The Affectual-Social Ecology of Cultural Artefacts: Illegal Markets and Religious Vandalism in Swat Valley, Pakistan

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.

Keywords:

• Illegal market
• antiquities
• religious registers
• heritage activism
• Swat

1. Introduction

Objects have a life of their own. Some fall into disuse and others are re-commodified. These commodities can be found in the formal, informal, and illegal-underground markets (Appadurai, 1988). In this article, we focus on the illegal-underground markets (Becker & Wehinger, 2013) in which cultural artefacts, especially remains of Buddhist culture in Pakistan, are circulated from local to national and finally to international scale (Anderson, 2016). These underground markets are socially embedded (Erami and Keshavarzian, 2015), and the local/everyday valuation of objects traded within these are underpinned by conflicting, but often intertwined, spiritual and material value registers of the Swati society. We argue that the expansion of the underground market in Swat Valley, Pakistan, has amplified the monetary exchange value of these objects, which inspired a change in people’s value orientation towards them. Preservation of antiquities in the context of Swat valley attracted much national and international attention, both academic and policy-wise, when Taliban dynamited iconic statues and archaeological sites in the 2007-2009 militant crisis (De Nardi, 2019).

We contribute to the social economy field by bringing it into an interdisciplinary dialogue with the field of archaeology. Our point of departure is to look beyond the social embeddedness of markets to focus on their embeddedness within the structure of feelings. Our point of entry into this dialogue is through the illegal antiquities market. To this end, we offer empirical insights through an ethnographic exploration of the antiquities market in the Swat valley and its embeddedness in the structures of feelings underpinned by comingling registers of economy, religion, and cultural values.

Although religious beliefs still play a role in the destruction of these remains, they have become less influential due to a thriving underground market for these artefacts. The exploration of the anthropological value and impact of religious beliefs on culturally specific engagements with economics is not new (Malina 1997). In Swat, religious belief impacts in very subtle ways on the destruction as well as the marketing of these objects. Taliban’s iconoclasm is only a fragment of the life process of these antiquities (De Nardi, 2019; Olivieri, 2018).

We seek to bring together work on ethics, piety, and economy in Islam through the lens of affect and affective geographies. Usually, historical approaches to the lifecycle of antiquities foreground the human destruction of these objects, following their production, presence, use, and demise. In the Swat specific context, focusing on ruptures such as Taliban’s violence and iconoclasm is important; however, more consequential is tracing continuities and change in the value system that propels deliberate destruction.

Accordingly, we start from the premise that as far as illegally acquired antiquities are items of monetary value, the economic activity surrounding them cannot be meaningfully ‘disembedded’ from the local socio-political context (Killerby & Wallis 2002). We argue that in Swat, specifically in relation to cultural artefacts, religious and market forces primarily shape the value system. Both religion and market have somewhat similar exchange logic¹ with diametrically opposed outcomes for cultural artefacts (Khan, 2021).

In affective economies, emotions do things and align individuals with communities (or bodily space with social space) through the very intensity of their attachment (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). Religion and economy, like fields in Bourdieusian sense, have their own value registers, their own orientation towards things in the world, the stakes and rewards of a particular field; this positioning also determines whether they are constituted valuable or worth pursuing (Threadgold, 2020, p. 30). Within a specific geographic setting, actors within each field, religion, market, government, and so on have their field-specific habitus (Khan & Syrett, Forthcoming), which is ‘one’s history rolled up into an […] assemblage of embodied affective charges. As capitals are accumulated, they constitute a reservoir of dispositions that constitute the capacity to be affected and to affect’ (Threadgold, 2020, p. 60). These fields and their embodied value orientations constitute the affective atmosphere surrounding individual encounters with cultural artefacts in multiple situations. These situations or ‘social settings have immanent and imminent impressions of the possibilities of what can immediately follow an affective moment, the potential trajectory on which one can then embark’ (Ibid, p. 69).

We contextualize the iconoclastic destruction of selected sites in Swat within the persistent trajectory of destruction of culturally embedded archaeological remains. This process is critical to an empirical understanding of the local affective geography, in Navaro-Yashin’s (2012) sense, of historical heritage sites in Swat and the surrounding region. The places and objects we discuss are tangled up in visceral and affectual understandings that exceed the market value and religious perceptions of the same. These two aspects or registers of Gunah (good deeds) and Sawab (bad deeds) on one hand, and profit and loss on the other coalesce to form variegated and often unstable meanings and perceptions of local heritage, and our current research is showing these registers as being almost inextricably intertwined to constitute the affective atmosphere surrounding cultural artefacts. Arguably, this cognitive and affectually complex geography is underpinned by the overlap of religious and market values of exchange. To bring affective geographies within the social economy framework, instead of engaging emotional capital, or the affectivity of the forms of capital including economic capital (Threadgold, 2020), we explore the embeddedness of these multiple value registers within the local structure of feelings.

In what follows, Section 2 conceptualizes the illicit market of cultural artefacts and contextualizes this study within the illicit antiquities markets literature. This contextualization suggests a gap in understanding for a context-specific, local cultural lens on the illegal antiquity market. Section 3 outlines the empirical context and a brief history of religious vandalism and illegal antiquity markets. Section 4 outlines data generation and analyses methods. Section 5 argues for the agency of cultural artefacts and the entanglement of this agency in the economic register of profit and loss, and the religious register of good deeds and bad deeds. Section 6 demonstrates that these two registers underpin ‘the structure of feelings’ (sensu Williams, 1977) surrounding the destruction of cultural artifacts in the Swat valley. We argue that local relations and relationships towards pre-Islamic heritage and archaeological relics configure social space by creating social boundaries. Thus, the visceral response to, and affective engagement with heritage are embedded in a particular structure of feeling and its constitutive registers.

2. Conceptualizing and Contextualizing Swat in the Illicit Antiquity Markets

Debates surrounding illicit trade of antiquities are largely focussed on transnational networks and international markets (Prescott & Rasmussen, 2020). The local cultural ecology within which illicit excavation and trading are articulated at the source of the supply-chain of this well-known market rarely receives detailed empirical examination (Brodie & Renfrew, 2005; Campbell, 2013). The only exception in this connection is a body of scholarship dedicated to ‘subsistence diggers’ to which we will return shortly (Hardy, 2015; Matsuda, 1998). The Northwest of Pakistan in general, and particularly Swat valley offer a good example of this neglect. For over a century, archaeologists have highlighted the destruction of cultural reserves by illegal diggers, smugglers, and antiquity dealers in the northwest of Pakistan including Swat valley (Ali & Coningham, 1998).

Illegal digging and smuggling of cultural artefacts in the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan is widespread (Prescott & Rasmussen, 2020), smugglers and dealers at the national and international level patronize local diggers, and this entire economy is unrecorded due to its illegal nature. Therefore, instead of merely adding a peripheral angle to the wealth of transnational markets of antiquities and trade networks studies (Brodie & Renfrew, 2005; Campbell, 2013; Prescott & Rasmussen, 2020), we expand and turn to a specific, cultural ecology of perceptions and social contracts. These forces shape the inception of acts of illicit excavation, destruction, and trade in the field, on the ground. We follow this culturally specific inquiry by focusing specifically on the local level (Krieger, 2014; Matsuda, 1998; Williams, 2020). Absence of detailed systematic treatment of the antiquities market at the local level in Pakistan and particularly in Swat also points to a major gap in the archaeological literature on Swat where it does not link theories of archaeology with critical ethnography (Matsuda, 1998). More importantly, to date, no social economist has empirically explored these markets in Pakistan.

Some argue that it is unjust to categorize ‘subsistence’ digging as a criminal activity (Hardy, 2015, p. 230). Such categorization, following this opinion, is unjust as long as there is no viable alternative economic means for ‘subsistence diggers’² to access their basic human rights to clean water, food, and medicine (ibid, p. 237; Matsuda, 1998). In this connection, some even go as far as to suggest creating antiquity markets that include museums and government officials, diggers, and other stakeholders (cf, Williams, 2020). Nevertheless, providing legal rights of selling to diggers for provenience preservation and assigning prices to artefacts, archaeologists would be tacitly aiding the market by re-enforcing the idea that artifacts should be seen as commodities (Krieger, 2014, p. 936).

This literature (Hardy, 2015; Krieger, 2014; Williams, 2020) is based on philosophical arguments without any empirical bases. We understand that archaeologists and looters are both part of illicit market transactions (Prescott & Rasmussen, 2020). Similarly, we acknowledge that the economic value of looted artefacts, contra Williams (2020), incentivizes illicit trading for the diggers, religious extremists, and some archaeologists (Matsuda, 1998). Hence, it is unwise to assign normative value disposition to archaeologists and looters where the former focusses on the significance of these objects for archaeological preservation, and the latter focusses on their economic value. As Alderman (2012, p. 605) notes, not all actors in the illegal trade are illegal actors, as legal actors often participate in illegal transactions, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Therefore, the question of economic value in the destruction of heritage through the illicit antiquities market requires a deeper analysis than what Williams (2020) suggests (Kersel, 2011). Brodie (1999) estimates that an individual digging up the artefact receives about one percent of the final value of that artefact and posits that much of the profit goes to the intermediaries who move the antiquity from the original digger to the final buyer. At the ground level, the diggers are not even sometimes aware of the economic value of the artifacts they find (Alderman, 2012; Matsuda, 1998). This suggest, at least at the local level, that economic value is not the only factor incentivizing the destruction of cultural artifacts. Black market offers ‘added (financial) incentive.’ Therefore, we argue that motivations for illegal acts ranges from profit to ideology, to neuroses (Alderman, 2012, p. 605).

Incentives to destroy heritage do not only stem from the monetary value of cultural artefacts within the antiquities market; religious capital (reward from God) also incentivizes the destruction of these artefacts in the Swat valley. With this understanding, we arrive at our key theoretical proposition: neither the black-market hypothesis, nor religious violence alone are sufficient to explain the affective dimension of heritage in Swat.

2.1. Structures of Feeling and Antiquities Market

Religion and economy not only constitute a configuration of social contracts and identity, but they configure a social and affectual geography of belonging, memory, and the senses. We go beyond social embeddedness and ‘markets as networks’ arguments, and draw upon the concept of ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and key concepts in affect scholarship by positing our lens on the stratified yet dynamic nature of the social culture of Swat and the role of heritage within it: a network of social contracts encompassing emplacements and affectual embodiments and materiality in the region. The structure of feelings allows analyses of structuring constrains of institutional societal order, and the emergent interpersonal, social, and cultural formations. The structure of feelings has two distinct features: (1) ‘it has much to do with the phenomenology of intersubjective consciousness and the structural interactive processes by which that is formed and subsequently transformed into nascent and emergent social and cultural structures.’ And (2) it may also be found ‘in the cultural and social histories of the thought of those who neither dominate nor those whose interests are served by established institutional social orders.’ (Filmer, 2003, p. 202).

Williams’s postulation is that in articulating social and cultural phenomena ‘we are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically, affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought’ (1977, p. 132), serves our exploration of the social dynamics of looting and heritage engagement in Swat. We may indeed identify the conflict and tension within community responses to heritage: when it is standing, when it is looted, when it is damaged. What is felt, thought, said, and done articulate along complex variables. In fact, we would argue that the engagements and interaction of social actors with the materiality of the pre-Islamic world in Swat follow tacit social contracts beyond religious belief; at the same time, it is becoming obvious that the illicit diggers and intermediaries perform cultural roles that exceed the market logics.

The interlinked ideas of affect as social performance are also of relevance here. The performative processes of excavation, illicit market transaction and destruction are not new phenomena. Albeit well established in Swat’s affectual and cultural registers, they are also emergent, in William’s sense, as they articulate in vastly different and unique ways in each case. No two excavation or looting experiences are alike. Thus, as emergent affectual acts, engagements with archaeological remains arise as distinct cultural performances where ‘new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships begin to develop that are not simply elements of some new phase of the dominant culture but are substantially alternative or oppositional to it.’ (Williams 1977, p. 132). Moreover, this local structure of feeling organically operates in an alternative or oppositional relationship to hegemonic structures of power (antiquities acts, world heritage charters, international academic networks). Thus, our second theoretical proposition: the structures of feeling and affect as social performance within it advances our understanding of the antiquities market and varying interactions of actors with artefacts within it.

3. Empirical Context

Swat valley, historically known as Uddiyana kingdom (Khaliq, 2014), represented an important centre of various civilizations including Greek (with the invasion of Alexander the great), Indo-Greek, Parthian, Kushan, Sasanian, and Islamic. Swat has always been considered a rich trading region between the plains of Gandhara and the mountains of the Northern regions. Swat was also an outstanding Buddhism learning centre; a large number of historical sites and religious settlements such as stupas, monasteries, viharas, rock carvings, and inscriptions scattered all over the valley are the testaments of this rich history (Biagioli et al, 2014, p. 134). Damage to these rich heritage sites and objects has historically been the concern of political authorities and archaeologists working in or on the region. The looting of artefacts and their demand in the international market can be traced back to the birth of formal archaeology (late 19^th century) in the region (Khan R, 2020, p. 150–151). Similarly, supersession of one religion by another and consequent erasure of the replaced religion from the central scene is hardly unusual (Tucci, 1977, p. 10–11). While the history of illegal digging or religious vandalism in the region is beyond the scope of this study, it is sufficient to note that none of these have received in-depth treatment in the archaeology, anthropology, and sociology of the region either by indigenous or Western scholars. This neglect is striking due to the fact that hardly any archaeologist denies that Swat sites have been damaged by looters/illegal diggers (Tucci, 1977; Olivieri, 2018).

Historically, the engagement of locals with archaeological sites and objects has escaped notice due to unethical research practices of colonial archaeologists (Khan, 2020), the obsession of post-colonial archaeologists with counter arguments and dismissing/questioning the interpretations of artefacts by others in the field. This oversight is also caused by a narrow focus on either state regulations (Mughal, 2011), or the lack of awareness among local (Muslim in this case) communities, or disinheritance of the historical (un-Islamic) heritage (Zahir, 2017). Within this context, instead of viewing state and archaeology departments as the custodians of, and local communities as a threat to heritage, we are interested in the local meaning of heritage sites and objects and their emotional connections with local populations (Menon & Varma, 2019).

There are forces that actively preserve these artefacts beyond the social material processes of disposal, affectual engagement, and iconoclasm. However, the formal code followed by these forces is itself embedded in the only apparently incompatible exchange logics of religion and materiality. State institutions are the prime examples of governance based on established antiquity acts; and still, the ways in which officials enact state laws are structured by the Gunah and Sawab registers underpinned by halal (permissible) and haram (impermissible) actions (Ismail, 2013). These registers, while ostensibly referring to a religious matrix, also inform and draw from the profit-loss register of the underground antiquity market. Unlike the increasingly flourishing audit culture of piety (Strathern, 2000) where Muslims meticulously record their good deeds (Taylor, 2018), and unlike spiritual economies where religion is employed as an instrument to facilitate inculcating neoliberal values (Rudnyckyj, 2009), we combine religious and economic registers like the economies of affect (Rudnyckyj & Richard, 2009).

4. Data Generation and Analyses

Methodologically, we take an ethnographic stance on acts of looting and destruction of archaeological remains in Swat. We draw upon field visits by the first author (between October 2020-January 2022) to various archaeological sites and their surroundings, informal conversations with local community members, and 18 semi-structured interviews with key players in Swat to trace the factors underlying the persistent damage to such objects, as well as considering their social and economic positioning through the lens of affect. Our interviewees had four categories including illegal diggers (ID), heritage activists (HA), journalists (J), and archaeologists (A). For anonymity, throughout this paper, we associate categories of interviewees with numerals (e.g. ID1, HA2 etc.). All the interviewees were male as in Swat; there is no women archaeologist,³ women as illegal diggers, women heritage activists, or women employees in the museum. In addition to field visits, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews, we were also following local print and social media to record recent acts of theft, vandalism, and smuggling of antiquities.

We employed flexible thematic analyses (Fletcher, 2017) to develop inductively our stance on the affectual and social ecology of the antiquities markets in Swat. We use this data to illuminate the persistent tensions within, and rupture of, local social and cultural contracts as a process, or in Williams’ words, ‘a whole and connected social material process’ (1977, p. 140). Our data demonstrates that social players take a holistic view of acts of engagement with antiquities, be it destruction, excavation, and/or smuggling. We accordingly assume a similar positioning, rather than considering the selling, destruction, or damage to artefacts as a result taken out of its social context.

4. Religious Registers and the Destruction of Cultural Artefacts in Swat Valley

The acts of vandalism and iconoclasm of terrorists, whether Taliban in Afghanistan or Swat, or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has brought religion under scrutiny (Flood & Elsner, 2016). Some argue that these spectacular acts of destruction of heritage sights were aimed to disguise stealing of these artefacts for terror financing (Westcott, 2020, p. 4-6). Such questions have hardly been a concern for archaeology and anthropology on the pre—and post-Taliban Swat, though Taliban’s iconoclasm and the destruction of selected sites in Swat has been the subject of considerable debate in community archaeology (De Nardi, 2019; Olivieri, 2018).

However, focussing on Taliban’s iconoclasm alone would not suffice to understand the role of religion in the structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) encapsulating the politics of destruction and preservation of heritage sites and cultural artefacts. Religion, as the director of Italian archaeological mission in Swat opines, is a lesser threat to heritage preservation in the region. To further articulate his assertion, he states,

‘I have already told you that the Jahanabad Buddha was the only thing destroyed by Taliban. However, the only active destruction of a site was a Hindu temple in 2000 by Shin Patki people.’ ‘So, those who destroy these relics do not have a single motivation but many. Either I consider these as pagan things, I am a kid, or I am an ignorant person, or I am a member of an organized group. In any case, there is a motivation to destroy these things.’ (interview, November 3, 2020).

Taliban’s iconoclasm and its message was articulated in a deeper and complex entanglement of religious register of Gunah and Sawab, and economic motives underlying illicit market of cultural artefacts. As producers, consumers, and workers, as we shall see later, some ‘islamists, like others, operate at the dawn of new normativities and subjectivities.’ (Iqtidar, 2013, p. 496). Within these politics, ‘While some attention has been paid to the role of ideas among policy makers, not enough attention has been paid to the change in ideational constellation of those at the receiving end of these policies, or to how neoliberalism might fuse with existing ideas and practices in different contexts.’ (Iqtidar, 2017, p. 795). Neoliberalism here is not implied to mean abstract ideas or set of policies, but actual practices constitutive of neoliberalism (Rudnyckyj, 2009, p. 107).

Historically, Swati people believe that breaking statues earn you good deeds that will be rewarded and preserving or selling them will attract bad deeds that will be punished by God. As a local journalist recalled: ‘Look, such things were quite common 15-20 years ago from now. I went to a site in Quqarai [upper Swat] where there were statues at a site, I was asking around about the location of that site, a child took me there. That kid asked me, this is Gunah, why have you come to this site? I asked, who told you [child]? He [the child] replied, our Quran teacher told us that we should destroy these. I just said by the way that these are already destroyed, he replied, we did it, we throw stones at it and do things to destroy these.’ Moreover, another interviewee specified, ‘it is there in every mind that statue is a thing against Islam, destroying it is Sawab, and keeping it intact or preserving it is a sin’ (JHA1, 16/01/2021). Our empirical material also suggests that trading these relics, particularly statues is considered as haram, and against the Islamic register of purification and circulation (Bonner, 2005, p. 392). In everyday street-conversations, even those known to have earned their fortune through selling Buddha statues are framed in negative terms for doing impermissible activities.

Villagers in remote areas are becoming aware of the increasing market demand of these artefacts, but ambivalent to give preference to economic register over the religious register of Gunah and Sawab. In the winter of 2007, a farmer found a 30-centimetre statue while ploughing his land, He took it straight to the house of his close friend, a member of the Tablighi Jamat, who was involved in religious preaching. That member of the Tablighi Jamat reported the following dialogue with the farmer:

The farmer said that I want to sell it, will it be a sin? I replied, it is Gunah, and the income will be haram, after hearing that, the farmer broke the statue at that very moment in our courtyard.’ (Informal conversation in Khwazakhela, 14/01/2021).

The role of religion in shaping entrepreneurial subjectivities is not restricted to uneducated farmers living in remote villages, it is also an important factor in shaping decisions of actors within the illicit market in interacting with sites and types of objects, and hence they present themselves as dealers of specific commodities. In this way, they formulate their individual relations to economic activities and to the markets by invoking different ethical and normative registers (Ismail, 2013, p. 116). These formulations include considerations that invoke the logic of the market as well as interpretations of the licit and illicit in the context of permissible and impermissible (Ismail, 2013, p. 120). Some decide not to excavate graves because ‘it is not good’ (ID1, 16/01/2021). While others limit themselves to the search of coins, beads, pottery, and other artefacts saying, ‘thank god, we are not doing impermissible things.’ (ID3, 17/01/2021). While those who excavate graves justify their action within religious frame, the subsistence diggers we interviewed explained that Muslim graves are visibly marked, they do not have carvings on their stones, and their feet are not directed towards the west (Kaba). Moreover, none of our interviewees wanted to associate themselves with the trade in statues, because looking for statues, their preservation, keeping them at home, and trading in those is considered haram. Despite actively dissociating themselves with trading in statues, many of the illegal diggers are involved in their trade. Those who do not, have not found any yet. Nevertheless, this apparent dissociation of our interviewees from trading Buddha statues is better explained within the affective register where dissociation is a strategy for concealing one’s actions for avoiding shame, embarrassment, and stigma of committing un-Islamic acts.

Still, the expansion of black-market activities and their financial returns not only mellows religious bias towards these artifacts and their dealers, but also causes attitude shift reflected in the increased involvement of some of those who are known for religious preaching. A fifty-five year old illegal digger from upper Swat, involved in illegal digging for 30 years explains, ‘Some of those religious people in my village who used to spread negative propaganda against me are now involved in this trade. Now they ask me to inform them if there is any site to dig.’ (ID3, 16/01/2021). This claim was corroborated by a local journalist when he reported:

‘why people do all these things, of course, for money. And most of these, as I have told you, at least three groups that I personally know are related to Tabligh.’ (J1,16/01/2021). In an extreme case, an illegal digger introduced the first author to an imam (religious leader) of a local mosque in upper Swat who was involved in digging and dealing in artefacts. At their second meeting, the imam revealed having five different-sized Buddha statues available for sale in the market. While pitching his product in the black market, he was concerned about losing his religious reputation for involvement in the trade of impermissible goods.

The complex and dynamic entanglement of religion and market in relation to antiquities is complicated by the role of the state in heritage preservation. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP hereafter) (provincial) archaeology directorate has started a rigorous campaign for preserving archaeological sites as tourism assets in the post-Taliban Swat.⁴ The narrative of this campaign, framed within political economy of top-down development is unable to combine religion and economic argument to generate mass support. As a prominent archaeologist explains, ‘the State does not, and cannot use religious discourse to create a policy narrative to promote preservation because there is not much in Quran and hadith that support the preservation of sculptures. In fact, those who champion the destruction of non-Islamic relics of the past have plenty of historical examples and qur’anic verses to promote their destruction.’

Interestingly, in a neoliberal vein, some state officials and heritage activists enact heritage preservation as a matter of spiritual virtue to create new ethical orientation (Rudnyckyj, 2009, p. 105–106). For these individuals, the promotion and boost to heritage tourism in Swat through archaeological sites requires the formation and circulation of favourable public opinion with some religious justification. An oft-quoted verse in this connection is, ‘And insult not those whom they (disbelievers) worship besides Allah’ [al-An‘aam 6, p. 108]. We also found this verse in the comment book (for tourists) of famous Bazira site in Barikot where Italian mission and KP’s archaeology department are engaged in excavation (see figure 1). The man in charge of the security of Bazira site brought our attention to this verse to negate the role of religious clerics in spreading hatred against archaeological sites.

Figure 1. ‘He added that ‘this verse of Quran was written here by a schoolteacher of Islamic studies who is also an imam in our local mosque’. Authors’ own image.

Heritage activists do not subscribe to the Gunah and Sawab register of Islam, but rather they use qur’anic injunctions for moulding public opinion in favour of preserving these sites and related artefacts. However, the religious register of Gunah and Sawab are enacted directly by illegal market actors. Incidents are reported where these actors acquire permission from the landowner for digging his site in order to ‘purify his land and save him [landowner] from Gunah.’ At one of his research expeditions, one interviewee found people illegally excavating while the landowner was standing by the site. The interviewee reported starting conversation with the landowner who told the interviewee:

‘these people [illegal actors] have come to me and they are paying me for it. They are purifying my land and saving me from Gunah on one hand and will also pay me money.’ [interviewee added] ‘In this way, those people [illegal actors] have extracted much of the things from Swat.’ (J1, 16/01/2021).

This social contract does not imply that all illegal diggers exploit the Gunah and Sawab registers to destroy heritage sites for their own gain, nor are all the religious actors involved in illegal market activities. Religion, however, is an important factor in the affective atmosphere of heritage preservation and destruction in Swat. Indeed, Taliban clearly use the religious register of Gunah and Sawab for justifying their iconoclasm and the destruction of the key site of Jahanabad (De Nardi, 2019). Their logic of combining Gunah and Sawab with the economic register of profit and loss was often contradictory to the dominant religious belief in Swat. For instance, we noted earlier in this section that illegal diggers in Swat refrain from excavating Muslim graves, but we also found many (difficult to corroborate) reports of Taliban digging these graves in search of treasure. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine further the extent to which the attitude of the overall population of the region reflects behavioural change caused by the spiritual economies of heritage activists for preservation; illegal diggers for looting; and Taliban for iconoclasm. Nonetheless, our study has detected some important indicators of the role of religion in the affective landscapesurrounding cultural artefacts in Swat, namely the increased number of illegal diggers, the involvement of religious people in this trade, and the use of religious idioms by the educated few to exploit these sites for gain.

5. The Role of Religious and Market Registers in Shaping the Affectual Geography of Heritage

The performativity of heritage conservation and destruction in Swat is shaped by the complex relationality of the fields in the heritage landscape including conservationists (including archaeologists and heritage activists), black market actors, and religious zealots. Performativity within this context, occurring in the gaps of energies between fields, contributes to our understanding of affect associated with heritage sites and cultural artefacts (Crouch, 2015, p. 183). Human encounters with cultural artefacts stimulate latent potentialities of interaction because of the ability of these objects to activate multiple associations. Affective properties of these associations are shaped by our perceptions of the world which are coloured by our predispositions (Lebrecht et al, 2012). Hate or disgust expressed in the form of religious vandalism (A1), loss experienced in the form of looted sites (A3), pride felt in discovering and conserving a site (by heritage activists) or its destruction by religious zealots (J1), disappointment and envy felt by an archaeologist on site on seeing another archaeologist discovering an artefact (A3), shame felt in being associated with the selling of Buddha statues but none of the other black market activities (ID1); these are some of the dominant affectual enactments associated with cultural artefacts.

How these associations are articulated depends upon one’s habitus, which allows an understanding how the past is played out in the present for individuals. This lens draws our attention to the degree of ease or discomfort to which people respond to and internalize wider social world as they move across a range of familiar and unfamiliar fields (Reay, 2015, p. 21). In Swat, how one feels the affective atmosphere surrounding cultural artefacts depends upon the angle from which one encounters the object (Ahmed, 2010, p. 37). Let us empirically explore this argument by discussing a very recent act of vandalism by unaware construction workers in the Mardan District of Pakistan.

On 18 July 2020, the act of vandalism in the Takht Bhaie region adjacent to Swat went viral on social media. Six labourers (five shown in the video and one shooting the video on a smartphone) found a large size Buddha statue [Gandharan art piece] completely intact at a construction site. The video captures an unusual spectacle of vandalism, with inquisitive conversations accompanied by the sound of repeated strikes of sledgehammer on a statue of the Buddha. The unusual well-preserved heritage artefact was shattered by the contractor and his team of labourers before the knowledge of this remarkable chance-find could reach the owners of the land or the archaeology department (see figure 2). A local mullah is reported to have urged the contractor and his team to destroy the statue. The conversations, performative registers unfolding before and during the act, and the context are important to understand the affective atmosphere surrounding cultural artefacts. Below, we reproduce (in translation) the circumstances, the ‘feel’ of the recording and the dialogue between the labourers at the time of the destruction.

Figure 2. Two stills from a video showing construction labourers in Mardan unearthing and proceeding to destroy a statue of the Buddha. From Facebook (public domain).

Figure 3. Video still and official announcement of the retrieval of a statue of the Buddha from a house raid in Malakand. From Twitter (public domain).

The video starts with one labourer saying, ‘This is a standing doll, don’t you see that it is a standing doll?’ The other asks, ‘what are these signs on the body?’ One of them replies, ‘This is a woman.’ Another, while pointing to some broken pieces exclaims, ‘look we have broken its thighs.’ One of them stops the man with a sledgehammer from further breaking it down, to show it in greater details to his curious companions. ‘Look, ‘this is her belly button ‘. With this, inquisitiveness reaches its heights, and questions ensue in rapid succession. One of the labourers, pointing to the chest of the statue, asks, what is this? The older man in the video replies, ‘this is her necklace, and its head was separated before. We have not cleaned it [so that everything is properly visible].’ Another asks, ‘But where is its vagina [spoghaz]?.’ The elder man replies, ‘this swollen part is its vagina,’ contextualizing it and says, ‘these are its clothes, and this is its belly-button.’ One of them starts rubbing it to clear the dust, while explaining, look at these wrinkled signs on its body, these were its clothes, perhaps a frock [cholai da].’ Another asks, ‘are these Hindus or English?’ The older man replies, ‘these are Hindus, this was Gotam Budh, completely intact [mukammal sahi salamat].’ Towards the end, one of them exclaims, ‘congratulation to all, our hearts were strong,⁵ that’s why we were able to break it.’ To reinforce the feeling of religious pride, one of them, referring to the potential value of such a remarkable artefact on the black-market states, ‘even it did not have its head, even if it was headless.’ [video stops].

This colourful exchange unfolding during the event of the damage to a Buddha statue leads us to formulate the following inferences. First, we may infer that the lay population is ignorant but receptive, and that the presence of actors from the field of heritage conservation, religious preachers, or black-market actors can shape and redirect the affective atmospheres latent in everyday interaction with specific objects. Second, lay persons appear curious to know more about these antiquities but may feel constrained by social affects that they feel expected to subscribe to. Third, the conflictive registers of religion and black-market economy guide the performativity around cultural artefacts in such cases.

Let us consider an alternative scenario in which the contractor might not have encountered a religious man involved in the illegal antiquity market. The provenience of the artefact might have been obliterated, but not the object itself. For instance, in a more recent instance of looting, The Buddha statue was intact when the diggers were stopped by local police from removing it (see figure 3). The religious register might have been appropriated at two levels for benefitting from the illegal market. At the first level, the contractor may have been promised to purify his construction site by taking away the artefact or taking away the artefact by provoking verse 108 of the chapter six. In this instance, the contractor might have earned Sawab along with receiving financial compensation from the antiquity dealer. At the second level, any buyer would readily come to purchase this artefact because of its economic value in the national and religious value for buyers in the international market, particularly far-east. As A famous Pakistani archaeologist explains,

‘you have locals, international buyers, mafias, and a large thing in this market that we have seen is the religious value of these artefacts. Because we are selling their gods to them, simply they will buy it.’ (A2, 18 August 2020).

In Swat, the visceral moments of everyday encounters with cultural heritage are embedded within the dynamic symbolic economies of values (Bourdieu, 1984). Understanding the structure of feelings, charged by competing value registers of religion (Gunah and Sawab), and black-market (profit and loss) requires attention to one’s sense of self. If one experiences a shift in place, a change in material position, there are affective consequences. In either case, affect is a product of the material position of an individual. The tying of affect to the body, and of the body to its social position, anchor the affective to an imagining of the authentic self, which one is either trapped within or cleaved from (Leaney, 2019, p. 210). All of our interviewees including heritage activists, archaeologists, and illegal diggers admit either defacing Buddha statues or at least feeling unease at their site before acquiring their current cultural capital as a heritage activist, archaeologist, or illegal digger. As an archaeology lecturer in the University of Swat explained,

‘even I considered preserving these artefacts against religion, until I studied archaeology and understood the real value of preserving them.’ (A1, 15/01/2020).

Similarly, a national level illegal antiquities dealer explained,

‘When we were kids, our mother used to tell us to deface those because this was the order of god. However, since people came to know that they are valuable and they can earn money by selling these statues, they do not deface them anymore; instead, they preserve them for selling them.’ (ID4, informal conversation, April 6, 2020).

6. Final Remarks

The empirical case of Swat valley presented in this paper has implications for existing debates on illegal markets and heritage activism. Our affective tack within an interdisciplinary frame on illegal antiquities markets goes beyond the pre-occupation of economic sociology with the social organization of illegal markets as illegalized arenas of exchange (Beckert & Dewey, 2017, p. 2). In this frame, the illegal market becomes a part of the affective geography of cultural artefacts. This geography consists of both human and non-human elements with their dynamic affective properties. The environment exerts a force on human beings in its own right: something in space, in material objects, or in the environment that exceeds, or goes further and beyond the human imagination, but that produces an affect that may be experienced by human beings (Navaro-Yashin, 2012, p. 18). Heritage sites and cultural artefacts accumulate history and accrue affective value within the dynamic registers of symbolic economy. Archaeologists are not to be blamed alone, none of the social sciences has paid attention to this multifaceted affective atmosphere of the heritage destruction and preservation in the pre-and post-conflict Swat. Within the pre-and post-conflict affective economy of Swat, actors involved in preservation (archaeologists or heritage activists) or destruction (black market or vandalism) of heritage sites and artefacts are an assemblage of contextual experiences. Through these contextual experiences affects are gathered and sorted, jettisoned and stockpiled, to form the emotional basis from which an individual reasonably engages with everyday life (Threadgold, 2020, p. 147).

Taliban’s iconoclasm of the famous Jahanabad Buddha offers the best example in this connection. The century-long looting of archaeological sites and defacing of Buddha statues in Pakistan have not even received a quarter of academic and policy attention compared to What Taliban’s iconoclasm has received in the past decade. The destruction of a Buddha statue in July 2020, at a construction site in Mardan District is the best example noted above. By drawing attention to the commingling value registers and their dynamic role in the structure of feelings surrounding heritage preservation and destruction in Swat, we intended to pay special attention to the local level of the illegal antiquity market with a particular focus on its affective geography. If affect matters in the context of neoliberalism as Anderson argues (2016, p. 735), why are heritage activism, cultural preservation, and regulation of antiquities circulation and destruction not critically analysed at the local level to better contextualize Taliban’s single but most impactful act of iconoclasm in Swat?

In conceptualizing the phenomena of destruction or illicit excavation of heritage and arts objects, we must be mindful of their complex cultural embeddedness, affectual positioning, and embodiment in a fragile, often contested frame. Conversely, we can draw upon lessons learned to shape a better and more nuanced model of engagement with potentially illicit acts. In doing so, we must be mindful that not only interests of different communities are colliding over cultural artefacts (Kersel, 2011, p. 533), but these communities (as fields) are not homogenous and have internal splits and power struggles which we have not examined in this paper. What is clear however, is that all acts of illegal digging, theft, and destruction are not necessarily looting (Coningham & Gunawardhana, 2012, p. 293–294), and the design of preservation frameworks must seriously consider the affective economy underpinned by intertwined and simultaneously competing religious and economic registers. Unlike spiritual economies where religious accountability and capitalist work ethics are combined to inculcate neoliberal values (Rudnyckyj, 2009), neither state nor international organizations are able to incorporate religion in their preservation discourse primarily because qur’anic injunctions and Hadith (speeches and acts of the prophet Muhammad) glorifies destruction of statues.

We can start from these new insights to foster socially aware and engaged modes of community education, activist education, and training. Participatory governance of archaeological and heritage resources in Swat would come under the remit of civic engagement. Civic engagement is fundamental for striking a positive social contract between government, heritage protection agencies, and the civil society (Baù 2016). Moreover, the transformative benefits of a more meaningful engagement with the area’s rich cultural heritage would be beneficial to local communities. We acknowledge emerging research on the positive impacts of archaeology and heritage on key wellbeing indicators (Pennington et al. 2019; Sayer 2015) and the transformative social benefits of participatory peace (Baù 2016).

Any application of the ideas of participatory peace and cultural preservation in Swat must be articulated carefully, informed by a robust, genuine drive to inclusion. Such design and application planning will require dedication to cultural parameters, the registers of Gunah and Sawab among them, as well as a commitment to meeting the specific needs of the local Swat context. However, the potential wellbeing boost latent in the area’s cultural landscape can only be tapped if archaeologists and heritage professionals embrace challenges: they need to diversify and demystify their practice, making it more accessible and attractive to a variety of local publics. These professionals may try to do so by using creative arts to express archaeological findings, accepting that diverse publics have an agency as co-creators and co-curators of knowledge and interpretation, and ultimately by acknowledging the centrality of outreach as an integral and vital aspect of the discipline.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by British Academy.

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 (2012) 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, 1984, 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, 2009, pp. 69 and 73).