Tribal Democracy (Tribal jirga, Afghanistan)

By Bilal AhmedPosted on 18 November 2013Posted in Asia, Politics I was speaking to my mother about democracy, expressing wariness about European models, which many Pakistanis associate with the Soviet-inspired experiments of the Afghan Communist era. I mentioned the jirga, as a way of envisioning direct democracy, in South Asian vernacular. She found it appealing. “That’s like the old days, […]

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review

Should we look to traditional societies to help us tweak our lives? Wade Davis takes issue with the whole idea Source: https://www.theguardian.com/ Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, envisioned societies as stages in a linear […]

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond: review

Tom Payne is riveted by a thought-provoking study of peoples from New Guinea to the Kalahari Desert, which asks what we can learn from such societies. By Tom Payne 7:00AM GMT 08 Jan 2013 Parents: when your child cries in the night, should you pick him up and let him snuggle in your bed? Or, like […]