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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how ‘jinn’ and spirits are involved in intimate struggles in Central Asia. As they get entangled with spiritual practitioners and material forms in the figure of the ‘witch’ – an immoral ‘Other’ to be securitised – new configurations of ‘the secular’ emerge.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary Central Asia, everyday precarity and labour outmigration radically transform intimate lives. ‘Jinn’ and spirits are closely involved in intimate struggles and increasingly reconfigure intimacy as an intricate part of everyday conflicts. They can, for example, support a co-wive in a polygynous family unit to navigate tensions. Based on so far nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine this involvement. I argue that spirits offer resources otherwise unavailable to individuals; however, their actions often remain beyond human control.

These entities and practices, are since 2024 increasingly rendered suspect at the level of the state. In recent years, ‘jinn’, ancestral spirits, spiritual practitioners and their practices, and material forms such as harmal plants have become entangled with the figure of the ‘witch’ — an immoral ‘Other’ onto whom moral anxieties are displaced and who is to be securitised. Both the practices of spiritual practitioners – often called tabibs and folbins – and the act of seeking their help have been criminalised, to protect citizens from exploitation. This echoes broader debates over ‘superstition’, ‘modernity’, ‘biomedical’ authority, and ‘Islamic’ reform. Yet the deinstitutionalised character of these practices, as well as the nature of the spirits, makes them difficult to regulate, giving rise to new configurations of ‘the secular’ (Asad 2003). Tackling their everyday challenges, people situationally employ different translations navigating how to live with or without 'jinn' and spirits.