ABSTRACT
Most people in the developed world know very little about life in the mountains, deserts, and remote valleys of Central and South Asia. Media coverage focusing on extreme events generates an international perception of this region as a terrain of terror, a zone of fanaticism and conflict. We are free to imagine the worst: a place and people dominated by dark forces. But though one can find here the warlords, gun-toting revolutionaries, violent conflicts, and environmental catastrophes depicted in the international news media, South and Central Asia is also a region with a long, rich, complicated history whose current inhabitants—farmers, poets, heroes, herders, mothers, merchants, teachers, students—are far more likely to be peaceful than ferocious. And the lives of these people, many belonging to small groups with unique identities developed over generations in unique encounters with the world, are radically changing. Once a part of the Earth that harbored extraordinary human diversity, South and Central Asia is now the setting for aggressive forces of homogenization.
