Legitimating Porter Regulation in an Indigenous Mountain Community in Northern Pakistan

Abstract

Portering—carrying loads for pay—is an important source of cash income in the high mountain community of Shimshal, northern Pakistan. In this paper recent changes in the regulation of portering opportunities in Shimshal are interpreted as a tentative outcome of ongoing struggles among villagers over the ideological power of two integrated and competing conceptualisations, or discourses, of political legitimacy. These contemporary ideological discourses trace to historical conflicts between commoners and royalty in the feudal kingdom of Hunza, of which Shimshal was an outlying settlement. Specifically, an ‘authoritative’ position in Shimshal perpetuates a tradition of elite privilege developed by the kings of Hunza to justify their penetration of community-level political, social, and economic life. A ‘discursive’ position draws from an alternative tradition of equity and solidarity which originated in the consensual clan (and later, community) assemblies of commoners, and which was used historically to resist the infiltration of royal prerogative into everyday life. An account of recent struggles between advocates of these positions over portering regulation in Shimshal is developed from ethnographic material collected in 1988 and 1989. Aspects of Habermas's theory of communicative action are utilised selectively to interpret the implications of those struggles for political legitimacy in Shimshal. It seems that Shimshal is experiencing a tenuous shift away from authoritative forms of legitimacy toward more discursive ones, although a strongly Habermasian conceptualisation of discursivity is unwarranted.