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Abstract

By foregrounding romantic love as an ethnographic object, this talk explores how intimate relationships are being reconfigured in contemporary Tajikistan amid intensified labour migration. It argues that romantic love offers a productive analytical lens for examining how Tajikistanis renegotiate intergenerational authority over partner choice and contributes to making sense of the rise of polygynous marriages in the context of migration.

The extensive regional archive of love poetry and literature attests to the rich imagination of desires for love that has long existed. Yet the individual enactment of romantic love has historically been tightly constrained by social norms. Young people’s wishes to marry for love were often not endorsed by parents and wider society. A prior romantic relationship or even public suspicion of romantic feelings could damage a girl’s and her family’s reputation and negatively influence her chances of marriage.

Today, intensifying forms of mobility—including social media engagement, student mobility, and labour migration—are reshaping established patterns of intimacy and kinship. These processes give rise to prolonged periods of separation, transnational and sometimes polygamous family arrangements, as well as competing imaginaries of love and partnership. Such ideals are produced and circulated, among others, through consumer practices, television, poetry, music, public education systems, national celebrations, and religious teachings.

The talk presents ethnographic examples of how people in Tajikistan today search for, practice, and evaluate love. It is based on the first seven months of a twelve month in depth ethnographic PhD fieldwork project conducted between 2025 and 2026 in urban and rural settings, including Dushanbe and villages surrounding Bokhtar. By following romantic love as an ethnographic object, it contributes to broader debates on intimacy and mobility by examining the tensions in how social norms and individual desires are negotiated. In doing so, it nuances dominant explanations of rising polygynous arrangements in Central Asia that focus on economic precarity and religious revival, showing that romantic love and individual desires are also central to how such marriages are imagined, negotiated.