Editor’s Note: What follows is part of a cross-blog survey that explores minorities in Central Asia. This article was written by Ted Callahan*, a Research Fellow at the Social Research Center of the American University in Bishkek.

A visit to the Afghan Pamirs reveals nothing so much as the timelessness of certain economic forms. Animal husbandry is not a materially-intensive business, requiring only knowledge, patience, and a little bit of luck. Of course, it helps to have sheep. Lots and lots of sheep.

The Kyrgyz who live here are committed ovinophiles. For them, sheep, as well as yak, are the equivalent of having money in the bank, collecting interest. So long as you leave it untouched, it will increase. Except – to stretch the metaphor – the bank is continually prone to being robbed or collapsing into rubble.

Today, there aren’t so many sheep in the Afghan Pamirs, at least not compared to as recently as 30 years ago - the last time anyone bothered to attempt to count them. True, there is some benefit in this: formerly overgrazed and degraded pastures are again healthy, once overused areas are left dormant and in some cases have reverted to use by wild ungulates, like the ibex or the Marco Polo sheep. But, so far as the Kyrgyz are concerned, the situation is dire.

People who study pastoral nomads (not a pleonasm: “pastoral” means involved in raising animals and “nomads” implies a mobile population) have one firm axiom: when female animals of breeding age are being sold off, the economy, if not the society itself, is in dire straits. Simply put, female sheep and yak are a pastoralist’s reproductive capital, allowing the herd to increase while still providing valuable secondary products like milk, wool, and dung. Males are only good for stud, wool, and dung and so they are usually the ones used for meat.

On both of my trips last year to the Afghan Pamirs, I noticed a lot of ewes headed down-valley, with the itinerant traders who come up to the Pamirs during the comparatively mild summer. These traders, most of whom live a couple days’ drive away (not including the three days it will take them to walk to the road), bring up grains and manufactured goods. These goods are traded to the Kyrgyz in exchange for animals and animal products (dried cheese – qurut, felt horse blankets – kiyiz, and woven rugs – palas). In the past, the terms of exchange were in favor the Kyrgyz, who had a cohesive society under centralized leadership, as well as weapons and the backing of the government to act as a frontier militia.

Today, many of these traders hail from opium producing regions and, in addition to the products mentioned above, also bring opium (tariok) to the Kyrgyz. This alone is nothing new except that now, with the writ of the central government so weak and Kyrgyz society fragmented and impoverished, the traders have the upper hand. Although opium use probably occurs among 70% of the adult male Kyrgyz population, the Kyrgyz claim that much of this is to blame on the coercive tactics of the traders, who insist on using opium as a medium of exchange and regularly threaten any community leaders who oppose the selling and consumption of opium in the Afghan Pamirs. In this, they have the backing of powerful local commanders who control opium production and trafficking in eastern Badakhshan province. In many cases, it is the police themselves who sell opium to the Kyrgyz.

Dependency on opium has had any number of deleterious effects upon the Kyrgyz. It acts as a financial drain, diverting thousands of dollars worth of Kyrgyz commodities to the purchase of opium. Almost inevitably, opium use and addiction lead to indebtedness and impoverishment, as heavy users and addicts sell off the last of their herd – and in some cases their unmarried daughters – to their creditors.

Opium use also retards collective social action among the Kyrgyz. Apathy and resignation to their plight seem to be the norm among the Kyrgyz, especially those of the Big Pamir. The wealthiest man in the Pamirs, one Effendi Boi, is (in)famous far and wide for his opium-dictated schedule: “He stays up smoking for three days, and then he sleeps for three days.”

Suffering perhaps the world’s highest rates of maternal, infant, and child under five mortality, lacking any infrastructure (roads, schools, or clinics), and with dwindling herds, the Kyrgyz considered taking the government of Kyrgyzstan, their titular homeland, up on an offer to “repatriate” them. Among the various reasons why the deal fell through, one major cause was concern that opium would not be so readily available – or cheap – as it is in Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz stayed put.

It’s a rare and terrible thing to witness a society approaching the verge of collapse, where hope is close to being extinguished. One usually expects to find such things in urban ghettoes of Nairobi or the war-shattered ruins of Grozny, not in the stunningly beautiful Afghan Pamirs. But how else to explain the experience of a British doctor, who has lived in the Wakhan Corridor for several years and who recently undertook a visit to the Kyrgyz of the Big Pamir, to distribute medicine, provide care, and train certain locals in basic health practices? Instead of being welcomed, he found himself constantly arguing over the prices for hiring animals and the few men he trained demanded to be paid for helping their community.

My own experience wasn’t too dissimilar. I was up there to help figure out how a school could be built for the Kyrgyz. The logistics involved in this – transporting materials, finding teachers, accommodating students – were daunting. Like my friend the doctor, I had to pay for transport. Several times, the price suggested was twice the normal rate; it was Ramadan and cold and no one felt much like working. I explained that I too had other things I could be doing but that I had chosen to come up here in an effort to help them. In one instance, a knife was produced in the midst of negotiations, though I was never directly threatened with it. On my way out of the Pamirs, unable to agree on a reasonable price with the members of a local leader’s camp, I left on foot, carrying all my possessions.

At the start of my trip, in this same camp, I had been given an insulated box and asked to take it up to the camp of the Kyrgyz khan, or chief. Inside were oral polio vaccines, donated by the Aga Khan Development Network. I duly brought it to the khan and explained its provenance and purpose. He claimed that he was not responsible for administering medication; this was his rival’s job, in the other camp. Furthermore, he wasn’t a doctor and didn’t know how to give injections. I explained that it was to be drunk, like water; no needles or doctors required. He still refused to administer it himself or to let me do so. I ended up bringing it back to the camp where I had originally been given it; all vaccines unused and, by now, likely spoiled and useless.

For over a hundred years, the Kyrgyz, lacking any of the genetic adaptations which permit other highland peoples – Tibetans, Andeans, Ethiopians – to subsist at high altitude, have managed to scratch out a living in the high Pamirs of Afghanistan. Their solutions to the various problems of permanent residence at altitude were primarily social. It’s a sad irony that social problems, some the result of innovations the Kyrgyz made to subsist in the Wakhan, now threaten to drive them from their homeland.

*Ted Callahan is currently conducting a two-year research project among the Kyrgyz of the Afghan Pamirs as part of his doctoral dissertation, looking at how pastoral production strategies create patron-client relationships and influence access to positions of political authority. Ted holds a BA in Conservation Biology from Middlebury College and an MA in East Asian Studies (China Program) from Stanford University. He has been the recipient of three Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies 2005 Student Paper Prize, and the Central Asia Institute’s 2006 Afghanistan Development Initiative Fellowship. He has also worked for 12 years as a river and mountain guide throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America.