Affective Labor: Afghanistan's Road to China

Abstract

We arrive at the road construction camp by foot on a cold afternoon in April 2019. It is snowing and a chill wind blows through the narrow gorge carved by the Wakhan river. Coming from Sarhad-e Broghil, at the eastern end of Afghanistan's road network, it takes us a few hours to make our way up the roughly ten kilometers of gravel road. Here, a dozen men spend months on end blasting and digging a narrow road into the rock along old shepherd tracks. This road-which barely fits two cars at once-is part of a grander narrative and vision of connectivity with China to the east.

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ISSN 2624-9081 • DOI 10.26034/roadsides-201900210
Affective Labor:
Afghanistan’s Road to China
Tobias Marschall and Till Mostowlansky
collection no. 002 • Labor Roadsides
We arrive at the road construction camp by foot on a cold afternoon in April 2019. It is
snowing and a chill wind blows through the narrow gorge carved by the Wakhan river.
Coming from Sarhad-e Broghil, at the eastern end of Afghanistan’s road network, it
takes us a few hours to make our way up the roughly ten kilometers of gravel road.
Here, a dozen men spend months on end blasting and digging a narrow road into
the rock along old shepherd tracks. This road – which barely fits two cars at once – is
part of a grander narrative and vision of connectivity with China to the east.

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© Tobias Marschall
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Paving the Way
As in many countries in the region, the promise of connectivity to China has become
a political fetish. In Afghanistan, links to China have flourished at several points in
history: from the transmission of Buddhism from India, to the provisioning of Chi-
nese weapons to the mujahedin in the 1980s, to the current influx of Chinese goods.
Against this backdrop, Afghan and Chinese politicians have passionately reproduced
the trope of the Silk Road to frame economic projects from copper mining to road
construction. Paradoxically, the stretch of road covering the sixty-eight kilometers
from Sarhad-e Broghil to Baza’i Gonbad, and then possibly across the border with
China, has received comparatively little publicity. This arduous and slow ten-year
project does not lend itself very well to political marketing and in Afghan politics
a decade is an eternity. Thus, while many economic endeavors across the region
have become sites of intense emotional investment due to their official inclusion
in the Belt and Road Initiative, this particular road has not. Instead, the affective
dimensions of Afghanistan’s road to China manifest on a much more personal, local
and tangible scale. As we approach the end of the road and the makeshift camp of a
government subcontractor on this cold spring afternoon, the workers pause to extend
warm greetings. Asfand, an excavator driver from Kunduz, comes for a cigarette and
a chat, and Farid invites Tobias to join him at the jackhammer.

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Tent sociality
For people in Sarhad-e Broghil and other places in the Wakhan, the road to China
does not invoke ideas of progress and wealth. Rather, this is about getting a viable
route up to mountain pastures where people seek short-term employment as shep-
herds. Similarly, for the road construction workers with whom we stay in the camp
– whose location moves with the shifting end of the road – the goal is not China.
The aim is to finish a day’s labor, to be able to sit in the warmth of the tent around
a gas heater and share stories about travel and family, to smoke, to pray, to look at
images on offline phones, to see eight-month shifts in rarefied, cold air come to an
end and to safely return to their homes across north Afghanistan.
As night draws in we join the workers for dinner and later follow Asfand to his tent,
which he shares with Afzaar, a mechanic from Kunduz, and Amooz, a young engineer
from Faizabad. While a snowstorm blows outside we get lost in conversation, laughter
and music. Jansen (2016) sees affect as linked to moments of intensity and a shared
sense of history. He thereby builds on Massumi (1996: 91), who locates the source of
such intensity in a process in which the body does not simply absorb stimulations,
but infolds “contexts,” “volitions” and “cognitions.” Sitting around the gas heater,
listening to Dari pop songs, we are all haunted by such intensity. While cigarette
smoke fills the tent, Afzaar, Asfand and Amooz tell us about loneliness and their
distant families, about Facebook timelines frozen in time and about how they are
constructing this road because they wish to live “peacefully” (ārām) in their country
and home, and because this road might achieve both.

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References:
Jansen, Stef. 2016. “Ethnography and the Choices Posed by the ‘Affective Turn’.” In
Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture, edited by Jonas Frykman and Maja
Povrzanovic Frykman, 55–77. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109.
Cite as: Marschall, Tobias and Till Mostowlansky. 2019. “Affective Labor: Afghanistan’s
Road to China.” Roadsides 2: 73-87. DOI: https://doi.org-10.26034/roadsides-201900210.
Authors:
Tobias Marschall currently pursues a PhD in anthropology at
The Graduate Institute Geneva (IHEID), focussing on a visual
ethnography of movement and space amongst the Kyrgyz
of the Afghan Pamirs. Tobias and his co-author Till share an
interest in mobility in Central Asia and spent two periods of
joint fieldwork in the Afghan Wakhan (2016, 2019). Visit Tobias’
portfolio at: https://tobiasmarschall.myportfolio.com
Till Mostowlansky is a Research Fellow at the Department of
Anthropology & Sociology of The Graduate Institute Geneva
(IHEID), the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity
along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2017) and works on a book project on humanitarianism,
development and Islam in High Asia. For more information
see: mostowlansky.com

collection no. 002 • Labor Roadsides
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