The People

The people

Introduction

Ethnic groups

Language

Religious non-leteracy in a literate culture

Folklore and folk music

Folk music and instruments

Settlement patterns

Life cycle

The inward looking society

AFGHANISTAN’S peoplet rival the topography in ethnic, linguistic, and physical variety. Basically, the country is a zone of predominately Muslim, lndo-European speakers of the Mediterranean sub-stock of the great Caucasoid racet, which extends from Gibraltar and Tangier on both sides of the Mediterranean, and moves through Anatolia, Iran, and southern Afghanistan into northwest Pakistan. A Spaniard, Sicilian, Greek, Turk, Arab, or Sephardic Jew would be physically at home in most of Afghanistan. Only distinctive tribal and ethnic clothing, language, religion, and other cujtural impediments make the difference.

But, like the United States, and for a much lomger period, Afghanistan has been a cultural, as well as physical, melting-pot: Persian, Central Asian, Sino-Siberian, European (Hellenistic, Roman), Indian, Turkish, Arab, and Mongol influences rose, fell, and blended.