A construction of cultural history from visual records for the Burusho of Hunza, Pakistan

This is a case study in the 1990s of the relationship between shifting knowledge and changing landscape for a small community of people living in the high Karakoram valley of Hunza, a political division of north-east Pakistan.;The study was based on the Hunza Slide Catalog-Collection (HSC), a unique collection of 238 glass lantern slides made by the late Lt.-Col. David Lorimer from photographs he took in the 1920s and again in the 1930s. I was able to use almost 175 of the HSC records. Those I could not use belonged to the politically defunct route which formerly connected Hunza to Kashmir. The core of Lorimer's HSC focused on a particular community and documented its local rulership and the daily and annual agricultural activities of the ordinary population.;I used the HSC to explore shifting knowledge and changing landscape in two ways. First, I photographically documented all the features and landmarks of the HSC that were observable in the 1990s to establish what portion of the HSC landmarks and features were yet visible and to develop contrasts between the earlier landscape and the 1990s. Second, I made a photographic album of the HSC and used it in interview sessions to learn how people understood the difference between the two periods.;Though I could document more than eighty percent of the HSC on the 1990s landscape, very different results were produced from the interviews. When changes in knowledge were juxtaposed to changes in landscape, the sharpest contrasts occurred between older and younger people.;I concluded that shifting knowledge and changing landscape were part of the same phenomenon. Change is not something that happens "out there" separate from our selves. It is part of us. Because knowledge--as one manifestation of change--is constantly contextualized, it is a useful indicator of how people understand the changes of which they are a part.;The study contributes to interests in change and altering perceptions, discussions of landscape, use of memory, narratives and history, and applications of photography.