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Paper abstract:

Ensuring physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for a healthy and active life for all people is an ongoing global challenge. For mountainous regions in the so-called “developing world,” an increase in the number of people considered vulnerable to food insecurity has been noted since the turn of the millennium (Romeo et al. 2020). Remoteness due to challenging topography, natural hazards, and local impacts of global environmental change, have been identified as determinants that aggravate food systems, along with armed conflict, resource degradation, and limited access to markets, social services and facilities, and off-farm income opportunities. In Central Asia, development aligns with these global dynamics (ibid.; Dame 2018). Case studies have the potential to flesh out such general findings with detailed and context-specific accounts of the complexity of the subject under study, which can then be made available to policymakers, development practitioners, and civil society activists. Against this backdrop, this paper utilizes a case study conducted in the Pamirs of Tajikistan to address the question of how the human nutrition situation plays out in the specific local context of Zong, a remote, rural mountain settlement in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province. The aim is to understand and reconstruct which conditions influence the general food situation on site, the parameters upon which unequal nutrition patterns of households in the community depend, and which dynamics these patterns exhibit in concrete cases over time during the course of one year. Multiple empirical research methods were used to generate the data of the study, including a group interview with local leaders, guided interviews with informed stakeholders, a standardized household survey, and the keeping of food diaries by representatives of selected households. Preliminary results show that a wide range of challenging conditions make food security difficult, that exceedingly close relationships exist between the socioeconomic status and dietary patterns of individual households, and that these patterns exhibit periodic and episodic fluctuations. After completion of the full analysis, the results will be made available to local decision-makers, as well as to non-governmental development organizations working in the study region of the Pamirs of Tajikistan to support informed decision-making.

Dame J. (2018): Food Security and Translocal Livelihoods in High Mountains: Evidence from Ladakh, India. Mountain Research and Development 38(4): 310–322.

Romeo R., Grita F., Parisi F. & L. Russo (2020): Vulnerability of Mountain Peoples to Food Insecurity: Updated Data and Analysis of Drivers. Rome.

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In this paper, I look at how my interlocutors – Kyrgyz environmental activists and conservationists – position themselves when encountering the Western-constructed models of indigeneity in international biodiversity conservation projects, and how they renegotiate the meanings of concepts such as “local community” or “local knowledge.” With decolonization historically associated with the Cold War idea about “three worlds,” it is of little surprise that the debates about postsocialist postcoloniality persist, despite the undeniable facts of Russian Empire’s conquests, or the production of knowledge aimed at hierarchizing different subjects of the empire based on their ethnicities, both during the Russian Empire, and during the Soviet Union (Hirsch 2005; Mogilner 2013). A related, but less explored question is how to understand indigeneity in the post-Soviet context. The international indigenous activism arose in the second half of the 20th century for the most part focused on the Americas and Oceania, while the non-indigenous (including Soviet) imagination of indigeneity was and is tied to the ideas of non-modernity and anthropological “savage slot” (Trouillot 1991). This “lack of fit” of Central Asia into the mainstream conceptualizations of postcolonialism and indigeneity is getting its recognition in academic debates within Central Asian studies, but it also has consequences in lived experiences of interactions of Central Asian subjects and international institutions and organizations operating in Central Asia. As I had opportunity to see during my study of environmental activism and biodiversity conservation in Kyrgyzstan, international conservationist projects tend to attempt to take into account matters such as “local knowledge” or “indigenous rights,” but they do so while having these concepts understood based on the binaries of Global North – Global South, or modern – indigenous. I look closely at two strategies my interlocutors were using when encountering these notions: embracing the idea of specifically Kyrgyz traditional knowledge about the mountain ecosystems, but without making an explicit claim of indigeneity; or avoiding the issue, but finding other discursive and practical ways to prioritize and elevate the involvement of rural activists over the usual project participants, such as foreigners or well-connected activists from Bishkek. This shows that the absence of Central Asianist perspectives from the mainstream understandings of postcoloniality and indigeneity can also be a space of possibilities for renegotiation of everyday hierarchies. However, such optimistic analysis must also be cautious, as these possibilities are not available to all Central Asian subjects, nor in all circumstances.

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In recent years, anthropological theories pertaining to materiality and environmental humanities perspectives have reconsidered thoughts, ideas, and presuppositions on things that had been previously labelled inert or passive. Work on everyday water politics drawn my attention to re-think the idea that materials can be used to describe material practice and second, it has led me to a re-consider of what does it mean for contemporary material culture studies and related fields to think with materials. Looking at the necessity of new modifications to existing water systems, this paper places less emphasis on the material decay of water infrastructure and more on how material modification are embedded in the local environment and what meaning is entangled in those constructions. In this vein, the paper explores a variety of themes that place more-than-human actors at the centre of their inquiries of informal material innovation, as well as the security of water pumps for daily needs, suggesting the material modification of the water supply as a crucial lens in making sense of understanding rural communities in people’s everyday lives, their material practices – and my research. Examining how materials in relation to practice don’t cease to matter can shed light on thinking about things as dynamic, and actively pumping beneath the material surface to generate multiple dimensions of practices, and how material practice remakes everyday life. Without harping on significant material modifications in water infrastructure we cannot fail to be impressed with the actions of local actors in rural At-Bashy that bring us back thinking material and social history together. Furthermore, the presented data from rural At-Bashy in Kyrgyzstan may underline material conditions to open up new ways of demonstrating adaptation and technologically innovative processes as an action that emerges in group co-operations of local actors in reshaping water access.