Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus EDITED BY MANJA STEPHAN-EMMRICH AND PHILIPP SCHRÖDER MOBILITIES, BOUNDARIES, AND TRAVELLING IDEAS Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus Edited by Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Philipp Schröder https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Philipp Schröder. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Philipp Schröder, eds., Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0114 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/603#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/603#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. This work is part of the research project ‘Translocal Goods — Education, Work, and Commodities between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, China, and the Arab Emirates’ [grant number: Az. 86870], which has been funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (Volkswagen Foundation), 2013– 2017. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-333-9 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-334-6 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-335-3 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-336-0 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-337-7 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0114 Cover image: Road between Nurek and Hubuk (2016). Photo by Hans Birger Nilsen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/110608682@N04/30283802874 Cover design: Anna Gatti. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Preface 1 Foreword 5 Nathan Light Introduction: Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas 27 Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus: A Translocal Perspective Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Philipp Schröder Part 1: Crossing Boundaries: Mobilities Then and Now 1. Emigration Within, Across, and Beyond Central Asia in the 61 Early Soviet Period from a Perspective of Translocality Kamoludin Abdullaev 2. Crossing Economic and Cultural Boundaries: Tajik 89 Middlemen in the Translocal ‘Dubai Business’ Sector Abdullah Mirzoev and Manja Stephan-Emmrich Part 2: Travelling Ideas: Sacred and Secular 3. Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: Translocality and Identity 121 Azim Malikov 4. Explicating Translocal Organization of Everyday Life: 151 Stories From Rural Uzbekistan Elena Kim 5. A Sense of Multiple Belonging: Translocal Relations and 177 Narratives of Change Within a Dungan Community Henryk Alff Part 3: Movements from Below: Economic and Social 6. ‘New History’ as a Translocal Field 205 Svetlana Jacquesson 7. Informal Trade and Globalization in the Caucasus and 229 Post-Soviet Eurasia Susanne Fehlings 8. The Economics of Translocality — Epistemographic 263 Observations from Fieldwork on Traders In(-Between) Russia, China, and Kyrgyzstan Philipp Schröder Part 4: Pious Endeavours: Near and Far 9. iPhones, Emotions, Mediations: Tracing Translocality in 291 the Pious Endeavours of Tajik Migrants in the United Arab Emirates Manja Stephan-Emmrich 10. Translocality and the Folding of Post-Soviet Urban Space in 319 Bishkek: Hijrah from ‘Botanika’ to ‘Botanicheskii Jamaat’ Emil Nasritdinov Afterword: On Transitive Concepts and Local Imaginations — 349 Studying Mobilities from a Translocal Perspective Barak Kalir Notes on Contributors 361 Index 365 Preface This book marks the end of a very pleasant intellectual journey for us. It began in spring 2013, when we started our research project with the admittedly technical title Translocal Goods — Education, Work, and Commodities Between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, China, and the Arab Emirates. We aspired to explore new ways in which the exchange relations of mobile actors from Central Asia redefine their own (emic) as well as our (analytic) understanding about identity, ethnicity and Islam as they extend beyond common ‘containers’ of local community, nation state and regional setting. Within that conceptual frame, three individual scientific efforts each dealt with quite distinct themes: • Studying Islam Abroad — Students’ Mobility, Life-Chances and Translocal Muslim Practice in-between Tajikistan and the Arab World (Manja Stephan-Emmrich) • The ‘China-Business’ — An Ethnography of Kyrgyz Traders and their Translocal Livelihoods in-between ‘Home’, China, and Russia (Philipp Schröder) • Translocal Hijab — The Producing, Distributing and Consuming of Religious Clothing in-between Tajikistan and the United Arab Emirates (Abdullah Mirzoev) We have presented in detail the concepts and empirical data associated with these projects in an earlier publication (Schröder and Stephan- Emmrich 2014), as well as in the introductory chapter to this volume. But academia can only thrive to the degree it is supported by a generous institutional structure. In that regard, we could not have found a better partner than the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung), and © M. Stephan-Emmrich and P. Schröder, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0114.12 2 Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas in particular the program Between Europe and the Orient — A Focus on Research and Higher Education in/on Central Asia and the Caucasus. Until 2017, the funding provided by the Volkswagen Foundation enabled us not only to conduct our individual ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asia, Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates, but also to engage actively within various circles of the scientific community. One such key event was a workshop held in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) in April 2015, which we jointly organized with our main local partner, the American University of Central Asia. Over three days, our group of participants intensively discussed draft papers that approached the notion of ‘translocality’ from all kinds of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological angles. Since then these early texts have been developed into full-fledged chapters, due in no small part to our invited discussant, Barak Kalir of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. As someone who shares our interest in mobility studies, but also draws from extensive research experience outside of Central Asia, his intuitive commentary provided the authors with a fresh perspective, challenging them to think beyond conventional approaches in their disciplines or focus areas. We are very grateful that Barak agreed to condense his thoughts on the contributions gathered here into a remarkable afterword. At the beginning of this book you will find a foreword by Nathan Light of Uppsala University in Sweden. We appreciate his thoughts as a senior scholar of Central Asian studies, because they allow us to situate our authors’ contributions within the wider perspective of (trans-) regional historic development. In this way, we believe, the fore- and afterwords complement the introduction in interesting ways: in the latter we could focus on the immediate conceptual issues of translocality as addressed by our authors, precisely because the fore- and afterword develop such invaluable contextual knowledge in regard to both area and mobility studies. Finally, we are grateful to all contributors, who all worked hard to meet the various expectations and shifting deadlines we set them. As this volume is an unusual assembly of authors for whom English is not their native language, we are particularly thankful to our language editor, Tricia Ryan. Due to her own background in social science Preface 3 research in Central Asia, her timely remarks improved the manuscript beyond grammar or style. We are indebted once more to the Volkswagen Foundation for agreeing to provide additional funds to support the publication of this research in Open Access format. In that regard, many thanks also to Alessandra Tosi of Open Book Publishers, whose patience and careful management were invaluable during this book’s production process. Furthermore, we are grateful to Bianca Gualandi and Lucy Barnes, also from OBP, for supporting us in matters of visual design and language- editing. Nora Bernhardt, Karin Teuber and Fiona Smith of Humboldt- Universität of Berlin have been crucial assets to our project since 2013, and their enthusiastic support for our common research-and publishing- efforts is very much appreciated. Finally, we do not see the present volume