Migration and Society in Gilgit, Northern Areas of Pakistan

High mountain areas like the Northern Areas of Pakistan are frequently regarded as having been isolated from the surrounding world before the development of modern means of communication. The paper argues that Gilgit, the modern center of the Northern Areas, had been subject to immigration and thus contact with the outside long before the era of road construction. The relationship between immigrants and people of Gilgit changed according to the conditions and (political) context of migration. Modernity did not start migration but it caused new patterns of migration and of relations with immigrants to emerge.