Benedicte Grima

Secrets from the Field: an Ethnographer's Notes from North Western Pakistan Benedicte Grima

The personal accounts contained here, reveal the untold experiences and relationships of an ethnographer with the people she lived and worked among for over 10 years in northwestern Pakistan among Afghan refugees and tribal Pakistani Pashtuns. They are the everyday occurrences and personal experiences of a woman living alone, or with her infant daughter, secrets and blunders withheld from academic books. Friends and colleagues have asked what it was like to be a foreign woman alone in an isolated and strict tribal Muslim culture. They ask even more so now, piqued by curiosity about the culture that is said to be protecting Osama bin Laden. These stories herein answer many of those queries and reveal information complementary to other political and scientific books.