over the previous fifty years as they switched from a form of subsistence pastoralism to a cash economy. Barfield's research constituted a substantial revision of the standard hypothesis on the economic and social status of nomadic pastoralists, as originally posited by Fredrik Barth. One of Barfield's main purposes is to provide a case study that illustrated the wide ranging complexity of pastoral nomadism, its integration into a regional economy, and how structural changes have occurred within the pastoral economy itself.

First hand accounts of rural Afghanistan were rare even at the time the research was conducted because successive Afghan governments had restricted the number of scholars permitted to undertake extensive fieldwork. No anthropological research has been conducted there in the past twenty years. While not originally intended as such, the book documents a way of life that was disrupted, an perhaps destroyed, by the decades of war begun with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and civil wars that followed their withdrawal. For this reason Barfield's study of Afghanistan is one of the few available works on a traditional Central Asian nomadic society.

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