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- Format:
- Panels and Roundtables
- Location:
- Webex
- Sessions:
- Monday 12 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
Central Asia and the Caucasus are often portrayed at the receiving end of incoming change and movement. By contrast, this panel seeks to highlight and interrogate movements generated between and 'out' of these areas. Bringing together arenas of movement usually conceptualized as separate such as 'religious' and 'migrant' mobility, this panel proposes a wide-angle lens on the movement of people, things and ideas generated in the region.
With prominent panelists including Till Mostowlansky, Madeleine Reeves and Gulnaz Sibgatullina, this panel invites comparative historical and social science perspectives on the intertwining of these domains. Drawing on post-colonial and post-regional studies approaches to experiences of similarity, difference and change,speakers will engage with the utility of analytical terms such as 'translocality', 'diaspora', the notion of 'networks' and the shifting roles of political and economic structures facilitating or obstructing particular ways of moving.
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Миграция, Мобильность и Религия: Люди Центрально-Евразийского региона, Институты и Идеи в Движении.
Центральная Азия и Кавказ часто изображаются как ожидающие приближающихся изменений и движений. Напротив, эта панель стремится выделить и исследовать движения, возникающие между этими областями и «за их пределами». Объединяя арены движения, которые обычно концептуализируются как отдельные, такие как «религиозная» и «мигрантская» мобильность, эта панель предлагает широкий взгляд на передвижения людей, вещей и идей, генерируемых в регионе.
Эта панель, в которой участвуют видные участники дискуссии, включая Тилля Мостовлански, Мадлен Ривз и Гульназ Сибгатуллину, предлагает сравнительно-исторические и социальные научные взгляды на переплетение этих областей. Опираясь на подходы постколониальных и пострегиональных исследований в опыте сходств, различий и изменений, докладчики будут использовать такие аналитические термины, как «транслокальность», «диаспора», понятие «нетворков» и меняющиеся роли политических и экономических структур, способствующих или препятствующих определенным путям передвижения.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 12 October, 2020, -Gulnaz Sibgatullina (University of Amsterdam)
Paper long abstract:
With the fall of the Communist regime, not only physical borders between the member states and their constituencies had to be drawn anew. Also religious, linguistic and cultural boundaries that demarcated numerous Central Eurasian ethnic communities from each other have become increasingly porous, and their redefinition continues to excite much public controversy. This paper discusses three conspicuous developments, fuelled by labour migration flows and activities of foreign missionary organisations since the 1980s, that have been transforming the outlook and discourses of Muslim and Christian groups in the region: 1) The emergence and growing functions toolkit of new religious lingua francas (e.g., Russian has become not only the shared language of ethnically diverse umma in Russia but also of the Central Asian Protestant communities); 2) The participation in public discourses of in-between communities shaped by religious converts (e.g., international organisations of ethnic Russian converts to Islam, literature production and dissemination by Kazakh Jehovah’s Witnesses); and 3) The evolving interplay between language and religion (e.g., semiotic changes in prayers performed in a “non-traditional” religious idiom). The continuous process of “translocation” – in the form of linguistic (translation, transliteration, borrowing), religious (conversion) and physical (migration and travel) acts – contributes to the redefinition of what it means to be, for instance, an Uzbek or a Muslim in Central Eurasia today. This paper offers some observations into the shifting dynamics within the religion-language-ethnicity triangle and how the identities linked to it are being constructed, expressed and contested by a variety of social actors.
Till Mostowlansky (The Graduate Institute Geneva)
Paper long abstract:
In this talk, I explore the coming together of post-Cold War globalization, humanitarianism, religion and mobility. Using the example of the Pamiris, an ethnically and linguistically diverse group with links to Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region, I examine how a people that was already highly mobile in the Soviet Union became part of global Shia Ismaili networks in the post-Cold War period. While this process has built on longstanding historical interactions, it also involves different and sometimes conflicting visions of contact, connectivity and communal relations. Based on fieldwork in Tajikistan and Pakistan as well as in centres of education and economy in Asia and Europe I argue that the case of diasporic Pamiris, scattered across the former Soviet space and beyond, tells the story of their becoming part of the “pluralistic” Ismaili world under unequal relations of power.
Madeleine Reeves (University of Oxford)
Paper long abstract:
What would it mean to explore migration as a form of ethical practice? This paper explores two forms of explicitly outward-oriented movement in contemporary Kyrgyzstan that are rarely held together in the same analytic frame: the practice of Muslim proselytising (dawat), which seeks to draw notional or non-practicing Muslims to a more explicit articulation of their faith; and the practice of 'going to town' (shaarga baruu): that is, making a living from seasonal, often undocumented, migrant labour in Russia. These two forms of movement appear outwardly very different: the first oriented towards spiritual and moral renewal; the second, to sustaining domestic livelihoods in a context limited options for rural employment. In both cases, however, success is premised upon the capacity to mobilise a variety of human and non-human powers as a way of taming future uncertainty and navigating between competing domestic obligations. More fundamentally, both are concerned with the realisation of a life that is 'good', in both moral and material terms. The paper draws on fieldwork with migrants and involuntary non-migrants in Batken, Kyrgyzstan and Moscow to explore how the conditions for future hope are sustained when a 'migratory disposition' is stymied by economic crisis and the widespread subjection to re-entry bans. In so doing it considers 'going out' as an analytic that can afford insight into the intersections of physical and existential (im)mobility in contexts of economic and political uncertainty.