Abstract

This paper explores how intimate relationships are reconfigured in contemporary Tajikistan amid intensified labour migration. Using love—across romantic, familial, platonic, and patriotic forms—as an ethnographic lens, it examines how intimacy and belonging are (re-)produced and contested in everyday life. Based on research in both urban and rural settings, including Dushanbe and villages surrounding Bokhtar, the paper investigates how affective ties are shaped, by whom, and with what implications for social belonging. The paper draws on the first six months of a twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork project (2025–2026) conducted as part of a PhD in social anthropology. Methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and an ongoing literature review.

It argues that intimate relationships constitute a key site through which structural norms are reproduced, negotiated, and transformed. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of “sticky emotions,” the paper approaches love as an affect that circulates and adheres to social forms, including the nation, kinship structures, and marital ideals. In Tajikistan, love becomes attached to state-promoted notions such as muhabbat ba vatan (love for the motherland), as well as to maternal and familial roles, reinforcing moral and civic expectations. Love is highly visible in everyday life, circulating through films, consumer goods, and gossip. Different forms of mobility unsettle affective attachments, with younger generations increasingly challenging arranged marriage practices and asserting greater agency in partner selection. Migration-related separations also contribute to the emergence of new intimate configurations, including the growing prevalence of polygamous marriages.

By foregrounding love as both an affective and social force, this paper contributes to broader debates in the anthropology of intimacy and mobility. It draws on ethnographic examples to show how global mobility reshapes intimate life, marriage, and belonging in contemporary Tajikistan.