Paper short abstract:

Kashmir is known as the core of Indopakistani dispute: through an ethnographic analysis on the teenagers institutional practice of stonepelting against army, related imaginary and representations is possible to understand how conflicting transnational political powers interpenetrate moral economies.

Paper long abstract:

Kashmir is well known as the core issue indopakistani dispute: we should consider it a territorial conflict as well as a dispute over cultural, historical, political landscapes, mostly linked to 1947 Partition and intimate "communal" nature of areal politics. After 20 year of ISI sponsored Islamist militancy, the separatist organizations, basically linked to Pakistani belonging narratives, have promoted a non violent protest strategy. At the same time their local power assumed governamental features, deeply rooted in the local population resentment against indian army human rights violations. Among informally imposed strikes calendars and military curfew youth stonepelting (kanjang in kashmiri language) against army has emerged as an institution where moral economy, multiple political identities and paradoxical overlapping powers are staged in a social interactive drama. Stonepelting has become a microphysical/metaforical coagulate of a broader geopolitical landscape, where teenagers-soldiers violent interaction involves a semiotic-normative intimacy which enables an ephemeral space signification. Kanjang shouldn't be conceived as a mere local effect of geopolitical power configuration as it has recently became a core subject among conflicting media and political discourses which are trying to develop encapsulating representations of this social phenomena. This hegemonization of stonepelting resulted in a diacronic reversal of the relation between practice and imaginary: if two years ago kanjang "fashion" was lead by a imaginary mobilization, mainly media comparison with Palestinian issue, now local stone pelting has irrupted in the translocal macroevents landscape, the practice of violence has became a part of ethnonationalist iconography and is now the spring in the political imaginary mobilization process.