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Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tajikistan, this paper addresses the complexity of the relationship between migration, the pursuit of the good life, and people’s projects of self-fashioning.

Paper long abstract:

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tajikistan conducted in 2017-2018, this paper seeks to interrogate economistic assumptions about the logics of Tajikistani migration to Russia. In doing so, it addresses the complexity of the relationship between migration, the pursuit of the good life, and people’s projects of self-fashioning. Analysing how people make sense of their struggles using the lexicon of modernity, it shows that far from being an ‘automatic’ response to general economic and political breakdown, migration decisions are embedded in the experiences of living and imagining one’s present and future in a place, constituted by the multi-layered histories of mobilities, where present forms of sociality and categories of person are informed by spatial and social transformations brought about by the Soviet modernisation project. During my fieldwork, being/becoming modern emerged as a serious concern for a community that had not questioned its modernity a couple of decades ago. I argue that the departure of Soviet modernity followed by the normalisation of mass labour migration of Tajik nationals to Russian cities has resulted in migration becoming intrinsic to the very project of becoming persons with a capacity to be ‘modern’. Driven by economic and social upheavals of the post-Soviet period, migration aims to fill the gap not only in family budgets, but also in people’s sense of self. Yet, since the Russian migration regime is premised on the ‘flattened’ representation of nationals of Central Asian countries as unskilled migrant workers, this gap cannot be closed, their presence on the territory of Russia being contingent on subordinating their aspirations for modernity to the physical prowess and docility needed to construct modern life for the Russian middle class.