Buzkashi, a pastime of Turkic origin people (Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz), became in the 1970s a characteristic game throughout Central Asia. It has since survived Soviet occupation in the 1980s, Taliban crackdowns in the 1990s, and more recent modernization efforts. Buzkashi is a unique spectacle in which dozens, sometimes hundreds, of horses and riders fight over a headless calf on the steppes of northern Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Anthropologist Whitney Azoy, who has lived the game before the war and followed it ever since, takes us inside this powerful and enduring expression of Central Asian popular culture in his book, Buzkashi. Games and Power in Afghanistan, edited and published in Spanish by Casa Asia, with the collaboration of the Embassy of Spain in Afghanistan.

“No one can understand Afghanistan without understanding buzkashi and no one can do so without reading Azoy” (Ahmed Rashid, author of The Taliban: Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia).

Whitney Azoy’s presentation will be in English without simultaneous translation. After the conference the author will sign copies of the book.

Presented by:
Javier Parrondo, Director General of Casa Asia

Lecture delivered by:
Dr. Whitney Azoy, scholar, author, and storyteller, has studied and narrated buzkashi for the last half century. His Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, the first full-length game ethnography ever written, published in 1982, has been updated in two editions in English, in 2003 and 2011. Now, Casa Asia has edited and published it in Spanish. Whitney Azoy has recently published A Buzkashi Reader with ten extended stories based on first-hand experiences with the buzkashi game. A former US diplomat, four-time Fulbright scholar, and retired director of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies in Kabul, Dr. Azoy currently resides in Lanzarote, Canary Islands.