T Mostowlansky
Biographic Data
| ID | 50726 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Mostowlansky |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Mostowlansky |
| SIGNATURE | MOSTOWLANSKY T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bern |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6038-2301 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Mining for Norms: International Extractivism, Chinese Business, and the Indeterminacy of Compliance in Kyrgyzstan
In this article, we show how the study of compliance provides significant insights into the political and social tensions that shape Chinese business conduct in Kyrgyzstan's extractive industry and beyond. Drawing on interviews and analysis of legal documents, we first examine disputes between Chinese mining companies and Kyrgyz state institutions. These disputes demonstrate how the mundane workings of government bureaucracy foster a legal enviro…
A Muslim humanitarian in Gaza: Charitable encounters and the relief of Arab suffering
Islam’s weight in global history: A response to Sidaway
In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West…
Dying Dreams in Tajikistan’s Global Borderland
Twenty-five years since the end of Tajikistan’s civil war in 1997, dreams and aspirations of international development and cross-border mobility in the country’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, colloquially called “the Pamirs,” have evaporated. Once the mountainous region was envisaged to have a prosperous postwar future ahead of it, with emerging trade links to China and Afghanistan, substantial funding from international nongovernmental o…
Exemplary Lovers: Humanity and Hierarchy in Muslim Philanthropy
Islamic charity is an increasingly well-charted field of study that encompasses Muslim institutions and practices of “doing good” across time and space. What is less well charted, though, is the study of how these institutions and practices become part of a broader sphere of civic engagement through contact with Muslim and non-Muslim actors, concepts and exemplary figures. This article analyses such contact, focusing on Muslim philanthropists who…
Emic and Etic
The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates in the humanities and social sciences ever since. Imported into anthropology in the 1960s, etic came to stand for ambitions to establish an objective, scientific approach to the study of culture, whereas emic refers to the goal of grasping the world according t…
The Belt and Road as political technology: Power and economy in Pakistan and Tajikistan
While celebrated as a new ‘win-win’ initiative, Belt and Road narratives sidestep the fact that current investment regimes originating in China must contour to existing political economies in host countries. Drawing on the examples of Pakistan and Tajikistan, both of which share land borders with China, and both of which have been eager recipients of recent Chinese investments, we forward two arguments: (1) In both countries the narrative of conn…
Humanitarian affect: Islam, aid and emotional impulse in northern Pakistan
Employing a perspective on humanitarianism as a ‘morphing’ project of ‘doing good’, this article explores the historical process of drawing humanitarian institutions to northern Pakistan via Muslim networks. Focusing on local men who have practised a variety of forms of humanitarian engagement in past and present, it looks at the broader moral assemblages of which these humanitarians are part. The article thereby shows how these moral assemblages…
Whither West Asia? Exploring North–South perspectives on Eurasia
The introduction to the Special Issue explores the relevance of the concept of West Asia for understanding connections between East Asia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. It seeks to go beyond the tendency in much scholarly work concerning regional connectivity in Asia to fixate on various permutations of the “Silk Road” or East–West ties more generally. We bring attention, rather, to the simultaneous significance of dense North–South connections th…
Faraway Siblings, So Close: Ephemeral conviviality across the Wakhan divide
In this article, I set out to explore the possibility of a shared life between two places in the highlands of Pakistan and Tajikistan-a region dissected by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor, by present-day nation-state boundaries, by historical divisions between Central and South Asia, and by a former Cold War frontier. Moving away from a take on conviviality as specifically tied to urban spaces and face-to-face encounters, I attempt to trace …
Wakhan Quadrangle: Exploration and espionage during and after the Great Game
Wakhan Quadrangle is an extraordinary book about a place, its people, and those who came to explore it and eventually rule them. The place is the Wakhan, a land situated at the meeting point of the
Muslim Endowments in Asia: Waqf, Charity and Circulations
Institutional Repository UINJKT merupakan konsep untuk mengumpulkan, mengelola, menyebarkan dan mengelola seluruh karya – karya ilmiah yang dihasilkan oleh civitas akademika UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta
Assembling marginality in northern Pakistan
Trading worlds: Afghan merchants across modern frontiers
The Afghan pressure cooker, the deg-i bukhar or ‘pot of steam’, is a symbol of national identity, with even the Afghan flag moulded onto it. As Magnus Marsden explains in the opening vignette of th
Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
Introduction: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces
In this introduction, we outline our approach to the two main themes this interdisciplinary special issue brings together - language and globalization, and South and Central Asian spaces. Arguing for the importance of exploring these topics from multiple, complementary disciplinary angles (sociolinguistic, anthropological and historical), we delineate a conceptualization of language and globalization which both acknowledges the inextricable relat…
Building bridges across the Oxus: Language, development, and globalization at the Tajik-Afghan frontier
In this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region as a "contact zone" in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals th…
Humanitarianism Across Mountain Valleys: “Shia Aid” and Development Encounters in Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan
Gorshenina, Svetlana: L’invention de l’Asie centrale. Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie
The Very Act of Cutting”
In the course of the emic–etic debate in the scientific study of religion\s, two complexes—insider–outsider and emic–etic—have increasingly become entangled. Taken against this backdrop, this article argues that ethnomethodology provides a methodological and epistemological outlook on these two complexes that can support efforts to disentangle them. Based on the discussion of ethnomethodological studies, I trace this outlook back to ethnomethodol…
A Matter of Perspective
This article introduces the emic–etic debate in the scientific study of religion\s and provides a frame for the special issue’s six articles on the topic. Departing from the broader debate’s early history in the 1960s, this article contextualizes the emic–etic debate and locates its point of entry into the scientific study of religion\s in the 1980s. This article argues that in the course of the debate the insider–outsider and emic–etic complexes…
Where Empires Meet: Orientalism and Marginality at the Former Russo-British Frontier
This article explores the intersection of orientalism and marginality in two regions at the former Russo-British frontier between Central and South Asia. Focussing on Tajikistan ’s Gorno-Badakhshan and Gilgit-Baltistan in today ’s Pakistan, an analysis of historical and contemporary orientalist projections on and in the two border regions reveals changing modes of domination through the course of the twentieth century (British, Kashmiri, Pakistan…
The state starts from the family’: Peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs
Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Bas…
Making Kyrgyz spaces: Local history as spatial practice in Murghab (Tajikistan)
In the past decade local scholars in Murghab, Tajikistan's easternmost district, have published several books in Kyrgyz on the history and culture of the Eastern Pamirs. In their work, the authors address the region's predominantly Kyrgyz population by emphasizing the ‘kyrgyzness’ of the Eastern Pamirs, which they refer to as Sarykol. The results of these local studies reverberate widely on the ground and have become integrated into everyday inte…
Paving the Way: Ismaʿili Genealogy and Mobility along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway
This article is an ethnographic study of Ismaʿili communities along the Pamir Highway. “The road,” as it is referred to locally, links Southern Kyrgyzstan with settlements in the eastern part of Tajikistan; its construction traces back to Soviet modernization policy. However, the highway’s construction in the course of the twentieth century led not only to a physical, but also a social transformation of the region. Labor migration of Ismaʿili Taj…
Assembling marginality in northern Pakistan
Whither West Asia? Exploring North–South perspectives on Eurasia
The introduction to the Special Issue explores the relevance of the concept of West Asia for understanding connections between East Asia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. It seeks to go beyond the tendency in much scholarly work concerning regional connectivity in Asia to fixate on various permutations of the “Silk Road” or East–West ties more generally. We bring attention, rather, to the simultaneous significance of dense North–South connections th…
Faraway Siblings, So Close: Ephemeral conviviality across the Wakhan divide
In this article, I set out to explore the possibility of a shared life between two places in the highlands of Pakistan and Tajikistan-a region dissected by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor, by present-day nation-state boundaries, by historical divisions between Central and South Asia, and by a former Cold War frontier. Moving away from a take on conviviality as specifically tied to urban spaces and face-to-face encounters, I attempt to trace …
Where Empires Meet: Orientalism and Marginality at the Former Russo-British Frontier
This article explores the intersection of orientalism and marginality in two regions at the former Russo-British frontier between Central and South Asia. Focussing on Tajikistan ’s Gorno-Badakhshan and Gilgit-Baltistan in today ’s Pakistan, an analysis of historical and contemporary orientalist projections on and in the two border regions reveals changing modes of domination through the course of the twentieth century (British, Kashmiri, Pakistan…
Humanitarian affect: Islam, aid and emotional impulse in northern Pakistan
Employing a perspective on humanitarianism as a ‘morphing’ project of ‘doing good’, this article explores the historical process of drawing humanitarian institutions to northern Pakistan via Muslim networks. Focusing on local men who have practised a variety of forms of humanitarian engagement in past and present, it looks at the broader moral assemblages of which these humanitarians are part. The article thereby shows how these moral assemblages…
The state starts from the family’: Peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs
Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Bas…
Making Kyrgyz spaces: Local history as spatial practice in Murghab (Tajikistan)
In the past decade local scholars in Murghab, Tajikistan's easternmost district, have published several books in Kyrgyz on the history and culture of the Eastern Pamirs. In their work, the authors address the region's predominantly Kyrgyz population by emphasizing the ‘kyrgyzness’ of the Eastern Pamirs, which they refer to as Sarykol. The results of these local studies reverberate widely on the ground and have become integrated into everyday inte…
Paving the Way: Ismaʿili Genealogy and Mobility along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway
This article is an ethnographic study of Ismaʿili communities along the Pamir Highway. “The road,” as it is referred to locally, links Southern Kyrgyzstan with settlements in the eastern part of Tajikistan; its construction traces back to Soviet modernization policy. However, the highway’s construction in the course of the twentieth century led not only to a physical, but also a social transformation of the region. Labor migration of Ismaʿili Taj…
Islam’s weight in global history: A response to Sidaway
In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West…
A Matter of Perspective
This article introduces the emic–etic debate in the scientific study of religion\s and provides a frame for the special issue’s six articles on the topic. Departing from the broader debate’s early history in the 1960s, this article contextualizes the emic–etic debate and locates its point of entry into the scientific study of religion\s in the 1980s. This article argues that in the course of the debate the insider–outsider and emic–etic complexes…
The Belt and Road as political technology: Power and economy in Pakistan and Tajikistan
While celebrated as a new ‘win-win’ initiative, Belt and Road narratives sidestep the fact that current investment regimes originating in China must contour to existing political economies in host countries. Drawing on the examples of Pakistan and Tajikistan, both of which share land borders with China, and both of which have been eager recipients of recent Chinese investments, we forward two arguments: (1) In both countries the narrative of conn…
Building bridges across the Oxus: Language, development, and globalization at the Tajik-Afghan frontier
In this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region as a "contact zone" in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals th…
Muslim Endowments in Asia: Waqf, Charity and Circulations
Institutional Repository UINJKT merupakan konsep untuk mengumpulkan, mengelola, menyebarkan dan mengelola seluruh karya – karya ilmiah yang dihasilkan oleh civitas akademika UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta
Introduction: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces
In this introduction, we outline our approach to the two main themes this interdisciplinary special issue brings together - language and globalization, and South and Central Asian spaces. Arguing for the importance of exploring these topics from multiple, complementary disciplinary angles (sociolinguistic, anthropological and historical), we delineate a conceptualization of language and globalization which both acknowledges the inextricable relat…
Paving the Way: Ismaʿili Genealogy and Mobility along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway
This article is an ethnographic study of Ismaʿili communities along the Pamir Highway. “The road,” as it is referred to locally, links Southern Kyrgyzstan with settlements in the eastern part of Tajikistan; its construction traces back to Soviet modernization policy. However, the highway’s construction in the course of the twentieth century led not only to a physical, but also a social transformation of the region. Labor migration of Ismaʿili Taj…
Making Kyrgyz spaces: Local history as spatial practice in Murghab (Tajikistan)
In the past decade local scholars in Murghab, Tajikistan's easternmost district, have published several books in Kyrgyz on the history and culture of the Eastern Pamirs. In their work, the authors address the region's predominantly Kyrgyz population by emphasizing the ‘kyrgyzness’ of the Eastern Pamirs, which they refer to as Sarykol. The results of these local studies reverberate widely on the ground and have become integrated into everyday inte…
The state starts from the family’: Peace and harmony in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs
Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2011, this article focuses on how people in Tajikistan's eastern Pamirs conceptualize well-being through the establishment of peace and harmony. An exploration of the interactional use of the terms ‘peace’ and ‘harmony’ in Kyrgyz and Tajik (tynchtyk, yntymak, tinji, and vahdat) makes manifest that the meanings of these terms are connected to the fields of ‘family’, ‘leadership’, and ‘state’. Bas…
Where Empires Meet: Orientalism and Marginality at the Former Russo-British Frontier
This article explores the intersection of orientalism and marginality in two regions at the former Russo-British frontier between Central and South Asia. Focussing on Tajikistan ’s Gorno-Badakhshan and Gilgit-Baltistan in today ’s Pakistan, an analysis of historical and contemporary orientalist projections on and in the two border regions reveals changing modes of domination through the course of the twentieth century (British, Kashmiri, Pakistan…
Gorshenina, Svetlana: L’invention de l’Asie centrale. Histoire du concept de la Tartarie à l’Eurasie
The Very Act of Cutting”
In the course of the emic–etic debate in the scientific study of religion\s, two complexes—insider–outsider and emic–etic—have increasingly become entangled. Taken against this backdrop, this article argues that ethnomethodology provides a methodological and epistemological outlook on these two complexes that can support efforts to disentangle them. Based on the discussion of ethnomethodological studies, I trace this outlook back to ethnomethodol…
A Matter of Perspective
This article introduces the emic–etic debate in the scientific study of religion\s and provides a frame for the special issue’s six articles on the topic. Departing from the broader debate’s early history in the 1960s, this article contextualizes the emic–etic debate and locates its point of entry into the scientific study of religion\s in the 1980s. This article argues that in the course of the debate the insider–outsider and emic–etic complexes…
Humanitarianism Across Mountain Valleys: “Shia Aid” and Development Encounters in Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan
Trading worlds: Afghan merchants across modern frontiers
The Afghan pressure cooker, the deg-i bukhar or ‘pot of steam’, is a symbol of national identity, with even the Afghan flag moulded onto it. As Magnus Marsden explains in the opening vignette of th
Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
Introduction: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces
In this introduction, we outline our approach to the two main themes this interdisciplinary special issue brings together - language and globalization, and South and Central Asian spaces. Arguing for the importance of exploring these topics from multiple, complementary disciplinary angles (sociolinguistic, anthropological and historical), we delineate a conceptualization of language and globalization which both acknowledges the inextricable relat…
Building bridges across the Oxus: Language, development, and globalization at the Tajik-Afghan frontier
In this article I set out to explore the Tajik-Afghan frontier in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region as a "contact zone" in which different actors engage in communicative encounters. Against this backdrop I take the construction of bridges across the Tajik-Afghan border river as a point of departure to analyse how these actors envisage processes of globalization. Following Pennycook, I argue that a focus on language as local practice reveals th…
Wakhan Quadrangle: Exploration and espionage during and after the Great Game
Wakhan Quadrangle is an extraordinary book about a place, its people, and those who came to explore it and eventually rule them. The place is the Wakhan, a land situated at the meeting point of the
Muslim Endowments in Asia: Waqf, Charity and Circulations
Institutional Repository UINJKT merupakan konsep untuk mengumpulkan, mengelola, menyebarkan dan mengelola seluruh karya – karya ilmiah yang dihasilkan oleh civitas akademika UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta
Assembling marginality in northern Pakistan
Whither West Asia? Exploring North–South perspectives on Eurasia
The introduction to the Special Issue explores the relevance of the concept of West Asia for understanding connections between East Asia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. It seeks to go beyond the tendency in much scholarly work concerning regional connectivity in Asia to fixate on various permutations of the “Silk Road” or East–West ties more generally. We bring attention, rather, to the simultaneous significance of dense North–South connections th…
Faraway Siblings, So Close: Ephemeral conviviality across the Wakhan divide
In this article, I set out to explore the possibility of a shared life between two places in the highlands of Pakistan and Tajikistan-a region dissected by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor, by present-day nation-state boundaries, by historical divisions between Central and South Asia, and by a former Cold War frontier. Moving away from a take on conviviality as specifically tied to urban spaces and face-to-face encounters, I attempt to trace …
Emic and Etic
The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates in the humanities and social sciences ever since. Imported into anthropology in the 1960s, etic came to stand for ambitions to establish an objective, scientific approach to the study of culture, whereas emic refers to the goal of grasping the world according t…
The Belt and Road as political technology: Power and economy in Pakistan and Tajikistan
While celebrated as a new ‘win-win’ initiative, Belt and Road narratives sidestep the fact that current investment regimes originating in China must contour to existing political economies in host countries. Drawing on the examples of Pakistan and Tajikistan, both of which share land borders with China, and both of which have been eager recipients of recent Chinese investments, we forward two arguments: (1) In both countries the narrative of conn…
Humanitarian affect: Islam, aid and emotional impulse in northern Pakistan
Employing a perspective on humanitarianism as a ‘morphing’ project of ‘doing good’, this article explores the historical process of drawing humanitarian institutions to northern Pakistan via Muslim networks. Focusing on local men who have practised a variety of forms of humanitarian engagement in past and present, it looks at the broader moral assemblages of which these humanitarians are part. The article thereby shows how these moral assemblages…
Dying Dreams in Tajikistan’s Global Borderland
Twenty-five years since the end of Tajikistan’s civil war in 1997, dreams and aspirations of international development and cross-border mobility in the country’s Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, colloquially called “the Pamirs,” have evaporated. Once the mountainous region was envisaged to have a prosperous postwar future ahead of it, with emerging trade links to China and Afghanistan, substantial funding from international nongovernmental o…
Exemplary Lovers: Humanity and Hierarchy in Muslim Philanthropy
Islamic charity is an increasingly well-charted field of study that encompasses Muslim institutions and practices of “doing good” across time and space. What is less well charted, though, is the study of how these institutions and practices become part of a broader sphere of civic engagement through contact with Muslim and non-Muslim actors, concepts and exemplary figures. This article analyses such contact, focusing on Muslim philanthropists who…
Islam’s weight in global history: A response to Sidaway
In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West…
Mining for Norms: International Extractivism, Chinese Business, and the Indeterminacy of Compliance in Kyrgyzstan
In this article, we show how the study of compliance provides significant insights into the political and social tensions that shape Chinese business conduct in Kyrgyzstan's extractive industry and beyond. Drawing on interviews and analysis of legal documents, we first examine disputes between Chinese mining companies and Kyrgyz state institutions. These disputes demonstrate how the mundane workings of government bureaucracy foster a legal enviro…
A Muslim humanitarian in Gaza: Charitable encounters and the relief of Arab suffering
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (12 works) · History (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · History (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)