Pakistan Studies Group

The Pakistan Studies Group was founded in the mid 1980s to address the frustration of scholars of Pakistan. Pakistan is geographically and culturally an extremely heterogenous country, encompassing aspects of South Asian, Middle Eastern and Central Asian cultures. Going to specialist conferences on any of those regions, therefore, meant addressing some, but not all aspects of the diverse richness of Pakistan. Adding to this complex cultural 'soup', Pakistanis constitute important migrant groups around the globe. The agenda of the PSG is therefore to focus on the particularities of Pakistani cultures as well as the complex relationship between people from different culture areas, be they South or Central Asia, the Middle East, Northern Europe, North America or others. The primary activity of the PSG has always been to provide a relaxed forum in which scholars of Pakistan might share ideas about ongoing research and meet each other. The first Pakistan Workshop was held in 1986 in the Lake District in England. Since then the Workshops have been a fairly regular event which has attracted anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, geographers, demographers, missionaries, historians, development workers as well as non-academic members of the Pakistani community in Britain. Out of these Workshops, there have been two edited volumes of papers which offer a valuable contribution to the sadly rather small literature devoted to Pakistan in anthropology.

This year, with the cooperation of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Durham and the School of Social Relations at the University of Keele, the PSG will offer some additional means to facilitate research on Pakistan, Pakistani diaspora and the Muslims of South Asia. This web site offers links to the next and past Pakistan Workshops (since 2000). We also hope to offer links to PSG members' research websites on any aspect of our areas of interest. CSAC has very generously agreed to provide server space for some web sites which can then be highlighted on the PSG pages. CSAC's long record of expertise and commitment to high quality web dissemination means that it has a position of prominence few departmental web sites can hope to acheive. This location, therefore, ensures greaters exposure for the PSG and for any web sites housed here. Recent events have seen Pakistan receive considerable attention from the media, much of which seems to have been produced with little knowledge of Pakistani people. The PSG believe it is time that the scholars of Pakistan step up the dissemination of their research to counter newspapers preference for easy to digest 'received wisdom'.