Pamiri Lifeworlds

Living through imperial border disputes resulting in the separation of many communities and families, Pamiris find themselves surrounded by rupture, both in memory and contemporary situations in this transborder mountainous region, divided since 1895 by British and Russian imperial border demarcation. This monograph, drawing from ethnographic interviews with Pamiris from Gorno-Badakhshon Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), Tajikistan collected between 2021 and 2023, investigates how Pamiris continue to respond to rupture, using memories of past ruptures to position themselves within their own cartography of Pamir. For some, rupture takes the form of (im)mobility and a fear of coming too close to the border, while others turn to creativity to make sense of the ruptures around them. Through oral narrations and material artefacts, Pamiris learn, feel, and recreate a Pamiri cultural identity which provides continuity in times of rupture, helping younger generations to experience the interconnection of the lifeworld in which they find themselves and, ultimately, imagining Pamir through emotion and memory.
This monograph challenges the anthropological assumption that ruptures represent breaks in continuity, arguing that materiality provides continuity in times of instability, with cultural heritage giving Pamiris a way to position themselves in the uncertain present by way of the material turn. In this way, this monograph attempts to draft a Pamiri history of rupture, challenging assumptions of global continuity and relocating historical narratives of the past century to Pamir by presenting Pamiri perspectives on rupture and examining how people remember and respond to times of redirection, uncertainty, and instability. In doing so, this monograph strengthens the growing focus in historical studies on non-elite, marginalised perspectives, for example in the fields of Oral History, Salvage Ethnography, as well as the larger historical debates in the field of Subaltern Studies, ultimately drafting a history of Pamir from a regional perspective. The regional is understood here both spatially and temporally as an overarching perspective, whereby, in contrast to global approaches to space and time, the regional represents part of an inward-outward approach which is distinctive of the New Area Studies. The regional is therefore understood as a perspective which, while existing in relation but not necessarily tied to the geography of Pamir, for example Pamiris living in diaspora in Russia or North America, is in this case a Pamiri experience of being-in-the-world. Drawing from the experiences of Pamiri people articulated using Pamir languages, this book locates such shifts in temporality on a community level, examining how rupture has affected interconnection and understandings of space and time. By shifting to a regional scale, experiences from preconceived peripheries like Pamir are brought to the forefront, highlighting at times the subjectivity of rupture and challenging the concept of the global epoch for the fact that, when you live far from the political centres of nation states or at the vague edges of the mandala, their ruptures lose the relevance a global epoch demands.

Fiona Katherine Smith, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Germany.