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
