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 evocative study of the Chitral region challenges all these stereotypes. Through an exploration of the everyday experiences of both men and women, he shows that the life of a good Muslim in Chitral is above all a mindful life, enhanced by the creative force of poetry, dancing and critical debate. Challenging much that has been assumed about the Muslim world, this 2005 study makes a powerful contribution to the understanding of religion and politics both within and beyond the Muslim societies of southern Asia.
Actually existing silk roads Marsden, Magnus
Journal of Eurasian studies,
January 2017, 20170000, 2017-01-00, 2017-01-01, 2017-01, Volume:
8, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article explores the relevance of the concept of Silk Road for understanding the patterns of trade and exchange between China, Eurasia and the Middle East. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork ...in the city of Yiwu, in China's Zhejiang Province. Yiwu is a node in the global distribution of Chinese ‘small commodities’ and home to merchants and traders from across Asia and beyond. The article explores the role played by traders from Afghanistan in connecting the city of Yiwu to markets and trading posts in the world beyond. It seeks to bring attention to the diverse types of networks involved in such forms of trade, as well as their emergence and development over the past thirty years.
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 on a small but lively community of Jews from the Afghan cities of Kabul and Herat, and does so in comparison to a considerably larger community of Jews from formerly Soviet Central Asian Republics, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, who identify themselves as ‘Bukharan’. Investigating ethnographic material relating to Afghan and Bukharan Jewish communities based in New York, the article sheds light on an alternative and ongoing history of cosmopolitanism in Muslim Asia. More broadly, it also argues that field research amongst migrant and diasporic communities from Muslim Asia living in the West can offer important insights into the afterlives of the region’s historic cities.
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
such processes might best be studied cross-culturally.
Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and
intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the
volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange
itself.
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 that enable the interpenetration of varying parts of Asia and argue that West Asia is analytically helpful in bringing definition to such ties.
This article explores the concept of West Asia in relationship to recent work in the global history of Islam that points toward the existence of transregional arenas of historic significance that ...incorporate many of Asia’s Muslim societies. Recent anthropological work has also brought attention to the dynamic nature of the relations and cultural connections between peoples living in regions that once formed part of expansive arenas of interaction yet were divided by imperial and national boundaries, as well as the ideological conflicts of the Cold War. Against this political and historical context, we deploy West Asia as a geographical scale that brings to light interconnected forms of life that have been silenced by traditional area studies scholarship. We compare our field work experiences with two different networks made-up of Muslims that span different axis of Muslim Asia. We argue that “West Asia” brings attention to influential connections, communities, and circulations that both bear the imprint of deeper pasts as well as the influence of emergent and shifting transregional dynamics in the present. Furthermore, by emphasizing connective dynamics that move beyond the rather conventional focus on east–west relationships, the category West Asia also encourages scholarship to highlight multiple yet hitherto little explored inter-Asian north–south connections.
Exploring Eurasian connections from the perspective of mobile Afghan traders, Marsden documents how trading communities thrive in geopolitically fraught contexts, analyses the structure of the ...networks they form, and explores the dynamics of the commercial hubs important to their activities. This title is also available as Open Access.
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 ways. First, recognition of how they are polycentric and multi‐nodal. Second, how they are successful in transforming their collective aims and projects in changing shifting political and economic circumstances. Third, how they are made up of individuals able to switch their statuses and activities within trading networks over time. Furthermore, I argue that a focus on the precise ways in which traders entrust capital, people and commodities to one another, reveals the extent to which social and commercial relationships inside trading networks are frequently impermanent and pregnant with concerns about mistrust and contingency. Recognition of this suggests that scholars should focus on practices of entrustment rather than notions of trust in their analyses of trading networks per se, as well as seek to understand the ways in which these practices enable actors to handle and address questions of contingency.
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This article documents the migration of Afghanistan’s Sikh communities to Asia and Europe during the Cold War and its aftermath. It analyses these migratory trajectories both in the context of ...conflict in Afghanistan and the refugee flows it created as well as in relation to the long-term role of Afghan Sikhs in transregional trade. The article argues that exploring Sikh migration from Afghanistan through the twin analytical lenses of trade networks and the Cold War helps to illuminate a more complex range of identities and experiences than allowed for by a singular focus on their status as either ‘refugees’ or migrants from ‘the Global South’.
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