their accompanying national mythologies from exercising a powerful sway over behavior, as World War II so tragically demonstrated. It took the shock of that war to create a reaction strong enough for countries to embrace regional integration, but that choice has always been more compelling logically than emotionally.

The principal dangers for you are the inexperiences of your people in government affairs, tribal fights which have done so much harm and must at all cost be stopped, and the attraction which certain of your regions can have for foreign powers which are ready to profit from the least sign of weakness.

. . . the Native American relationship with the land is very important . . . One could not any more own the land than one could own the air above the land or the rain that fell on it or the animals that lived on it. Land is so important and place is so important to tribal people that history for them is more a function of place than of time. People are associated with a particular region, the region is the centre of their world . . . consequently, that land is so intricately bound into the very soul of most tribal people that it's not something that you trade back and forth. And when they were forced to trade lands in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to give up land, in order to survive, it was a very traumatic experience for them. Another thing to remember is that most of the religious beliefs of tribal people are site-specific, and by that I mean that their cosmology, the powers in their universe, are also tied to the particular area in which they live. - David Edmunds, Professor of American History at the University of Texas

In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil.

Mohammed took his tribal customs and traditions and injected them into his new religion. Many of the ideas and traditions he implemented were already contained in the tribes he conquered, so in many cases, no major changes were required of his new followers. For example, most, if not all, of the tribes were polygamous. Women were seen primarily as chattel and under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. The communities of the new Islamic religion in the 600s CE often converted en masse. With minor modifications, they kept practicing their traditions. Mecca was already a major pagan religious shrine; Mohammed conveniently changed it into a place of worship and pilgrimage for Allah. Practically speaking, Mohammed unified a fracture region under a single religion and did it with a superior military. Conquest, war, and male predominance were the hallmarks of Islam. Despite political splits over the centuries, the tribal nature of Islam remains intact.

The Iron Age of Petra began in approximately 1200 BCE. This period has been linked to the presence of the Edomites, a tribal kingdom that was first mentioned by the Egyptians, Assyrians, and the authors of the Old Testament. However, unlike the Biblical accounts of a mythical kingdom that was ruled homogenously by a king appointed by the gods, Edomite society was largely a continuation of tribal kin-based forms of social organization that already existed in the region.[17]

Botanists have not explored the region very thoroughly (not even the Pakistani army has much stomach for poking around these wild tribal lands), so there may be surprises in store. And

Safir Khan. Rahim’s former underling, working from either Afghanistan or the tribal region of Pakistan. Now presumed to be hiding in the mountainous region straddling the border between the two countries. The bastard had killed their president and killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. His days were numbered.

The likeness of Ethiopic to Arabic suggests an original tribal affinity.

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

The world is tearing itself apart,” the retired General began. “This administration is compromising national security. In another few years he will be gone to go write his memoirs and tour the country doing speaking engagements before picking up a job in some think tank. Then guys like you and me will be left holding the mess that he created. We will have inherited an unworkable situation in the Middle East. “He forced Mubarak out; clearly the wrong move. We had a good deal going with Gaddafi and many worked very hard to get him into our camp, but we did flip him. Then the President helps the militias overthrow him without the slightest understanding of the region and the complicated east, west, and south tribal conflict overlaid on top of sectarian issues.

She remembers third grade at the Indian Island School, where she learned that the name Penobscot is from Panawahpskek, meaning “the place where the rocks spread out” at the head of the tribal river, right where they were. That Wabanaki means “people of the Dawnland,” because the tribes live in the region where the first light of dawn touches the American continent.

Giant gabbro stone balls called petrospheres are scattered all over the southwestern states of Costa Rica. Nobody knows who made them, but the consensus is that they were signs of tribal power, wealth and male fertility. It’s not hard to figure out. If Costa Rica was covered with almond-shaped pits filled with the remains of men who’d accidentally wandered into them because men love holes, you’d think a matriarchal society once ruled the region and men were dumbasses. You see giant spheres all over the Diquís Delta and you think, well, those are testicles. And men are dumbasses. It’s not rocket science.

If you were to roam the world from the arctic goldfields of Kotzebue Sound to the pearl-fisheries of Thursday Island,’ wrote Lowell Thomas when he visited the region in the 1920s, ‘you could find no men more worthy of the title “desperado” than the Pushtuns who live among these jagged, saw-tooth mountains of the Afghan frontier.’ Elliot, Jason. Unexpected Light (p. 56). Pan Macmillan UK. Kindle Edition.

Climate Peacekeeping action in the lawless, war-torn tribal region of West Texas.

When it came to federalism, however, there were different types. Regional (territorial) federalism has been the characteristic form in the West: the United States, Canada and so on. Ethnic federalism, in contrast, has been an African development following the Nigerian post-civil war constitution of the mid-1970s. It followed the logic of colonial indirect rule. As an expression of self-determination, ethnic federalism acknowledges the ethnic group—and not the population of a region—as the political self with the right to self-determination. The general principle is: for each ethnic group, a homeland. And inside each homeland, customary rights for members of the ethnic group indigenous to that homeland. In Ethiopia too, as had been in colonized Africa, those residing in the homeland but ancestrally not of it, were disenfranchised. This legal innovation turned ethnic difference into a source of advantage for those acknowledged in law as indigenous and discrimination against those who were not. The politicization of ethnicity created an enfranchised majority alongside disenfranchised minorities in each homeland. This is what C&S termed tribalism, the inevitable consequence of indirect rule.

Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.

And as she read, America’s mythologies began to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and region—became clear. And she was consoled by her new knowledge.

Nennius tells us, what Gildas omits, the name of the British soldier who won the crowning mercy of Mount Badon, and that name takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance. There looms, large, uncertain, dim but glittering, the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Somewhere in the Island a great captain gathered the forces of Roman Britain and fought the barbarian invaders to the death. Around him, around his name and his deeds, shine all that romance and poetry can bestow. Twelve battles, all located in scenes untraceable, with foes unknown, except that they were heathen, are punctiliously set forth in the Latin of Nennius. Other authorities say, “No Arthur; at least, no proof of any Arthur.” It was only when Geoffrey of Monmouth six hundred years later was praising the splendours of feudalism and martial aristocracy that chivalry, honour, the Christian faith, knights in steel and ladies bewitching, are enshrined in a glorious circle lit by victory. Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson. True or false, they have gained an immortal hold upon the thoughts of men. It is difficult to believe it was all an invention of a Welsh writer. If it was he must have been a marvellous inventor. Modern research has not accepted the annihilation of Arthur. Timidly but resolutely the latest and best-informed writers unite to proclaim his reality. They cannot tell when in this dark period he lived, or where he held sway and fought his battles. They are ready to believe however that there was a great British warrior, who kept the light of civilisation burning against all the storms that beat, and that behind his sword there sheltered a faithful following of which the memory did not fail. All four groups of the Celtic tribes which dwelt in the tilted uplands of Britain cheered themselves with the Arthurian legend, and each claimed their own region as the scene of his exploits. From Cornwall to Cumberland a search for Arthur’s realm or sphere has been pursued.The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. One specimen of this method will suffice: "It is reasonably certain that a petty chieftain named Arthur did exist, probably in South Wales. It is possible that he may have held some military command uniting the tribal forces of the Celtic or highland zone or part of it against raiders and invaders (not all of them necessarily Teutonic). It is also possible that he may have engaged in all or some of the battles attributed to him; on the other hand, this attribution may belong to a later date." This is not much to show after so much toil and learning. Nonetheless, to have established a basis of fact for the story of Arthur is a service which should be respected. In this account we prefer to believe that the story with which Geoffrey delighted the fiction-loving Europe of the twelfth century is not all fancy. If we could see exactly what happened we should find ourselves in the presence of a theme as well founded, as inspired, and as inalienable from the inheritance of mankind as the Odyssey or the Old Testament. It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.

By contrast, dozens of serious demographers and statisticians—not just the Jean-Paul Sanderson I mention—have concluded the overall population rose slightly or was unchanged at around 8 to 10 million from 1885 to 1908. Others include Bruce Fetter, Guy Vanthemsche, Jean-Luc Vellut, Pierre-Luc Plasman, Anatole Romaniuk, and, as mentioned, the later Jan Vansina. Taken on its own, the EIC was a positive influence on the black population in the Congo because of its campaigns against slavery, endemic tribal warfare, cannibalism, and polygamous rape and torture. Infrastructure and trade brought life-saving income. Population remained unchanged only because of the persistence of endemic disease and slavery. According to Romaniuk, venereal disease alone can explain the depression of population growth after 1900 when the EIC had finally brought a modicum of peace and prosperity to the region.

General Motors dealer, Al Jomaih, was based in Riyadh.16 The king and crown prince no doubt also recognized that the Nejd, with its tribal orientation and religious conservatism, had been, and probably always would be, the region of the kingdom most devoted to the House of Saud. They began an affirmative action program for Nejdis in both business and government.

The king and crown prince no doubt also recognized that the Nejd, with its tribal orientation and religious conservatism, had been, and probably always would be, the region of the kingdom most devoted to the House of Saud. They began an affirmative action program for Nejdis in both business and government.

Bible is replete with references to the distinct tribes; the Book of Joshua, for example, offers a detailed description of the disparate tribes joining forces to regain the land of Canaan, which God had promised them. Whether they consolidated themselves outside of Canaan or molded their distinct tribal identities within, we do not know. But it is reasonable to assume that between the thirteenth and eleventh centuries bce, residents could be found in the central mountain region of Canaan who shared a number of key properties that identify them as precursors to today’s Jews:

When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916 the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a Chinagraph pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the north-east. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony. The term ‘Sykes–Picot’ has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explain the unrest and extremism of today. This explanation can be overstated, though: there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived. Nevertheless, as we saw in Africa, arbitrarily creating ‘nation states’ out of people unused to living together in one region is not a recipe for justice, equality and stability.

Slavery existed long before the outside world returned to where it had originated. Traders in the Sahel region used thousands of slaves to transport vast quantities of the region’s then most valuable commodity, salt, but the Arabs began the practice of subcontracting African slave-taking to willing tribal leaders who would deliver them to the coast. By the time of the peak of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries hundreds of thousands of Africans (mostly from the Sudan region) had been taken to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus and across the Arabian world. The Europeans followed suit, outdoing the Arabs and Turks in their appetite for, and mistreatment of, the people brought to the slave ships anchored off the west coast.

It is not that Pueblo Indians hate modern America, especially since they find our modest cultural wants much easier to live with than colonial Spanish ones. Indeed, they don’t hate us at all—many have volunteered and served with distinction in our armed forces, and a number of Pueblo homes fly the American flag daily. Others, such as the famed Jemez Eagle smoke jumpers, serve as first responders throughout the American West. As forest fire teams go, the Jemez men are among the world’s best, and they will hold a dangerous but critical fire line with stunning resolve. No, it’s not about hatred, it is just that our unchecked growth, lack of social cohesion, and flamboyant use of resources—especially water—worries them as being unsustainable. They expect to outlast us. A few years ago, a local tribal elder appeared in an educational film about the Anasazi and commented that his people had to hold on to traditional Pueblo land, culture, and values because some day his descendants would look out across the Rio Grande Valley and modern Albuquerque would be gone.50 He is in the mainstream of opinion among traditional Pueblo leaders. Given our wasteful ways, weak communities, reemerging regional cultural conflicts, and rapidly diverging economics-based class system, we may in fact not be a sure bet for long-term survival.

A host of scholars who have studied surviving southeastern Indian groups conclude that few if any of these peoples possess cultures that do not bear the mark of significant contact with nonindigenous societies. Even the most “traditional,” such as the Seminoles of Florida, whom Nancy O. Lurie describes as “Contact-Traditional,” were significantly altered from precolonial days by the time pioneer “salvage” ethnologists described their cultural traits and created laundry lists that have since become benchmarks for defining aboriginal culture in the region. To many more traditional reservation-based groups, having surviving Indian cultural traits is extremely important to proving authenticity, although they are not required for acknowledgement via the BIA process. The existence of surviving Indian cultural traits is highly persuasive to most observers in proving that a group still exists as a viable tribal community.

Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the “principle of parsimony,” Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily” or “Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.” The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the “primitives” who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious.

In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.