Astronauts Of The Western Pamirs: Mobility, Power, And Disconnection In High Asia

How can we think about mobility between places in High Asia that are disconnected by complex national boundaries as well as by colonial and Cold War legacies? What does ethnographic fieldwork in these places reveal? And how can we connect this knowledge to other sites of anthropological investigation? This chapter approaches these questions, drawing on the author’s own longitudinal fieldwork in and between multiple locations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. Looking back in the history of anthropology to Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, it argues that—despite the many empirical differences between early twentieth-century Melanesia and twenty-first-century Central Asia—sea- and mountain-faring are not unrelated forms of mobility: navigating the verticality of the region, the stickiness of cultural stereotypes, new regimes of state power, transnational NGOs, and illicit forms of trade, the people of the Pamirs in the borderlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan meet familiar strangers and build new social relationships. Furthermore, this chapter argues that fieldwork on mobility in the mountainous margins of Central and South Asia offers alternate, yet complementary insights into contemporary anthropological research on an interconnected Asia. Stretching definitions of modernity, urbanity, and the center, the “astronauts” of the western Pamirs make a case for their planetary perspective from the rarefied air of their high-altitude home.