Zur Transformation bäuerlicher Hauswirtschaft in Yasin (Northern Areas, Pakistan)

Abstract

The study intends to reconstruct the socio-economic developments taking place in the Yasin Valley, a hitherto peripheral part of the Hindukush-Karakoram high mountain ränge, and to analyse the transformations of its society and economy. It has been carried out within the Pakistan-German Research Project "Culture Area Karakorum" (CAK), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and is based on fieldwork done in Northern Pakistan in 1990 and 1991, as well as on a two-month research in the archives of the former India Office Library and Records and the SOAS in London. <br> After introducing the concept of domestic economy in chapter I, the author describes the natural setting and its local conceptualisation as a frame of economic and social activities in Yasin (chapter 2). Social groups and relations on different levels from the household to political institutions are depicted as the preconditions of the "domestic economy" in chapter 3. The economy, discussed in detail in chapter 4, relies to a large extent on agriculture, cropping and herding, but today increasingly on additional sources of income, too. The transformation of the domestic mode of economy is the subject of chapter S together with some of the relevant factors behind: population growth, the development of labour migration, of pattems of consumption and trade, of transport, or the impact of development projects of NGOs and State activities. In chapter 6, at last, the transformation process is comprehensively discussed.