Magnus Marsden
Biographic Data
| ID | 3621697 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Magnus Marsden |
| GIVEN NAMES | Magnus |
| FAMILY NAME | Marsden |
| SIGNATURE | MARSDEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 277 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The Imperiled Connective Presence of Afghans in Pakistan
The mass deportation of Afghan refugees and mobile people from Pakistan to Afghanistan is reshaping trade networks and routes, dividing families, and disrupting local economies and identities. For centuries, traders and others in the Afghan diaspora were crucial to economic and cultural interconnection between Central and South Asia. This role continued through twentieth-century upheavals including the 1947 partition of the subcontinent and the 1…
Portrait: Susan Bayly
Adjusting scales: Jewish trading networks in and beyond Afghanistan, 1950-present-day
Jewish traders from Afghanistan mediated the country's international connections across the twentieth century. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Israel, the USA, and the UK, this article documents the significant nodes at which traders gathered, explores the reorientation of trading networks during the Cold War, analyses the geographical scales across which these networks operated, and assesses the importance of Muslim-Jewish relatio…
Beyond Long-Distance Nationalism: Khorasan and the Re-imagination of Afghanistan
This article explores the geographical imagination of diasporic activists from Afghanistan. It examines the significance of the historic-geographic region of Khorasan for their attempts to re-imagine Afghanistan and its place in the region and wider world. The article documents ethnographically the forms of intellectual exchange in which these intellectual-activists participate, and their modes of materializing the geographical imagination of Kho…
The Legacies of Afghanistan’s Urban Cosmopolitanism: Sikhs, Muslims and Markets in London
This article explores the lives and activities of Afghan Sikhs living in the United Kingdom. Rather than analysing Afghan Sikhs as a one-dimensional “community” defined in relationship to a singular “identity” based on a shared geographical origin in Afghanistan, the article emphasises the ways in which they have formed multiple and dynamic networks across shifting geographical and historical contexts. Ethnographically, it focuses on the importan…
Long-Distance Trade and Migration in Central Asia, 1500–1850
Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free,…
The Cambridge History of Global Migrations: Migrations, 1400-1800
Volume I documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400–1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of pre-industrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand of free, forced and unfree labour, long and short distanc…
Introduction. An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how…
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
Beyond State-Centrism, Towards Acknowledging Relationality: Understanding Afghanistan from an Inter-Asian Perspective
Scholars across the social sciences and humanities working on Afghanistan have in recent years sought to explore the country’s dynamics in relation to an inter-Asia approach: that means, moving beyond the discrete study of subregions and focusing instead on connections, circulations, and comparisons within, across, and beyond Asian contexts. This approach has enabled interdisciplinary work on Asia to question taken-for-granted boundaries of natio…
Beziehungen statt Staaten sehen: Afghanistan aus inter-asiatischer Perspektive
Forschende aus den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften haben in den letzten Jahren versucht, Afghanistan mithilfe eines inter-asiatischen Ansatzes zu fassen. Das bedeutet, dass die Aufmerksamkeit weniger isolierten Studien über einzelne Sub-Regionen galt, und stattdessen inter-asiatische Verbindungen, zirkuläre Bewegungen und Vergleiche in den Blick genommen wurden – innerhalb, zwischen und jenseits von asiatischen Kontexten. Solche Ansätze ermögli…
Trade ‘outside the law’: Uzbek and Afghan transnational merchants between Yiwu and South-Central Asia
This article analyses the trajectories of two transnational networks present in the Chinese city of Yiwu: Afghan merchants who trade goods in and out Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan; and Uzbek traders (citizens of either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan) who commercialize their merchandise in and out Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Our aim is to capture an ethnographically grounded understanding of informal markets and economies by analysing the …
Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historical…
Commerce, Cuisine and Cultural Exchange in Afghanistan, West Asia and Beyond
The Alternative Histories of Muslim Asia’s Urban Centres: De-Cosmopolitanisation and Beyond
Historians increasingly analyse the cultural diversity of life in the Afro-Eurasian arena of ‘Muslim dominion’ in terms of its cosmopolitanism. By contrast, critical scholarship has recently brought attention to declining levels of religious diversity in present-day Muslim Asia – a term that refers to Asia’s Muslimmajority population zones. This article, by contrast, explores the ongoing legacy of urban cosmopolitanism in Muslim Asia. It focuses …
Commodities, merchants, and refugees: Inter-Asian circulations and Afghan mobility
This article consists of an analysis of ethnographic material on Afghan trading networks involved in both the export of commodities from China to a variety of settings across Eurasia and the movement of 'refugees' from Afghanistan to Europe. Much recent work on trading networks has deployed the concept of trust to understand the functioning of such social formations. By contrast, in this article I assess the durability of Afghan networks in three…
Introduction to the special issue: After Trust
Trust' has long been seen as critical to the success and durability of trading networks, and conceptualized as a positive moral sentiment that is embedded in shared kinship, ethnicity or friendship, or in shared frameworks of morality. Other recent studies of business communities suggest that the ability to work in settings characterized by pervasive mistrust is a key factor in the development of commercial acumen and a determinant of success. He…
Marginal Hubs: On conviviality beyond the urban in Asia: Introduction
This special issue explores the forms of coexistence that emerge in what we call 'marginal hubs': sites that appear geographically or politically marginal, but which emerge as areas of intense and often volatile sociability, including border posts, container markets, industrial workshops, and pilgrim encampments. Such sites, which often come into being suddenly and are remote from the great urban centres, do not fit easily either within the frame…
China's Old and New Central Asian Ties
Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative is modernizing ancient patterns of commerce across the region, but small-scale traders may be left behind
Civility and diplomacy: Trust and dissimulation in transnational Afghan trading networks
This article explores the relationship between civility and diplomacy in the transnational commercial activities of traders from Afghanistan. The commodity traders on which the article focuses - most of whom are involved in the export and wholesale of commodities made in China - form long-distance networks that criss-cross multiple parts of Asia and are rooted in multiple trading nodes across the region, including the Chinese commercial city of Y…
Alternate modes of prosperity
The present collection is at pains to avoid falling into the trap of dualistic thinking and its method of theory making, involving analytical distinctions such as those between "us" and "them," "gift exchange" and "commodity exchange," "capitalist" and "primitive" economies. All the ethnographic cases presented here are taken from societies and cultures with deep histories of intense, multistranded connections with a variety of other societies an…
Merchant identities, trading nodes, and globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue
The contributors to this Special Issue are concerned by the nature of transregional Asian interactions taking place in the field of commerce. They explore this concern through an examination of the experiences, activities, and histories of commodity traders whose life trajectories criss-cross Asia. The articles share a common geographic point of reference: Yiwu - an officially designated ‘international trade city’ located in China’s eastern Zheji…
Beyond Bukhara: Trade, identity and interregional exchange across Asia
This article explores the nature of inter-Asian trade dynamics through a consideration of the role played by traders from northern Afghanistan’s Central Asian borderlands. It explores the role that traders from this region have played in commercial exchanges involving China, the Arabian Peninsula and a range of settings in West Asia. In addition to documenting the inter-Asian scope of these traders’ activities, the article also addresses the shif…
Islamic cosmopolitanism out of Muslim Asia: Hindu-Muslim business co-operation between Odessa and Yiwu
This article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from…
Migrants, Militants, and Merchants
This chapter explores in greater detail the relationships between the professional, Islamic, and regional identities of traders. It does so by focusing on the northern Afghan town of Kunduz and on a group of traders in that context who identify themselves as being Panjshiri. These Panjshiris are part of complex and transregional trade networks that bring together people, things, and places across various boundaries. Whereas an important element o…
Everyday Diplomacy
This article considers the relevance of an ethnographic approach towards the study of diplomacy. By drawing upon recent interdisciplinary developments we critically reassess the ongoing assumption that in the modern world diplomacy is separated from other domains of human life, and that the only actors authorized and able to conduct diplomacy are the nation-state's representatives. Having outlined recent theoretical interventions concerning the t…
Crossing Eurasia: Trans-regional Afghan trading networks in China and beyond
An expanding body of literature in the field of Central Asian studies has brought attention to the problems of considering the region's complex dynamics through the lens of its nation-states. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the role played by trans-regional circulations in connecting parts of Central Asia to the wider world. This paper situates ethnographic work on trans-regional networks of Afghan traders in China, Central Asia, Ru…
Fatal embrace: Trading in hospitality on the frontiers of South and Central Asia
This paper explores the contested yet critical importance of hospitality to the everyday lives of Afghan traders in Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan. Ethnographically, it focuses on the ways in which these people's relationship to the norms and values of hospitality are often highly reflective and shot through with irony, irreverence, and wit. Theoretically, it aims to move beyond anthropological approaches to the study of…
Love and elopement in northern Pakistan
This article focuses on conceptions of romantic love held by Khowar-speaking Muslim people in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan. It shows the ways in which romantic love in Chitral is expressed through a local poetic genre that has its cultural roots in Persian Sufi poetry. This body of literature is cherished by Chitralis, and now engaged in an interaction with very different images of romance emerging from an 'alternative' site of Asian m…
Repertoires of Family Life and the Anchoring of Afghan Trading Networks in Ukraine
This article examines the “repertories” of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with “local women” and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of re…
Muslim Cosmopolitans? Transnational Life in Northern Pakistan
This article explores the importance of transnational forms of Muslim cultural identity in northern Pakistan. By documenting the dynamism of a transnational form of Muslim identity that encompasses people belonging to a wide range of ethnic communities and Islamic doctrinal traditions, as well as extending across countries whose Muslim peoples have experienced the differential effects of their incorporation into both the Soviet Union and British …
Islamic cosmopolitanism out of Muslim Asia: Hindu-Muslim business co-operation between Odessa and Yiwu
This article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from…
From Kabul to Kiev: Afghan trading networks across the former Soviet Union
While the territory of Afghanistan is widely connected in the popular and historical imagination to long-distance trade, Afghan society continues to be popularly represented as being made-up of 'tribes', who subscribe to static 'honour codes', and tenaciously cling to archaic tribal values. This article examines the significance of traders of Afghan background to commodity flows across a wide range of contexts in the former Soviet Union, especial…
All-male sonic gatherings, Islamic reform, and masculinity in northern Pakistan
In this article, I explore the complex opportunities afforded by high-intensity performative events for the instantiation of diverse forms of sociality and masculinity in the mountainous Chitral region of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. I focus ethnographically on two types of all-male musical gatherings that are regularly attended by Chitrali Muslims: the istók and the mahfil. The "permissibility" of these types of entertainment, accord…
A tour not so grand: Mobile Muslims in northern Pakistan
This paper explores the ways in which village Muslims living in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan seek to nurture and sustain their region as a socially heterogeneous space by actively embarking on local forms of travel. The heterogeneity of places in the region offers potentials for Chitrali Muslims to enact diverse ways of being Muslim, forge complex structures of attachment to Chitral, and cultivate an attitude of curiosity as to the het…
Beyond Bukhara: Trade, identity and interregional exchange across Asia
This article explores the nature of inter-Asian trade dynamics through a consideration of the role played by traders from northern Afghanistan’s Central Asian borderlands. It explores the role that traders from this region have played in commercial exchanges involving China, the Arabian Peninsula and a range of settings in West Asia. In addition to documenting the inter-Asian scope of these traders’ activities, the article also addresses the shif…
Marginal Hubs: On conviviality beyond the urban in Asia: Introduction
This special issue explores the forms of coexistence that emerge in what we call 'marginal hubs': sites that appear geographically or politically marginal, but which emerge as areas of intense and often volatile sociability, including border posts, container markets, industrial workshops, and pilgrim encampments. Such sites, which often come into being suddenly and are remote from the great urban centres, do not fit easily either within the frame…
Women, Politics and Islamism in Northern Pakistan
This paper explores the responses of women living in a small town in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan to the Islamizing policies of the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties elected to provincial government in the North West Frontier Province in October 2002. Its focus is on women in the region who vocally and publicly criticize Chitral's politically activemadrasa-educated 'men of piety'. Documenting the ways in which th…
Merchant identities, trading nodes, and globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue
The contributors to this Special Issue are concerned by the nature of transregional Asian interactions taking place in the field of commerce. They explore this concern through an examination of the experiences, activities, and histories of commodity traders whose life trajectories criss-cross Asia. The articles share a common geographic point of reference: Yiwu - an officially designated ‘international trade city’ located in China’s eastern Zheji…
Trade ‘outside the law’: Uzbek and Afghan transnational merchants between Yiwu and South-Central Asia
This article analyses the trajectories of two transnational networks present in the Chinese city of Yiwu: Afghan merchants who trade goods in and out Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan; and Uzbek traders (citizens of either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan) who commercialize their merchandise in and out Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Our aim is to capture an ethnographically grounded understanding of informal markets and economies by analysing the …
Islam, political authority and emotion in northern Pakistan
This article explores local manifestations of 'Islamism' in the one-time princely kingdom of Chitral, in northern Pakistan. Chitral's former princely family continues to exert significant political influence in the region today, whilst court-derived forms of status distinction alongside newer expressions of class difference are of central importance to Chitrali social life. Many Chitrali 'men of piety' (dashmanan) are critical about the continued…
Commodities, merchants, and refugees: Inter-Asian circulations and Afghan mobility
This article consists of an analysis of ethnographic material on Afghan trading networks involved in both the export of commodities from China to a variety of settings across Eurasia and the movement of 'refugees' from Afghanistan to Europe. Much recent work on trading networks has deployed the concept of trust to understand the functioning of such social formations. By contrast, in this article I assess the durability of Afghan networks in three…
Introduction to the special issue: After Trust
Trust' has long been seen as critical to the success and durability of trading networks, and conceptualized as a positive moral sentiment that is embedded in shared kinship, ethnicity or friendship, or in shared frameworks of morality. Other recent studies of business communities suggest that the ability to work in settings characterized by pervasive mistrust is a key factor in the development of commercial acumen and a determinant of success. He…
Alternate modes of prosperity
The present collection is at pains to avoid falling into the trap of dualistic thinking and its method of theory making, involving analytical distinctions such as those between "us" and "them," "gift exchange" and "commodity exchange," "capitalist" and "primitive" economies. All the ethnographic cases presented here are taken from societies and cultures with deep histories of intense, multistranded connections with a variety of other societies an…
Adjusting scales: Jewish trading networks in and beyond Afghanistan, 1950-present-day
Jewish traders from Afghanistan mediated the country's international connections across the twentieth century. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Israel, the USA, and the UK, this article documents the significant nodes at which traders gathered, explores the reorientation of trading networks during the Cold War, analyses the geographical scales across which these networks operated, and assesses the importance of Muslim-Jewish relatio…
Civility and diplomacy: Trust and dissimulation in transnational Afghan trading networks
This article explores the relationship between civility and diplomacy in the transnational commercial activities of traders from Afghanistan. The commodity traders on which the article focuses - most of whom are involved in the export and wholesale of commodities made in China - form long-distance networks that criss-cross multiple parts of Asia and are rooted in multiple trading nodes across the region, including the Chinese commercial city of Y…
Talking the talk: Debating debate in northern Afghanistan
The ethnographic focus of this article is on the ways in which Afghan families who lived in northern Pakistan as refugees are currently reflecting upon to their complex experiences of return to their country through a rich and complex culture of debate, as well as the deployment of other verbal and peformative skills, especially imitation. More broadly, it argues that the comparative study of situated practices of debate offers unique insights fo…
Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan
The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT…
The Legacies of Afghanistan’s Urban Cosmopolitanism: Sikhs, Muslims and Markets in London
This article explores the lives and activities of Afghan Sikhs living in the United Kingdom. Rather than analysing Afghan Sikhs as a one-dimensional “community” defined in relationship to a singular “identity” based on a shared geographical origin in Afghanistan, the article emphasises the ways in which they have formed multiple and dynamic networks across shifting geographical and historical contexts. Ethnographically, it focuses on the importan…
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier
Popular representations of Pakistan's North West Frontier have long featured simplistic images of tribal blood feuds, fanatical religion, and the seclusion of women. The rise to power of the radical Taliban regime in neighbouring Afghanistan enhanced the region's reputation as a place of anti-Western militancy. Magnus Marsden is an anthropologist who has immersed himself in the lives of the Frontier's villagers for more than ten years. His evocat…
Mullahs, Migrants and Murids: New Developments in the Study of Pakistan A Review Article
The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change . By M UHAMMAD Q ASIM Z AMAN . Princeton, N.J. and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan . By O SKAR V ERKAAIK . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult . By P NINA W ERBNER . London: Hurst and Company
Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan
The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT…
Islam, political authority and emotion in northern Pakistan
This article explores local manifestations of 'Islamism' in the one-time princely kingdom of Chitral, in northern Pakistan. Chitral's former princely family continues to exert significant political influence in the region today, whilst court-derived forms of status distinction alongside newer expressions of class difference are of central importance to Chitrali social life. Many Chitrali 'men of piety' (dashmanan) are critical about the continued…
All-male sonic gatherings, Islamic reform, and masculinity in northern Pakistan
In this article, I explore the complex opportunities afforded by high-intensity performative events for the instantiation of diverse forms of sociality and masculinity in the mountainous Chitral region of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. I focus ethnographically on two types of all-male musical gatherings that are regularly attended by Chitrali Muslims: the istók and the mahfil. The "permissibility" of these types of entertainment, accord…
Love and elopement in northern Pakistan
This article focuses on conceptions of romantic love held by Khowar-speaking Muslim people in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan. It shows the ways in which romantic love in Chitral is expressed through a local poetic genre that has its cultural roots in Persian Sufi poetry. This body of literature is cherished by Chitralis, and now engaged in an interaction with very different images of romance emerging from an 'alternative' site of Asian m…
Islamic legitimacy in a plural Asia – Edited by Anthony Reid & Michael Gilsenan
Women, Politics and Islamism in Northern Pakistan
This paper explores the responses of women living in a small town in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan to the Islamizing policies of the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties elected to provincial government in the North West Frontier Province in October 2002. Its focus is on women in the region who vocally and publicly criticize Chitral's politically activemadrasa-educated 'men of piety'. Documenting the ways in which th…
Muslim Cosmopolitans? Transnational Life in Northern Pakistan
This article explores the importance of transnational forms of Muslim cultural identity in northern Pakistan. By documenting the dynamism of a transnational form of Muslim identity that encompasses people belonging to a wide range of ethnic communities and Islamic doctrinal traditions, as well as extending across countries whose Muslim peoples have experienced the differential effects of their incorporation into both the Soviet Union and British …
Islam and the prayer economy. History and authority in a Malian town by Soares, Benjamin
A tour not so grand: Mobile Muslims in northern Pakistan
This paper explores the ways in which village Muslims living in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan seek to nurture and sustain their region as a socially heterogeneous space by actively embarking on local forms of travel. The heterogeneity of places in the region offers potentials for Chitrali Muslims to enact diverse ways of being Muslim, forge complex structures of attachment to Chitral, and cultivate an attitude of curiosity as to the het…
In Amma's healing room: Gender and vernacular Islam in South India - By Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Talking the talk: Debating debate in northern Afghanistan
The ethnographic focus of this article is on the ways in which Afghan families who lived in northern Pakistan as refugees are currently reflecting upon to their complex experiences of return to their country through a rich and complex culture of debate, as well as the deployment of other verbal and peformative skills, especially imitation. More broadly, it argues that the comparative study of situated practices of debate offers unique insights fo…
Violence and belonging: Land, love and lethal conflict in the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan - By Are Knudsen
Musulmanes en movimiento: Vida transnacional en el norte de Pakistán
El presente artículo se centra en lo que a primera vista parecen tres escalas distintas de movilidad, las cuales son todas importantes dimensiones de la vida diaria de la gente que habla khowar y son musulmanes shi'a ssmai'li o sunnis originarios de Chitral, en el norte de Pakistán. Se busca demostrar si estas diferentes prácticas de movilidad están enmarcadas en relación con el "entendimiento popular [Chitrali] de lo global"
Southwest and Central Asia: Comparison, Integration or Beyond?
Articulating Islam Muslims in Global Societies
Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds
Fatal embrace: Trading in hospitality on the frontiers of South and Central Asia
This paper explores the contested yet critical importance of hospitality to the everyday lives of Afghan traders in Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan. Ethnographically, it focuses on the ways in which these people's relationship to the norms and values of hospitality are often highly reflective and shot through with irony, irreverence, and wit. Theoretically, it aims to move beyond anthropological approaches to the study of…
Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalisation, and the Afterlife of Development
Rydnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalisation, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 289 pps. Anyone who has taken an early morning fl
Crossing Eurasia: Trans-regional Afghan trading networks in China and beyond
An expanding body of literature in the field of Central Asian studies has brought attention to the problems of considering the region's complex dynamics through the lens of its nation-states. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the role played by trans-regional circulations in connecting parts of Central Asia to the wider world. This paper situates ethnographic work on trans-regional networks of Afghan traders in China, Central Asia, Ru…
From Kabul to Kiev: Afghan trading networks across the former Soviet Union
While the territory of Afghanistan is widely connected in the popular and historical imagination to long-distance trade, Afghan society continues to be popularly represented as being made-up of 'tribes', who subscribe to static 'honour codes', and tenaciously cling to archaic tribal values. This article examines the significance of traders of Afghan background to commodity flows across a wide range of contexts in the former Soviet Union, especial…
Repertoires of Family Life and the Anchoring of Afghan Trading Networks in Ukraine
This article examines the “repertories” of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with “local women” and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of re…
Migrants, Militants, and Merchants
This chapter explores in greater detail the relationships between the professional, Islamic, and regional identities of traders. It does so by focusing on the northern Afghan town of Kunduz and on a group of traders in that context who identify themselves as being Panjshiri. These Panjshiris are part of complex and transregional trade networks that bring together people, things, and places across various boundaries. Whereas an important element o…
Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers
Trading Worlds is an anthropological study of Afghan merchants in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The book argues that the merchants collectively form a little understood yet rapidly expanding global trading network. It contests one-sided images that depict traders from this and other conflict regions as immoral profiteers, the cronies of warlords or international drug smugglers. It shows, rather, the active role these merchants are…
Political science (36 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East (24 works) · History (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Geography (17 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works)