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Accepted Paper:
Diasporas of Empire: Ismaili Networks and Pamiri Migration
Till Mostowlansky
(The Graduate Institute Geneva)
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.