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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how in Tajikistan ‘jinn’ are involved in navigating everyday struggles. In recent years ‘jinn’, together with harmal plants and spiritual practitioners are entangled with the figure of the ‘witch’ creating an immoral ‘Other’ that needs to be securitized.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary Tajikistan, everyday precarity and labour outmigration radically transform intimate lives. In this context ‘jinn’ are intricately involved in navigating intimate struggles. They support the attempts of cowives in polygynous family units to secure access to resources or influence interpersonal tensions between in-laws. In recent years spiritual practitioners – often called tabibs and folbins – as well as seeking to attend their rituals has been criminalised in the name of protecting citizens from exploitation. This echoes broader global debates over ‘superstition’ and ‘modernity’, connected to struggles over ‘biomedical’ authority and ‘Islamic’ reform. ‘Jinn’ have long been involved in attempts to heal bodies, minds, and relationships, in the present they increasingly reconfigure intimacy as an intricate part of everyday conflicts.

Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan (2025–2026), I examine how against this backdrop ‘jinn’ are involved in navigating intimate relationships. I argue that the spirits offer resources to individuals otherwise unavailable. This together with the deinstitutionalised character of spiritual practices makes it difficult for authorities to regulate. However, the association of ‘jinn’, ancestral spirits, spiritual practitioners, and their practices together with different material forms such as harmal plant with the figure of the 'witch' creates an immoral ‘Other’ onto whom moral anxieties are displaced. This gives rise to new configurations of ‘the secular’ through ‘translation tactics’ of individuals navigating how to live (with)out the help of ‘jinn’ among intimate struggles.