Army-Anthropologists call Afghans "Savages"?

Not even a hint that the HTT was quoting an old British ethnography to highlight the terribly quality of historical documents on the area? Nothing? I wonder how much of that report McGeogh actually read…

Hi Joshua. That sounds interesting. Can you tell us more? Which ethnography?

Anyone with the ability and inclination to google can find that the quote appears in the Afghanistan Gazetteer of the British Staff Branch in colonial freaking India.

Of course, that requires some effort on the part of the writer of this post, and of the journalist who went ahead with this story.

By the way, where is the indication that this has anything to do with HTS? Not defending it or anything, but there are great efforts among HTS researchers to dispel the kind of nonsense that British colonial officers propagated a hundred years ago. Like the word “savage,” for one.

Hi “Oh please". Thanks for your comment. Do you have the link to the quote? I’ve googled parts of the quote including “utter savages” without result before I wrote this post. Now, I googled the last part as well ("great robbers” and google directed me to a kind of fact sheet about the Zadran http://www.nps.edu/programs/ccs/Docs/Pakistan/Tribes/Jadran.pdf (Program for Culture and Conflict Studies, Naval Postgraduate School):

They are probably a very small tribe living in very small villages; some of them cultivate the little land they have, but they appear chiefly to depend on their flocks for subsistence. They live, some in houses and some in tents. It was said that they are “great robbers”, and their country was formerly refuge for “bad characters”.

The reference is Adamec, Ludwig W., ed. Kabul and Southeastern Afghanistan., Volume 6, 1985

Googling “utter savages” and zadran doesn’t give relevant results.

But you’re right of course. It sounds more like colonial anthropology.

Same book, actually:

http://books.google.com/books?oe=UTF-8&um=1&q=%22utter+savages%22+zadran

What would you do if you found out a student of yours had someone else did their homework for them, like you’re having me do? Try Google Books next time; it has almost all of the corpus of Afghanistan/India publications of the British Indian Army, since they’re out of copyright.

Thanks for the link! Strange that the book didn’t show up in the search results. So, yes, might be a good idea to search google books additionally.

Concerning homework: Online, there are neither students nor teachers. We’re all educating each other. So thanks for doing your homework as netizen!

I would agree that “there are neither students nor teachers,” but it seems incumbent upon the author of a headline like “Army-Anthropologists call Afghans Savages” to look a millimeter beneath the surface of the media report he or she is relying on. By the way, you haven’t demonstrated how the Sydney Morning Herald article has anything to do with HTS in particular.

It looks like it might be time to update this post to reflect that fact that it’s profoundly inaccurate.

It was a HTS-report. I’ll write a new post tomorrow. I’ve added a questionmark to the title

A question mark, wow. Can’t wait for your new post on this topic today.

Find any evidence that this was an HTS-authored report? The article quotes an unnamed “analyst.” That’s not evidence.

Somebody who like you prefers to be referred to anonymously confirmed per email that it was a HTS-report. But I admit it is difficult to write about this sitting in Norway about such a sensitive issue and a report that is not available to the me. I’m waiting for one more email from another person, so you’ll have to wait even one more day