We are privileged workers. We have always known it. We travel around the globe, we do research, we investigate, we meet cool people. Yet, under the present situation, we obviously make no exception and stay home. In these days, confined in my flat, I dream about staying in one of those places we visited doing ethnographic interviews, and I guess I am not the only one. I miss the luscious valleys of Tigray, where trees, green patches, and isolated houses combines into unexpectedly jagged landscapes. I fancy about enjoying some refreshing shadow under an acacia or in a comfortable living room in a mudbrick house in Al Khiday, always wondering at the courtesy and hospitality of farmers. My eyes need the deep horizons of Sindh, where the Indus and the almost inaccessible Khirtar Hills embrace the tangible interface of two different – yet deeply connected – worlds.
Now it’s time to put together data, facts, impressions, and memories and show what we have been doing with what we collected on the field and with the existing literature and ethnographic databases. Abel is doing a great job, modeling a huge quantity of data, dealing with human agency on one hand and general patterns on the other. We keep in close online contact and the first elaborations look very promising, and the more we look at the data, the more we feel satisfied. I bet we will be posting some news very soon!
