Everyday disasters, stagnation and the normalcy of non-development: Roghun Dam, a flood, and campaigns of forced taxation in southern Tajikistan

This article conducts a comparative analysis of a catastrophic flood that hit the Kulob region of southern Tajikistan in 2010, and the government of Tajikistan’s campaign to gather money to build the Roghun dam and hydropower station. It advances the notion of ‘everyday disasters’ in order to explain the imprecise boundaries between major catastrophic events and more mundane dimensions of the everyday as experienced by residents of Kulob. The article seeks to shed light, firstly, on the processes that underpin both Kulob residents’ experiences of stagnation and the normalization of non-development, and, secondly, on the ways in which Kulob residents joke and ‘do’ cunning/cheating whilst dealing with disastrous events in order to cultivate an everydayness that is worth living

‘We sit and wait’: migration, mobility and temporality in Guliston, southern Tajikistan

This article analyses how people in Guliston, southern Tajikistan, conceive of ‘waiting’ both for labour-migrants to return from Russia, and to realise the projects that these migrants and their families envision. In Guliston people talk about two contradictory forms of waiting: on the one hand, they associate waiting with sitting and doing nothing; on the other, they equally emphasise the active roles they play to keep their village full of vitality while they wait for their migrant-relatives to return. Stressing the interdependencies between temporality and mobility, and the experiences of time and place by those who stay in their villages and those who migrate, this article argues that people in Guliston practise ‘waiting’ as active and creative processes that figure prominently in their production of specific forms of sociality and community, and their village as a dynamic place at the centre of a circulation of caregiving

Antropologicheskie issledovanya Tsentral’noy Azii v zapadnoy nauke Anthropological works on Central Asia in Western Academia

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Chapter 9 Afghanistan’s Cosmopolitan Trading Networks

The focus of this chapter is the city of Yiwu and the nature of Afghan networks present there. By inserting such networks both in the context of the wider global settings, and in terms of the traders’ experience of space in Yiwu, we seek to contribute to an emerging body of literature on Muslim cosmopolitanism in two ways. First, we bring attention to the ways in which the expressions of Muslim cosmopolitanism visible in Yiwu are premised on violent histories of international conflict and interference that have led to massive displacements of the country’s people, as well the bleaching out of the country’s own religious diversity. Secondly, we recognise that if the traders with whom we work are cosmopolitan in some aspects of their lives, then in others they reinforce and sustain collective commitment to national, regional, ideological and confessional identities, identities that are also of critical significance to their activities as traders

Everyday diplomacy: introduction to special issue

This article assesses debates concerning the relevance of an ethnographic approach towards the study of diplomacy. By drawing upon recent developments across the disciplines of anthropology, diplomatic studies, geopolitics, political geography, and global history we critically reassess the ongoing assumption that in the modern world diplomacy is separated from other domains of human life. We build on work in anthropology and related disciplines that has argued for the need to move beyond the that the only actors authorised and able to conduct diplomacy are the nation-state’s representatives. Having outlined recent theoretical interventions concerning the turn towards the study of everyday, unofficial and grassroots forms of diplomacy, the paper suggests postulation some of the ways in which ethnography can be deployed in order to understand how individuals and communities affected by geopolitical processes develop and pursue diplomatic modes of agency and ask how they relate to, evaluate, and arbitrate between the geopolitical realms that affect their lives. In so doing, we propose an analytical heuristic - everyday diplomacy - to attend to the ways individuals and communities engage with and influence decisions about world-affairs

'Birds without legs': legal integration as potentiality for women of a Afghan-Turkmen family in Istanbul

This article examines how three generations of women in an Afghan–Turkmen family residing in Istanbul, Turkey, have experienced historical migration and legal integration. We deploy the concept of potentiality to convey these women’s experiences of legal integration as a particular form of existence that is, at times, expressed by them and other families of Afghan background with the Dari metaphor of being ‘birds without legs’. The metaphor conveys their constant mobility. Combining original ethnographic data with the analysis of historical works, we argue that families of Turkic ethnolinguistic backgrounds from Afghanistan residing in Turkey have been unable, and at times unwilling, to realize refuge, citizenship and settlement as the endpoint of their mobile trajectories

Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: the case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan

This article focuses on the trading trajectory of an Uzbek family of merchants from Tajikistan. This family runs businesses in both Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, and China’s famous international trading city: Yiwu. The analysis is centred on the accounts placed by Tajikistan’s Uzbek merchants about their historically sustained experience, often across several generations, in trading activities. These merchants’ claims of belonging to a ‘historical’ trading community rather than being ‘newcomers’ to long-distance commerce are articulated in relation to notions of ‘hierarchies of trade’ as they evolve in a twofold relational model linking Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood and Dushanbe. I suggest that the forms of conviviality enacted in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood need to be understood in terms of the historical, multinational and transregional contacts that have occurred within the spaces of the former Soviet Union, as well as along the China-Russia and China-Central Asian borders. Equally, the hierarchies of trade of Uzbek merchants from Tajikistan in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood cut-across markers of identity that juxtapose the roles of Tajik and Uzbek communities in Tajikistan’s contemporary politics and economics

‘How can I be post-Soviet if I was never Soviet?’ Rethinking categories of time and social change – a perspective from Kulob, southern Tajikistan

Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the Kulob region of southern Tajikistan, this paper examines the extent to which the existing periodization ‘Soviet/post-Soviet’ is still valid to frame scholarly works concerning Central Asia. It does so through an analysis of ‘alternative temporalities’ conveyed by Kulob residents to the author. These alternative temporalities are fashioned in especially clear ways in a relationship to the physical transformations occurring to two types of housing, namely flats in building blocks and detached houses. Without arguing that the categories ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet’ have become futile, the author advocates that the uncritically use of Soviet/post-Soviet has the unwanted effect of shaping the Central Asian region as a temporalized and specialized ‘other’

Chapter 9 Afghanistan’s Cosmopolitan Trading Networks

The focus of this chapter is the city of Yiwu and the nature of Afghan networks present there. By inserting such networks both in the context of the wider global settings, and in terms of the traders’ experience of space in Yiwu, we seek to contribute to an emerging body of literature on Muslim cosmopolitanism in two ways. First, we bring attention to the ways in which the expressions of Muslim cosmopolitanism visible in Yiwu are premised on violent histories of international conflict and interference that have led to massive displacements of the country’s people, as well the bleaching out of the country’s own religious diversity. Secondly, we recognise that if the traders with whom we work are cosmopolitan in some aspects of their lives, then in others they reinforce and sustain collective commitment to national, regional, ideological and confessional identities, identities that are also of critical significance to their activities as traders