ANOR Central Asian Studies

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.

The volume sheds light on the disintegration of Afghanistan from various individual perspectives, focusing on the local perspective. In cooperation with the Afghanistan Forum in Deutschland e. V. and the research center "Communication for Social Change" (C4SC) at the University of Leipzig, renowned Afghan intellectuals and writers now living in exile in the West were invited to talk about the disintegration of Afghanistan and analyze it from their perspective. The most important contributions have been summarized in this anthology.

This book explores how to locate the sources which influenced the political, social, and ideological stance of a famous Turkestani Jadid thinker, writer, journalist and scholar, ‘Abdurra’uf Fitrat (1886-1938), thus also putting in perspective some overall intellectual trends in Turkestan, especially in Bukhara in the early 1910s. Based on Fitrat’s early publications the book discusses what intellectual milieu it was that shaped his worldview in the early 1910s, a worldview that could be designated as a first attempt at “freedom and sovereignty through Islam”. A thorough review of these publications also brings greater clarity to the issue of Fitrat‘s ethnical identity, which sheds light on how he related to the worldwide community of Muslims and how he positioned himself towards political unity of the Muslim World.
Furthermore, by scrutinizing Fitrat’s intellectual legacy of 1910-1915, this book highlights some of the origins of Jadidism in Turkestan and places Turkestani Jadidism in the context of worldwide Muslim reformism at the turn of the 20th century.

This study examines private homebuilding as a specific conflict-laden form of urbanization in post-Second World War Soviet Central Asia, based on the example of Samarkand. It elucidates the neglected role of private initiatives in Soviet urban planning and housing policy, which it describes as a tension-filled realm of conflicting interests, urban development tasks, and pressures.

The ethnological study describes the situation of Tajiki men, who undertake migration to Russia for economic reasons. “Going to Moscow” means becoming a migrant worker. The clash between a young man’s implicit expectations and the reality of his experiences in Russia turns managing migrant life into a challenge whose outcome is determined by his personal maturity as well as his family status.