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Central Asian Survey
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ccas20
Writing travel and the genealogical imagination:
Afghan Kyrgyz migrations in contemporary
perspective
Tobias Marschall
To cite this article: Tobias Marschall (16 Jan 2025): Writing travel and the genealogical
imagination: Afghan Kyrgyz migrations in contemporary perspective, Central Asian Survey, DOI:
10.1080/02634937.2024.2441808
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2024.2441808
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Writing travel and the genealogical imagination: Afghan
Kyrgyz migrations in contemporary perspective
Tobias Marschall
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,
IHEID, Geneva, Switzerland
ABSTRACT
The current ‘repatriation’ programme initiated by the Kyrgyz
Republic presents a timely occasion to reect on the ambivalence
of predicating migration in ethnic terms through descent and
territorial ascription. Instead, this paper looks at the way Afghan
Kyrgyz migrants mobilize and modulate genealogical and
territorial registers and the later fulfilment or frustration of their
aspirations. A focus on the current ‘repatriation’ programme is
doubly interesting here because it taps into broader questions of
citizenship, autochthony, and the securing of durable rights and
duties and secondly, because the programme’s realization casts
ambivalence to the pre-eminence of ethnic ascription in both the
experience of migration and migration research. It argues that
migrants’ relative success in moving back and forth between
places of ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ (in the programme’s own terms)
complexifies the expected linearity of their ‘repatriation’ and
implied definitive resettlement.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 28 March 2024
Accepted 21 November 2024
KEYWORDS
Migration; genealogy;
ethnicity; territory;
Afghanistan; Kyrgyzstan
Introduction
In the summer of 2014, Hajji Turdiakhun, former appointee to the upper house of Afghan
parliament (meshrano jylga in Dari), travelled for the third time to Kyrgyzstan upon the
invitation of Kyrgyz parliamentarians. Starting from the capital in Bishkek and then
moving southwards to the city of Osh, he detoured to meet distant relatives (alys tuugan-
dar in Kyrgyz) in the southwestern Alai district. Stopping first at his ancestors’ graves,
Turdiakhun, a large white embroidered coat on his shoulders and a white hat (ak
kalpak) on his head, was filmed crying aloud embracing his distant relatives for the first
time in their life. National TV channels diused moving images of the meeting along
with more formal encounters, such as with the President of the time, Almazbek Atambaev,
and visits to national monuments. The voiceover underlined the severity of the climate in
the Afghan Pamirs, which beyond the eects of war and violence was further
compounded by the absence of roads, proper healthcare facilities and schools.
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which
this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
CONTACT Tobias Marschall tobias.marschall@graduateinstitute.ch
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2024.2441808
Since its independence and like other former Central Asian Republics,
1
the Kyrgyz gov-
ernment started a programme of ethnic return migration, or ‘repatriation’ in the pro-
gramme’s terms. As representative (wakil in Dari) of the Kyrgyz ethnic minority to the
Afghan parliament between 2005 and 2010 (Callahan 2013, 242), Hajji Turdiakhun contin-
ued advocacy – formally established in 1999 by Abdul Rashid Khan (Kreutzmann 2000) –
towards the ‘repatriation’ of five families from the Little Pamir and five others from the
Great Pamir to Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz government’s specific denomination of migrants
as ‘returnees’ (kairylmandar) is telling. As the formulation literally implies, the ‘repatriation’
programme presupposes intrinsic ties predicated by kinship and ethnicity between a
given ‘homeland’, Kyrgyzstan and their current ‘remote place of refuge’, (aalys kalkaloo-
chu aimak) the Afghan Pamirs. Or, in the particularly vivid and moving words of Saltanat
Barakanova, ‘their place of sorrow and our homeland’.
2
After Kyrgyzstan’s Prime Minister
Feliks Kulov signed an order in 2006 to evaluate the repatriation programme, the govern-
ment issued a report stating that only nine percent of the twenty-three thousand retur-
nees, who arrived between 1991 and 2005, have obtained citizenship (RFE/RL 2006).
This paper examines how tropes of spatial distance and cultural dierence, ethnic
proximity and genealogical anity were shaped and mobilized along Afghan Kyrgyz
migrants’ encounters with state and international organizations. Their complex and
extended relations tend to be reduced in shared tropes to a visibly out-of-the-way
place and a bounded group – better informed by matters of narrative and administrative
coherence than established circulation patterns. But the idea of a repatriation also turned
to be an important mobilization resource which most significantly took form in the idea of
a ‘last migration’ – implying definitive departure of the entire Afghan Kyrgyz population
from the Afghan Pamirs. Looking back at recent events in the organization of the ‘repa-
triation’ programme, I explore how the ascription of kyrgyzness (kyrgyzchylyk) is dynami-
cally reframed in migrants’ travel writing, personal encounters with government
representatives, and their often quite animated discussions of government policies. In
this paper, I argue that the ascription in local history and genealogy writing of both remo-
teness, ethnic anity and cultural endangerment compounded with their allochronic
location in a remote place and distant time is central to salvage documentary practices,
the provisioning of humanitarian aid (gumanitalryk jardamdy in Kyrgyz) and the ‘repatria-
tion’ of returnees (kairylmandar) to their supposedly titular nation. Genealogy operates
here as a exible classificatory framework that aords the elaboration and strengthening
of ties across dierent moral registers and the distribution of distinct positionings in space
and time with often quite surprising outcomes.
To understand the aective, moral and strategic entanglements between these tropes,
I pay close attention to travel writings, migrants’ experiences and to the ways complex
interlinkages between kinship and ethnicity are made and unmade iteratively across inter-
national borders.
3
This paper departs from and unfolds migrants’ successive eorts to
elaborate and entertain relations in the style and vocabulary of the governing institutions,
media and persons encountered along the way. Exploring how ‘returnees’ describe their
own journeys, invoke, and mobilize dierent moral registers (religious, humanitarian and
ethnic) and eectively navigate administrative and bureaucratic hurdles provides a better
understanding of the contingent relevance of the ascription of ethnicity in migration and
migration research as well. I ask which migrant terms and vocabularies organize and
signify Afghan Kyrgyz shifting relations among themselves, across international borders
2 T. MARSCHALL
and in their interactions with state and international organizations? How do figures of
genealogical ancestry and tropes of remoteness, cultural alterity and endangerment
operate along migrants’ movements? Turning attention to migrants’ perspectives and
movements, as well as Kyrgyz government provision of humanitarian aid and facilitation
of migrants’ movements across international borders, I highlight the relevance of
migrants’ contribution in shaping the programme’s terms and conditions.
This paper grounds on eleven months of ethnographic research spent in the Afghan
Pamirs between 2015 and 2019 as well as two years and a half in Kyrgyzstan and Taji-
kistan attending migrants’ nodes and participating in the repatriation programme of
the Kyrgyz Republic. I conducted more than eighty semi-structured interviews with
upland pastoralists, lowland agro-pastoralists, programme ‘returnees’, Afghan and
Kyrgyz parliamentarians, government ocials, elders, scholars and journalists. I spent
an important part of the ethnographic research in walking paths of the Afghan
Pamirs with occasional travel companions or known interlocutors and a considerable
amount of time in cars and shared taxis to reach the places where the persons I
expected to meet were based.
4
Occasional strolls, remarks at the detours of unexpected
encounters and the attendance of the camps’ daily activities allowed me to notice
details and reconsider the assumed consistency of written accounts. I do thank my
travel companions (andiwal in Dari and jooldosh in Kyrgyz) Görg Ali Khaika, Abdulrah-
man, Nurulhuda, Faisylhak, Ismail Bai, Duwana Bai and Abdikarim Chokoev. Other
persons I had the chance to meet too briey, such the late Hajji Turdiakhun and
Erali Bai Khan. My gratitude goes to Esen Turganbaev or Esen Baike colloquially,
Saltanat Barakanova and Suleiman Kaipov, who all opened their oces and archives,
supporting my research in quite unexpected ways.
The mostly performative and problematic spread of positionality statements at the
beginning of peer reviewed publications bequests clarification of my choices (Gani and
Khan 2024). I assume a processual approach where outcomes are shaped through the
scales and steps of the research in line with the reections on research ethics of the
Swiss Anthropological Association (Perrin et al. 2020). Conceived this way, reections
on my position, research ethics and heuristic methods are not just restricted to one para-
graph nor destined only to academic peers but interspersed throughout the paper in rel-
evant places to reect the ongoing character of the dialogue I engaged with my
interlocutors. This implies to establish and maintain a space to discuss the potential
issues which may appear with the publication of research outcomes, their impacts on con-
cerned persons and institutions as well as the shifting relationships we used to entertain. I
had to constantly adapt my posture throughout the research progress, and I took care to
return its conclusions to the persons I worked with.
The contingent nature of the terms employed also requires the use of the narrative ‘I’
to situate my voice and perspective as researcher in the shifting contexts of our intersub-
jective encounters. I employ the past tense to convey a definite character to the reported
events of the ethnographic research. The discussion in the present tense of the ideas,
knowledge claims and arguments of the (principally anthropological) literature is less a
claim towards universalism than a way to stress the ongoing character of the discussions
I open on the themes. Every person named in this paper agreed with the publication of
their direct designation (by their first name as it is of use colloquially), reference and
quotations.
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 3
Relative distance and foreignness in person and language skills used to feature primar-
ily in encounters with the persons I interacted with and interviewed. Soon I realized that
the language skills and knowledge of the rapidly shifting context as well was unevenly
distributed. This turned decisive to the research progression in aording reexivity and
comparison of the distinct positions as well as linguistic uses we would encounter. The
partial and incomplete translation of certain idioms and interviews is telling of the
research context itself and its constitutive lines of distinction. Interviews were conducted
in Kyrgyz, Dari, Tajik, Wakhi and Russian, to the preferences of my interlocutors. Certain
expressions may sound foreign or wrong to an ear in Kyrgyzstan yet is of ordinary use
in the Pamirs – such as ‘Pamirga’ (to the Pamirs) which goes against standard vowel
harmony. I specify dierences in the quoted interviews for their relevance to situate nor-
mative interventions in a heterogenous context.
My repeated returns to the places where migrants were based proved also convenient
to my interlocutors, and I soon acted as messenger, carrying with me hand-written letters,
documents, important sums of money and photographs. Moving between their dierent
and often temporary places of residence allowed me to register the contextual relevance
of various, often contested, discursive and imaginary trends, to contrast perspectives and
to confront testimonies as well. Whilst ‘being there’ is a central tenet of the ethnographic
inquiry, paying attention to the discursive and imaginary tropes apparent in ocial docu-
ments, media publications and reports as well as the ways they are reformulated, appro-
priated, or contested by migrants proved equally relevant. Kinship, ethnicity and
genealogy feature here as determining markers for state policies and its allocation of
important resources. This does not imply that repatriates necessarily endorse their ascrip-
tion to a remote and critically endangered condition without resistance, critic or even
usually neglect. To the contrary of depictions as passive recipients of state subsidies in
media reports and research articles, repatriates were actively participating in the way
the repatriation programme was formulated and led – through various means ranging
from voiced critique in the media, withdrawal and the quiet return for some to the
Afghan Pamirs.
A contested ‘repatriation’
In the summer of 2017, a dozen families settled as ‘returnees’ (kairylmandar in Kyrgyz) in
the mountain town of Naryn, Kyrgyzstan. Another fifty persons followed in summer 2019.
Those events are the most visible outcome of a longer series of international pledges
voiced mostly by important political figures in Kyrgyzstan and directed towards material
support to distant parents (Talant 2021). After the 1982 migration of half of the group in
Eastern Turkey led by Hajji Rakhman Kul Khan (Denker 1983), several wealthy Kyrgyz men
stood out in terms of political and media attention. Mobilizing the momentum of new and
imminent threats to their supposedly primordial condition in the Afghan Pamirs, their
successive interventions (accompanied by Nazif Shahrani and Alan Dupree in 1981, Ted
Callahan in 2008 and myself in 2018) in the media and meetings with government repre-
sentatives raised in tone and substance the cultural singularity and existential fragility of
their continued occupation of the Afghan Pamirs.
In 2013, the Kyrgyz Republic established an embassy in Kabul, and according to the
Foreign Ministry,
5
humanitarian aid for the ethnic Kyrgyz of both Great and Little Pamir
4 T. MARSCHALL
was discussed among other issues. At that time, Afghanistan supported all Kyrgyz initiat-
ives (AKIpress 2013). But soon state perspectives diverged in that the Afghan government,
opposed to a major outmigration, presented the initiative in the durable terms of a
schooling programme whilst the Kyrgyz government explicitly aimed their definitive
‘repatriation’ (Isabaeva 2018, 4). By 2016, the programme supported the immigration of
about fifty thousand of the estimated six hundred thirty-six thousand ‘ethnic Kyrgyz’
living abroad (Wood 2018).
Given the insistence of Kyrgyz state responsibilities on repatriating the entire Kyrgyz
population from the Pamirs to Kyrgyzstan, Afghan Kyrgyz occupy an exceptional position
in the programme with outstanding pledges to allocate US$3 million from July 2022
onwards. The ‘repatriation’ of several families to Kyrgyzstan stands out from ordinary
migration patterns in Central Asia – principally informed by the mutually binding
dynamics of migrant labour and remittances.
6
Whilst a number of studies address the
moral and cultural dimensions in Kazakh return migration,
7
the policies adopted by the
Kazakh government, or the role of repatriates’ organization themselves (Kaiser and Beim-
betov 2020), comparatively few works address similar dynamics as featured in the Kyrgyz
government programme or conceive the eects of the ascription of ethnic lines of dier-
ence in local history and genealogy writing.
Repeatedly postponed until 2017, the contested and fragile realization of the pro-
gramme contrasts with the assumed consistency between ethnic and kinship ties as
well as the ineluctability of a ‘last migration’ from the Afghan Pamirs in the way suggested
in earlier publications.
8
Partly because of the unconventional mediatization of their move-
ments, Afghan Kyrgyz migrants visibly stand out from other ‘repatriates’ (kairylmandar)
coming from other countries (mostly neighbouring Tajikistan).
9
The important media
attention upon migrants’ arrival had both eects of singling out Afghan Kyrgyz’ presumed
cultural distinctiveness and genealogical ancestry as well as of raising important debates
over the justification of the ethnic return migration programme.
Migration terms
In the Afghan Pamirs, migration (kutch) – not necessarily conceived in the terms of a
definitive resettlement but rather as the possibility to cross otherwise closed international
borders – figured as a recurrent theme in discussions with wealthy livestock owners (bai)
as well as a potential and hopeful response to the mounting pressures which we used to
discuss evenings while drinking tea. In their words, migration appears as a focal point of
debate and contention. Some compared the government’s explicit aim to repatriate the
entire Kyrgyz population from the Afghan Pamirs with ürkün – a definitive and forced
exodus under exceptional circumstances. They dismissed the problems that I envisaged
when discussing their travel plans, such as the lack of biometric passport or even identity
documents for most of the population in the Afghan Pamirs. Instead, their answers pre-
sented migration as an attractive choice oering the possibility to opt out from extreme
political and climatic pressures. It took form in expressions like: ‘if life turns too hard here, I
will leave for China. I have parents there’, and genealogically inected reexions such as
‘there are a lot of Alapa (major descent line) in this area’.
10
Talking outside and out of
elders’ ears and sight, young men insistently asked me about the cost and value of life
in large cities, expressing their wishes to visit major centres in the world, mostly referring
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 5
to the cities of Paris, Dubai and New York. Women often sat silently during such discus-
sions, nodding in chuckles to our projections, commenting at times. Primarily staged and
discussed as a men’s aair, women were actively participating in determining the central
tenets of the planned movements. While men set precedence in the public sphere and
wealthy owners led the initial meetings and discussions with the programme’s respon-
sible, women’s interventions in the camps, in words, preparation of the food for travels
and keeping of the camps’ livestock were central to the modalities and timing of men’s
movements. Men did not necessarily feature as my main and privileged interlocutors
and the women I got acquainted with preferred to speak on condition of anonymity.
This explains their nominal underrepresentation in this paper which does not reect
their eective contribution as the wives of the representatives I interviewed were integral
parts of the discussion – often arresting a decision.
After the initial ‘repatriation’ of a dozen families, migration turned to be a major topic
in our everyday discussions back in the Pamirs. In the interviews I published in regional
media, migrants insistently refer to lacks in terms of infrastructure, health and education.
Migration appeared as a hopeful option to leave conditions in the Afghan Pamirs which
my interlocutors would inscribe in the terms of absence, backwardness or archaism as
described before. In tone with the way the Afghan Pamirs are framed as an exceptionally
remote area in media and government reports as well as research articles, Mullah Abdyl
Hak raised that ‘there is no road, no school, no doctor, no state, only little humanitarian
support reaches the Pamirs, life is hard here. We stayed in the seventeenth century; we are
not reaching’.
11
The metaphor of ‘we are not reaching’ (biz jetpeibyz in Kyrgyz) resumes
herders’ aspirations to participate in global circulations and their impressions of stucked-
ness relative to the faster pace of exchanges which the Pamir and Karakoram Highways
came to represent. The obverse and hopeful idea of a road connection raised opposite
expectations, ‘there would be work, a road, a doctor, a school, people would be
happy’.
12
However, common expectations of state-led development and modernization
induced by the construction of a road (and its 2020 completion) were not unanimously
met with the same appreciation among upland dwellers. Early on, herders started to
anticipate potentially disruptive eects, such as the evanescence of ordinary acts of
mutual support and lending practices under the greater pressure of monetary and
market logics that were expected to prevail elsewhere. Along the course of their
travels, migrants’ aspirations translated in mundane expectations of a better life abroad
and later shifted to acerb critics of the Afghan government’s principled opposition to
the entire ethnic group’s outmigration (ürkün) and of the administrative and clientelist
hurdles they faced to obtain a Tajik visa.
13
Their expectations to obtain from Afghan or
Kyrgyz governments transit funds via Dubai to reach Kyrgyzstan were not met either.
Some migrants eventually resorted to their own resources. They mostly sold livestock
for foreign currencies which I happened to convey.
Stretching along established corridors of itinerancy such the Pamir Highway, migrants’
back and forth movements appear exible and adaptive when contrasted to the way their
mobility is conventionally imaged or portrayed in Kyrgyz media and the government pro-
gramme but also reports and research articles. Their repatriation is revealing moral pos-
itions where to stay or to go is the result of a deliberate choice rather than irreducible to
clearly identifiable push and pull factors nor clear-cut boundaries. But not only, Afghan
Kyrgyz migrants’ back and forth movements also reect greater claims for equal
6 T. MARSCHALL
participation and recognition beyond their conventional location at the margins of
regional and national borders and conduits of exchanges as well. Monsutti raises that
migrants’ ‘mobility represents a protest against the global distribution of wealth and
security, as well as a subversion of classical forms of political territoriality. As such, it
can be conceived – through its structural consequences more than individual intentions –
as a political act’ (2018, 454). In moving across supposedly stable and established bound-
aries of mobility and representation, Afghan Kyrgyz’ movements, I suggest, subvert the
programme’s frames and categories as they spatially root and confine the group to a
distant space and time. Instead, and here I anticipate my main argument, the ‘repatriation’
programme underscores the relevance of migrants’ sustained eorts in travel and
speeches to establish themselves and close agnates in a wider landscape, reshaping
ascribed tropes of spatial remoteness, ethnic ancestry and cultural endangerment
which in turn aorded them a greater range of resources and movements. There is
thus value in distinguishing use and usage or writing travel as a practice and travel
writing as a popular genre in Central Asia – as elaboration or review of territorial and
genealogical ascriptions.
The relative ease with which some migrants moved back and forth across international
borders is a prompt to think beyond the state as a central point of reference to the insti-
tution of social boundaries (Reeves 2011b; Schetter 2005) and turn our attention to the
ways migrants participated in shaping and reframing government programmes and pol-
icies. Migration in this sense reveals moral positions in a context marked by important but
not determining inequalities rather than irreducible to clearly identifiable push and pull
factors nor clear-cut boundaries within the group, but also their ascribed spatiotemporal
location and actual movements.
14
Distant emissaries and the making of Kyrgyz spaces
On our walks to the Pamirs, Kyrgyz or Wakhi travel companions used to halt in the vicinity
of distinct landmarks (oston or mazar) to pray or more briey address their greetings to
the persons or entities the sites stand for. The slowed pace and extended length of our
walks (twenty to forty kilometres per day) also led us to review the traces left as palimp-
sest of larger scale migratory or geopolitical events. On our way down to the lowland
hamlet of Sarhad e Broghil from the Little Pamir, Mullah Abdyl Hak stopped and
looked around for a while to find a stone bearing an old Chinese inscription (bar bai
jer). He spontaneously explained, ‘the Chinese now claim that this place belongs to
them, the stone is of great value to them’. He later pointed to and commented the
sparse words written in Dari next to the petroglyphs we came across in Langhar, ‘Arif
and Malyk Kutlu (Hajji Rakhman Kul Khan’s sons) wrote their names in 1979 while
leaving the Pamirs to Pakistan’, he added. Leaving small traces behind, travellers signal
their passage as well as the time of their making in places noticed much earlier with sur-
prising redundancy. Our walks were often punctuated by breaks of this kind, prompted by
one of our companions to consider a particular aspect of the surrounding landscape,
reminded as we were of the earlier presence of other travellers. While their distribution
forms a coherent ensemble across the Pamir-Hindukush Mountain ranges (Mock 2011,
2013; Safinov 2009), landmarks’ significance is contingent and many. Because their
motives, meanings and contexts remain often indecipherable, their reading and
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 7
subsequent interpretation is open to the viewer’s dispositions. Landmarks’ consistent
location at a crossroads, along main routes or an outstanding rock formation raise a
sense of continuity in migrants’ contemporary appreciation of the landscape’s specific
features, often expressed in ‘we/them’, ‘now/then’ distinctions which the signs suppo-
sedly attested – this besides the distance in space or time which separated the viewers
from landmark’s authors. Literally walking onwards, the traces of earlier visitors enabled
us to read the landscape in the footfalls of those who preceded us. On our south side,
my travel companions pointed to an irrigated area which stood as a farmland which
belonged to Afghan Kyrgyz prior the 1978 migration to Turkey – thereby destabilizing
their common conception as strictly pastoralists.
The relationship between travel and writing is part of a longer history in Central Asia.
To Nile Green, ‘mastery of the written language was itself a tool that enabled and encour-
aged educated men to travel and find service in the chanceries of distant states’ (2013,
12). Important contributions already highlight the relevance of visits to old sites
(mazar,
15
kümböz
16
and national monuments) to foster a sense of continuity and cohesion
among those who identify as Kyrgyz.
17
Wealthy owners’ sons pursue education in China,
Kyrgyzstan and Turkey while some work as advisers for the Afghan ambassador to the
Kyrgyz Republic. Several wealthy owners’ sons were sent for schooling purposes to
China, Iran and Kyrgyzstan in the last years. Beyond learning the language, they actively
seek support and relations with political authorities.
On an evening spent at Mullah Abdyl Hak’s summer camp, he showed the photographs
of his 2008 travels to Bishkek and Istanbul to me, sitting in a yurt in Naryn with Hajji
Osmon and Hajji Turdiakhun. Both made a round-trip through Kyrgyzstan’s main towns
and spent two weeks in the Kyrgyz settlement of Uluu Pamir Khoyu in Vang, Eastern
Turkey. As part of their journey, they were received by the Kyrgyz prime minister and
gave interviews to journalists, meeting the political organization Zamandash, in a
similar attempt to gather political support towards a potential migration. Yet the
staged importance of travels to old sites to actualize kinship ties was contrasted by the
ambivalent sentiments and frustrated expectations of the ‘repatriates’. The collection of
the necessary documents (most had to be created ex nihilo) required claimants to
prompt in person the various state agencies to issue them. ‘You go here, you go there
to get the documents and each time you have to prove them how Kyrgyz you are’, Abdul-
wali, son of Abdul Rashid Khan, complained on our visit of Bishkek’s main monuments.
Our travel companion, Abdulwali, did not share the enthusiasm of his host, Esen Baike,
and saw in the visited monuments only the ‘inert stones of our ancestors’ (babalarybyzdyn
ölgön tashtar) – moving between a proclaimed sense of anity and the obvious distance
in treatment which he felt subjected to. The visits organized by politicians and genealo-
gists to distant parents (alys tuugandar) and monuments were met with ambivalent
reactions.
During occasional strolls with migrants in the town of Naryn, our walks led us to the
museum for history and culture (tarykh i madaniat), the central Mosque and the bazaar.
In the museum, Faisylhak could not refrain from smiling when our guide, stopping next
to a yurt (Kyrgyz or boz üi) described that ‘in the past, Kyrgyz people (el) used to live in
yurts year-round, now only pastoralists install them in summer’. Though seemingly
banal and anecdotal, the remark and my travel companion’s giggle are representative
of the gap between his own experience and its location in an imaginary topography
8 T. MARSCHALL
where his past mode of living is curated as remote and associated with a time now gone.
The documentation in Kyrgyzstan of Afghan Kyrgyz’ contemporary mode of dwelling as ‘a
thing of the past’ is yet another instance of the imaginary coincidence in popular dis-
course of their putative genealogical (and assumed temporal) ancestry with spatial dis-
tance. Conversely, such archival documentation practices along the way or in museums
of Afghan Kyrgyz’ movements are yet another instance of the collapsing in travel
writing of genealogical (and hence temporal) ancestry with spatial distance.
Between departures and arrivals: establishing a transnational space of
migration
Once in the Little Pamir, the elders (aksakal) Ismail and Duwana Bai inquired to me
whether Kyrgyz in Tajikistan truly know their seven forefathers. Ismail claimed to
know only four, Duwana laughed as he admitted knowing only two. ‘Our knowledge
of one’s own seven forefather’, both assumed, ‘is incomplete in both Pamirs’. Their
remarks directly upset and confront assumptions of the scholarship. Ismailbekova’s
account is illustrative of the general confusion in the scholarship between levels
when asserting that ‘Kyrgyz in Afghan Pamir’s Province trace their ancestry back
seven generations along the male line, which is necessary for proof of identity and
their claims to membership in a particular Kyrgyz kichik uruu (small lineage) or chong
uruu (big lineage). Those who did not know their origins were considered kul or
slaves, but this genealogical methodology was also used by individuals who were
the descendants of mixed marriages between Kyrgyz and non-Kyrgyz and the
ospring of Kyrgyz married to slaves’ (2017, 26). The shift in the second sentence to
the past tense is illustrative of the allochronic location which undergirds problematic
assumptions such as the prevalence of agnatic descent principles to Afghan Kyrgyz
society’s structure taken as a coherent whole or of the knowledge of forefathers up
to the seventh generation. Instead of conceiving them as given of the society, the com-
mentaries of Ismail and Duwana Bai suggest the opposite.
I recounted then to both elders how Abdikarim Chockoev, an elder and local history
writer (Mostowlansky 2012) living in neighbouring Eastern Pamirs impressed me with a
handwritten list of twelve forefathers hidden in his wallet which he could recite by
heart. I then enumerated the classificatory terms for agnatic descent which I learned
from an elder in Könö Korgon, a village in the Eastern Pamirs, Tajikistan (in ascending
order: ata, chong ata, baba, buba, kuba, joto, jete in Kyrgyz). Both playfully joked, ‘you
are definitely more Kyrgyz than we are’. Duwana explained the dierence in his own
terms, ‘in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, the state is strong (mykty). Here there is no school,
we do not know how to write here, we simply forgot, and people took our genealogies
(sanjyra) away with them when they left during the Soviet time (shuravi)’. In our discus-
sion, I cited the admonitory proverb written above the entrance of the Museum dedicated
to the study of local history and genealogy on the south shore of the Issyk Kul in Kyrgyz-
stan: ‘not knowing one’s seven forefathers, one will end a slave’ (jeti ata bilbegen, kul
bolot). Duwana amusedly replied that to the contrary, not knowing his seven forefathers
allowed him exactly to marry the daughter of one of the wealthiest owners (bai) in the
Little Pamir. He later explained that ‘we lost our sanjyra, our parents took them away
during 1978 outmigration’.
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 9
Conceived by Callahan, Ismailbekova and Shahrani as a prescriptive rule of alliance,
18
the obligations such knowledge implies stand as an explanation for the quasi absence of
genealogical texts and the oblivion of the knowledge of one’s own seven forefathers in
the Afghan Pamirs to resolve the problems of having to establish alliances with closer
cousins given the limited number of available partners. Supporting the proposition, Call-
ahan observes that ‘a high degree of clan (chong uruu) endogamy is found among the
Kyrgyz elite’ (2013, 113). Consequently, the designation and ascription of a set of knowl-
edges and practices to Afghan Kyrgyz stand as an example of the kind of productive mis-
understandings that demanded to be resolved when migrants presented their own
accounts to experts in Kyrgyz genealogy.
Kyrgyz genealogists’ (sanjyrachy) eorts to document and map Afghan Kyrgyz kinship
relations in the logic and framework of a popular travel writing genre are decisive,
although contested, to their integration in the moral and hierarchical framework of a con-
ception of Kyrgyzness by descent. Such inclinations to fix and document kinship and
ethnic ties can be traced back to the Soviet policy of indigenization (korenizatsia in
Russian) with the intention to follow ‘a linear path of development from kin-based or
clan groups, through tribes and tribal federations, to finally reach the stage of modern
nation-states as represented by the Soviet Republics’ (Ismailbekova 2017, 30).
19
Its link
to rodologia (the study of kinship, rodstvo in Russian) is striking for the popularity of
the genre in Russia during the same period (Leykin 2015). Genealogical reckonings in
travel writing gained traction in post-Soviet Republics to explain historical events in a
similarly teleological fashion based on a Lamarckian-like idea of heredity. The allochronic
framework of ethnogenesis assumes the outline of specific and stable ‘ethno-genetic’
dominants to specify phylogenetic structures (Kayipov 2010, 183).
Genealogies, like oral histories, are the objects of many uses (Humphrey 1979) but also
objectify many practices. They ground arguments and foreground encounters. Experts
compare various accounts, criticize the one or the other version, notice ‘errors’, inconsis-
tencies and contradictions.
20
Their accuracy mostly depends on the spatial and genealogi-
cal proximity of the author to the descent line he describes but their relative
indeterminacy, more importantly, allows for creativity to contemporary claims. Unlike
James Scott’s rehearsed proposition
21
on the relevance of text as a crucial instrument
of statecraft and as ‘an indisputable point of reference, (that) provides the kind of yard-
stick from which deviations from the original can roughly be judged’ (Scott 2009, 227),
and Scheele’s (2012) or Shryock’s (2008) observations in their respective ethnographic
contexts that deviation from the written text is perceived as scandalous, the production
of local histories and genealogies in Kyrgyzstan objectifies relationships in a exible and
not rigid framework which in turn aords the negotiation of ethnic, territorial ascription.
Gullette stress their contingency, since ‘maintaining these vital relationships is essential
(…), finding and establishing connections with people is important, but knowledge of
uruu and uruuk does not guarantee support’ (2010, 179). Considering the eect of the sus-
tained attention to kinship ties along Afghan Kyrgyz migrants’ iterations, I suggest that
kinship is both over- and underdetermined, contingently resourceful to migrants’ move-
ments. Given the relative exibility and adaptability of migrants’ and experts’ readings of
both written and oral histories in either or both places of departure or arrival, genealogies
and local histories translate rather than determine instrumental modes of inclusion and
exclusion – as grasped in early debates over the classic notion of segmentary
10 T. MARSCHALL
association.
22
Again, the formation of groups along kinship terms does not determine a
course of actions but is the product of meeting trajectories. Hence the relevance of the
distinction between kinship as a formal set of relations to be actualized and as a
process and sequence of events.
The textual transcription of kinship and ethnic ties translates such problematic
attempts at recovering gaps or absences in collective memory. In Kyrgyzstan, the
writing of local history and genealogy is a popular activity among elders (aksakal in
Kyrgyz). Their publications (sanjyra), displaying personal political trajectories along
with their integration to the Kyrgyz lineage system (Beyer 2016), are important
markers of one’s attachment to a specific place and typically resorted to during political
elections (Gullette 2007; Petric 2015). Instead of standing as absolute and definitive
accounts, texts’ objectivizing and visualizing aordances are instrumental to genealo-
gists’ attempts to precise people’s spatial and temporal location as well as their
relations with past eminent figures. Text and the ordering of relations along a struc-
tural-functionalist framework is valued by genealogists who examine documents com-
paratively and recursively, without implying that their transcription necessarily settles
disputes and disagreements.
Instead of conceiving of the two dierent perspectives as irreducible contradictions
between the temporal binaries of tradition and modernity, spatially located on each
end of migrants’ iterations, both genealogists and migrants found an elegant solution
to the apparent contradiction in assuming oblivion due to the eventful disruption of
both the Soviet Afghan war and subsequent migration to Turkey. In this context of
rupture and separation, the ‘repatriation’ programme aorded the elaboration, imagin-
ation and documentation of new, not preexisting, relations and to recover from gaps
or inconsistencies in their respective accounts.
Blood ties and the unmarried adult man: contingency in genealogical
ascription
In his mid-twenties, Ismail is part of a growing number
23
of livestock breeders who
achieved relative self-suciency and autonomy from otherwise binding livestock
lending practices (amanat in Kyrgyz) in the Little Pamir.
24
Finding someone to marry
was dicult for him, ‘expectations are high among men, and if you have a daughter,
your future is saved in the Pamirs’, he explained. The bridewealth (kalyng in Kyrgyz) ordi-
narily resumes in the trope of hundred sheep (jüz koi) but eectively includes more.
General expectations among the elite convene over an added fifteen to twenty yak
(kotoz), three to four horses, thirty to forty thousand Afghani (equivalent to four to five
hundred US dollars), home furniture in mattresses (tuchak) and coers (sandyk) filled
with basic cooking utensils and other gifts. Ismail eventually concluded that ‘there are
many girls [who] men simply cannot aord. About thirty men of age remain unmarried’.
Moreover, exclusive alliance strategies among close kins further restrict opportunities. As
Ismail explained, about a hundred persons in both Pamirs married the siblings of their
partners (kuda in Kyrgyz), such as the current Khan’s brothers with Osmon Hajji’s three
daughters, both members of a close descent line, Teit.
As a result, only wealthy livestock owners aord the expensive kalyng for their sons as
part of their anticipatory inheritance (enchi) while ‘the majority of Kyrgyz males are not so
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 11
fortunate, leaving them few alternatives. A common strategy is for a man to try and build
up his own herd, and borrow from close relatives if possible, so that he can eventually
aord to pay the kalyng’ (Callahan 2013, 116). Usually, brothers stay together in a camp
(aiyl) and share the duties in stocks’ watch whilst ownership is still strictly separated.
Mullah Abdyl Hak, an important religious expert and exceptional speaker adamant to
the repatriation, owned only a few sheep and twelve yak while his brother Nurylhak
was counted as one of the wealthiest owners in the Little Pamir. Together, they moved
with their families in Kyrgyzstan and left their stock as amanat to Samaat, their cousin
(MBS). Still, other opportunities are aorded in movement. Samaat met his current wife
while serving as a soldier in the district capital of Faizabad and returned to the Pamirs
when the Afghan government collapsed in 1992. Since, she followed him and settled
in the Little Pamir, exclusively addressing peers and myself in Kyrgyz, asserting besides
and with chuckles how long and at pains she was to ‘become’ Kyrgyz while Samaat
used to complain over his current situation in nostalgic tropes. ‘Dr Najibullah was a
good man, the Soviets were good’ (Dr Najibullah, Shuravi khub bud in Dari). Having had
to comply to the brutal reversal of power in the district centre, Samaat sought support
in the Little Pamir among close kins. Whilst it is common for a woman to settle in the resi-
dence of her new husband, the reverse is much rarer and so far, only concerned the father
of Najibullah, Rais e Shura in the Great Pamir, who came from Faizabad to settle in the
upland camps.
In Afghanistan, patrilineal descent features as an important discriminatory factor of
ethnic ascription, instrumental at times of political contestation. Monsutti explains,
‘people are liable to change their identity by crossing the boundary of their social
group and incorporating themselves into another group. In Afghanistan, ethnic
groups tend to be seen as huge agnatic kinship groups; each tribal segment is sup-
posed to stem from a common male ancestor, himself related to the ancestors of col-
lateral branches. Such a segmentary system, based on interlocking structural
oppositions, is an ideal representation and is far from exhausting the logic of alliances
and conicts nor the constant reframing of tribal genealogies’ (2013, 153). Najibullah,
son of a renowned commandant from Faizabad and a Kyrgyz mother, led administra-
tive duties as Rais e Shura in the Great Pamir (as Community Development Council
leader in the terminology of the past National Solidarity Program). Following disputes
over livestock ownership, he returned to Faizabad under the pressure, as he later
explained to me, of not being purportedly ‘truly’ Kyrgyz because his father was con-
sidered a foreigner (hareji). Disregarding the veracity of his account, the claim was
confirmed by his eventual leave and preference to present his discrimination along
ethnic lines instead of the politics that later antagonized his earlier relations to the
Pamirs.
Many sources of political legitimacy often overlap within a descent line. Economic, reli-
gious or political expertise are unequally distributed among its members as the outcome
of a common strategy to gather assets within a line or group. Hajji Rahman Kul Khan out-
standingly owned more than seventy percent of the total livestock population in both
Pamirs in distributing his assets to poorer households reinventing older notions of mor-
alized lending, amanat or sagun, and hence mitigating risks bound to livestock growth.
Abdul Rashid Khan married five times and had nineteen children. His attempt to
convey Khanship to his son Rushan did not last long, as Callahan observed (2013, 215).
12 T. MARSCHALL
Still, his smaller descent line (Alapa) is considered powerful (küchtöö) in the Little Pamir
and features in direct opposition to Hajji Butu’s Khanship. Alliances among cross
cousins within a line are common, as shown in Table 1. While Khanship was not necess-
arily directly linked with economic, religious or political resources, transmission never fell
far from close relatives. The consistency with which a major descent line, Teit, dominates
Khanship successions across major migratory events speaks first for sustained stability on
the level of interactions with the state and its many instances – less for consistency in
patrilineal transmission.
Ismailbekova’s comment to the observation of norms supposed to govern the
organization of Kyrgyz extended families (üibülöölör) prior to Soviet rule is illustrative
of the allochronic tendency in the scholarship to discursively asserting the prevalence
of blood ties as a norm which in turn was rarely eectively followed (2017, 22–37). If
alliances are eectively contingent, how to account for the eective and discursive
prevalence of ‘blood ties’? The more distant the descent line, the greater the
inclusion or exclusion frame, the less accurate its description, the reasoning goes.
According to Roland Hardenberg, ‘the most inclusive category, uruu, includes the
most distant patrilineal relatives […] Thus, an uruu may designate agnates descend-
ing from any ancestor who lived many generations ago’ (2009, 11). Hence the mne-
monic but also political prevalence of a limited number of ‘big’ descent lines
(Ismailbekova 2017, 46–47). The classificatory distinction into groups (chong uruu)
and sub-groups (kichik uruu or uruk) is used indierently in Kyrgyzstan (Hardenberg
2012; Jacquesson 2010) while expressing further subdivisions in the Afghan Pamirs –
‘though confusingly (from an emic perspective) they are still referred to as kichik uruu
rather than uruk’ (Callahan 2013, 109). The distinction between great (chong) and
small (kichik) descent lines (uruu) further specifies genealogical ascriptions among
close agnates.
In the Afghan Pamirs, four major descent lines form ascriptions that are further divided
into smaller ones: Teit, Kesek, Naiman and Nooruz. While Shahrani, Dor and Callahan
insisted on the consensual nature of the election of the Khan through an elders’
(aksakal and manap) assembly, every Khan belonged without exception to the same
major descent line (chong uruu), Teit. Current Khan, Abdulkhani Hajji Butu is the
nephew (MFS) of Abu Bakr Khan.
Table 1. Khanship succession.
Khan Khanship Uruu Kichik uruu Migration
Toktosun 1930s Teit Alapa
Sartbai 1937–43 Teit Alapa
Mamat Kerim 1943–45 Teit Alapa Forced to abdicate due to opium consumption.
Hajji Rahman
Kul
1945–47 Teit Kochkor Fled to China in 1947 after skirmishes with Soviet troops.
Astanabek 1947–49 Teit Kyzyl Bash
Hajji Rahman
Kul
1949–78 Teit Kochkor Fled to Pakistan in 1979.
Abu Bakr 1978–79 Teit Shaiym Returned to the Little Pamir after the move to Pakistan.
Abdul Rashid 1979–2009 Teit Shaiym Returned to the Little Pamir after the move to Pakistan.
Hajji Rushan 2010–2011 Teit Shaiym Forced to abdicate due to opium consumption, critics of his
young age.
Er Aali Bai 2011–2018 Teit Shaiym
Hajji Butu 2018–present Teit Alapa
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 13
Whilst reecting the dominant pattern of patrilineal inclusion in the Afghan Pamirs,
there are important limitations to tables like these. Those condensed sets of information
on kin relations and migration remain partial. The impression of orderliness and classifi-
catory cohesion they suggest is informed by a structuralist paradigm which undergirds
early Soviet,
25
and post-Soviet,
26
documentations of the Kyrgyz lineage system. They
do not reect the fungibility, disorder and complexity of the practices, alliances or,
here, political authority on migration, that they are intended to synthetically describe.
With the exceptions of Astanabek, Hajji Rahman Kul and Er Aali Bai, Khans are not necess-
arily the wealthiest owners (Callahan 2013, 215). The singular authority of the Khan is a
matter of direct and quasi constant contestation amidst a plurality of competing pos-
itions. In this regard, an account of khanship succession in a singular line dismisses the
relevance of other competing sources of political legitimacy. Mullah Abdyl Hak, son of
Abu Bakr and cousin ( jeen) of Hajji Butu, is a known religious expert who led important
discussions in travels and speeches towards the ‘repatriation’, whilst Hajji Butu, who
became Khan after Er Aali Bai’s passing, explained to me being lesser interested in pursu-
ing any outmigration. Hajji Turdiakhun, the only representative to the Afghan parliament
(Meshrano Jylga), is not represented in the table although he convened initial agreements
of the ‘repatriation’ with the programme responsible of the time, Saltanat Barakanova.
Coming from the Great Pamir, he was also referred to as Hajji Wakhil in distinction
from the status of Khan already attributed at the time and in recognition of his political
contribution. His younger sister (karyndash) married Sopu Abdilwahid, further establish-
ing ties across both Great and Little Pamirs. Together, Sopu, his wife and Turdiakhun’s
sons eventually moved to Kyrgyzstan in 2018.
Conclusion
While the repatriation programme aorded a few beneficiaries, to the like of Hajji Turdia-
khun’s initiating travels, opportunities to visit the homes and monuments of distant kins,
and while a dozen families even established initial steps towards more durable invest-
ments in Kyrgyzstan, most of the population remained in the Afghan Pamirs. Initially
undierentiated from a Kyrgyz state perspective – ‘we’ve never eaten with them and
would not even conceive this back in the Pamirs’ as an elder woman raised to me
during a dinner organized by the programme’s responsible in Naryn. The repatriation
quickly reinforced inequalities as wealthy owners, and their sons, were able to secure
work or education, and poorer families started herding in the government funded
village of Taldy Suu in the Alai. Young men occupied their time with the works or
studies they were able to aord, paying regular visits to the Mosque, stressing their hes-
itations to me as to which educational path (in school or at the Medresse) to choose.
The prospect of a last migration, as Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov promised to ‘repatri-
ate every remaining Kyrgyz from Afghanistan’ during his visit of the village of Taldy Suu,
reinstates a trope which displaces in time a banal conception of people’s existence in move-
ment. Still, migrants aorded (often with the financial support of their kins in the Afghan
Pamirs) the possibility to rewrite and reframe in movements their own imaginary location
and the asymmetry assumed by government assistance and resettlement policy. Their
sparse but connected movements established a transnational space of circulation in a land-
scape connoted by migrants’ contingent mobilisations of kinship, ethnic, religious and
14 T. MARSCHALL
political registers. The ‘repatriation’ became thus an important vector for creative mobilis-
ations of tropes of remoteness and alterity or proximity and anity as well.
In projecting distance and dierence, both in documents and actual practices, migrants’
movements upset and redraw static frames and tropes of remoteness. The ontological
rupture assumed between a ‘now’ and ‘then’, spatially distributed between a ‘modern’ Kyr-
gyzstan and the ‘remote’ Afghan Pamirs is a powerful and compelling but partial trope. The
association of spatial distance with cultural alterity – which Afghan Kyrgyz migrants at
times endorsed, at others simply dismissed, subverted or ignored – ambivalently featured
as parameters of documentation and classification (especially through the register of gen-
ealogy and local history as a popular writing genre and resource for examining contempor-
ary relationships). Tropes of cultural endangerment instanced by supposedly lost
genealogies feature as a meeting point for genealogists and migrants to redraw ties in
the form of genealogical charts (sanjyra) as an already popular travel writing genre. Geneal-
ogy and local history writing can be conceived as a practice to locate personal memories,
genealogical ascriptions and their ongoing reformulations. Migrant’s and experts’ respect-
ive documentation and objectification practices situate the allochronic dislocation of
Afghan Kyrgyz in texts moving across a wider Central Asian landscape.
To conclude, migrants’ iterations complicate the linear conception of their ‘repatria-
tion’ in the way formulated by the Kyrgyz government. Their movements better fit a
back and forth (kelgen-ketken in Kyrgyz) pattern than the idea of a definitive exodus
(ürkün) where the population is expected to move out of the Afghan Pamirs for the
last time. Yet if the topological register of the ‘repatriation’ programme as distant
parents in space and ancestry meets migrants’ words, their aspirations and concrete
movements upset the linearity and definitive nature of their expected resettlement.
Notes
1. Finke, Sanders, and Zanca 2013.
2. Personal communication, Bishkek June 2018.
3. Adelkhah 2015, 2017; Adlparvar 2015; Barfield 2011; Centlivres 1991; Simonsen 2004; Tapper 1988.
4. The paper builds upon observations and interviews collected in both Afghan Pamirs and the
hamlets of Sultan Ishkoshim, Qala e Panja, Khandud, Sarhad e Baroghil and Bozai gonbad in
Afghanistan, the towns of Murghab, Ishkoshim, Madyian, Shaymak and Alichur in Tajikistan,
Bishkek, Naryn, Osh and Taldy Suu in Kyrgyzstan as well as key government sites and in con-
tinued correspondences with interlocutors on social media since August 2015.
5. Personal communication, Saltanat Barakanova, representative to the Kyrgyz parliament and
repatriation programme responsible, Bishkek 2018.
6. Abashin 2013; Isabaeva 2011; Reeves 2011a.
7. Bonnenfant 2008, 2012; Buri and Finke 2013; Sancak and Finke 2005; Oka 2013; Werner and
Barcus 2015; Werner, Emmelhainz, and Barcus 2017.
8. Callahan 2013; Denker 1983; Dor and Naumann 1978; Kreutzmann 2003; Levi-Sanchez 2017;
Shahrani 2002.
9. As I was told by migrants from Tajikistan, the provision of certificates of residency and of
absence of criminal record from the country of departure is a mandatory prerequisite to
the obtention of Kyrgyz citizenship.
10. Samaat, Seki Kalon, Little Pamir, Mai 2017.
11. Personal translation. Original quote, ‘bizge jol jok, mektep jok, doktor jok, ökmöt jok, jardam
az Pamirga, jashoo kiin oshunda. Biz ong jetinshiden kylym turabyz, jetpeibiz’ (September
2016, Seki Kalon, Little Pamir).
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY 15
12. Personal translation. Original quote, ‘ish, jol, doktor, mektep bolot, el jakty’ (Abduwali,
September 2016, Kara Jylga, Little Pamir).
13. A migrant complained to me to have once to pay a four hundred US dollars fee at the Tajik
Embassy in Kabul.
14. De Genova 2013; Fassin 2011; Graw and Schielke 2012; Willen 2007.
15. A sacred site.
16. A mausoleum.
17. Beyer 2011; Mostowlansky 2011.
18. Ismailbekova 2017, 13; Callahan 2013, 112; Shahrani 2002.
19. See also Abashin 1999; Bromley 1983; Roy 2000.
20. Ismailbekova also notes that in her case ‘accounts between sources were inconsistent, and
people made sense of the inconsistencies in making or refuting their own claims’ (2017, 53).
21. An argument raised by Weber (2012).
22. Leach 2014; Tapper 1979.
23. I use the term in reference to Callahan’s earlier observation that a significant portion of the
population in the Pamirs grew in livestock wealth and autonomy compared to Shahrani’s
report of extreme inequalities within the group where the Khan owned more than seventy
percent of the total livestock population and only a small number of households. Whilst I
noticed important economic disparities during the time of my ethnographic inquiry, signs
of relative distribution were many – the absence of Kyrgyz herders in almost any Kyrgyz
camps, most notably. Young Wakhi men work instead in pastures for an average of one
sheep per month.
24. Amanat is a form of lending which past Rahmankul Khan introduced in the 1950s. It allows
poor households to tend for livestock of a wealthier owner and use secondary products. In
turn, the owner may distribute his livestock to dierent valleys, thereby reducing the risk
of losses induced by their concentration in an area exposed to the same range of epizootic,
climatic and theft threats.
25. Abramzon 1960; Hudson 1964; Khazanov 1994; Pogorelskyi and Batrakov 1930, 108–109; Vali-
khanov 1985; Vinnikov 1956.
26. Dragadze 1984; Gullette 2010; Jacquesson 2010; Pulleyblank 1990; Shahrani 2013.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethics
The persons involved in the research for this article consented to their participation and
agreed to their nominal designation. The persons who refused to be named in this article
and other publications arising from the research were systematically anonymised.
ORCID
Tobias Marschall http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6664-3082
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