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Abstract
Focusing on the rich social and affectual geography of heritage sites in Swat Valley, Pakistan, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to the complex synergy of the value registers of religion and economy and their role in the illegal antiquities market. We argue that ruptures like Taliban’s iconoclasm against the materiality of the pre-Islamic world requires a conceptual reframing of preservation, destruction, and looting within social and cultural frames of reference. Therefore, we reflect on how the illegal market of cultural artefacts in Swat is shaped by conflicting registers of religion and economy. We further examine how these conflicting value registers shape the ‘structures of feelings’ that shape and inform the preservation and destruction of heritage. To this end, we draw on interviews with illegal diggers and antiquity dealers, local archaeologists, heritage activists, and international experts on the Swat region.
Notes
1 Religion has a Gunah and Sawab register, which is comparable to profit and loss in the market language.
2 According to Yates and Brodie (Citation2012) the term ‘subsistence digger’ is used to refer to an individual who engages in illicit excavation of archaeological sites for salable cultural objects due to extreme poverty.
3 This does not apply to female students in the archaeology departments of various universities in and around Swat, or in Pakistan.
4 A recent example of this is a world bank funded project titled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa integrated tourism development project for Pakistan. This ongoing, $70.00 million project was approved in fiscal year 2019 with the closing date in 2025.
5 ‘Our hearts were strong [Zamung Zruna mazboot wal]’. This transliteration may generate confusion for a non-Pashto-speaking reader who may equate this utterance with the tension caused by the aesthetic appeal and the act of vandalism. The strongness of heart here does not refer to the aesthetic appeal being sacrificed for religious cause. The characters of this video are better characterized, following Bourdieu, as ‘naïve spectators who cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to specific history of an artistic tradition’. (Bourdieu, Citation1984, p. 4). It is their naivety, that makes the affective potential of their interaction with heritage cites, as circulating subjects, susceptible to manipulation by conflictive forces in the economy of affect (Rudnyckyj & Richard, Citation2009, pp. 69 and 73).