The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Interests / Disciplines

Since 1995 I have been conducting ethnographic research in Chitral – a large and mountainous region in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, which shares a very long border with Afghanistan, and, in places, is only separated by 25 miles of Afghan territory from the post-Soviet Muslim-majority state of Tajikistan. Chitral is largely populated by Khowar-speaking Chitralis who identify themselves as being either Sunni or Shi’a Ismai’li Muslims. My ethnographic work in Chitral has focusef on the ways in which village and small town Muslimsin the region have responded to the growing influence of reform-minded forms of Islam in the region, including those associated with the Taliban. 

My book, Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Cambridge, 2005), and a series of other publications, explores the ways in which Chitralis set to the task of ‘being Muslim’ in this world of political uncertainty and transformation. It does so through a consideration of the role played by combined intellectual and emotional processes in religious experience and notions of morality. By examining these domains of Chitrali Muslim life, I also contribute to wider debates in anthropology, concerning the study of morality, personhood, ethics and emotion, the life of the mind, the politicization of religion, as well as the wider religious and political significance of music and performance.

Teaching

I am interested in supervising students seeking to undertake anthropological fieldwork in Pakistan, Central Asia and the Middle East as well as in wider questions concerning the anthropology of religion (especially Islam), the interaction between religious and political transformations within and beyond South Asia and the Muslim world, as well as the study of transnational identity formations.

Students supervised

• Igor Cherstich
• Luigi Achilli
• Paul Rollier

Courses Taught

• Comparative Study of Islam: Anthropological Perspectives A
• Comparative Study of Islam: Anthropological Perspectives A (Masters)
• Culture and Society of the Near and Middle East
• Ethnography of a Selected Region - Near & Middle East
• Voice and Place

Research

Since the publication of Living Islam I have been expanding my interests, both ethnographically and conceptually. During the years my fieldwork in Chitral, I have come to know many men from Afghanistan and Tajikistan – they were refugees, agricultural labourers, builders, and owned bakery and butcher shops in Chitral’s villages and small towns. In the wake of the events of September 11th, many of these men and their families have returned to their ‘home’ countries – sometimes after having lived for as long as three decades in Chitral. Over the past two years, I’ve been conducting research in the regions of Tajikistan and Afghanistan from where these men came, as well as to the cities in which many of them are now living (Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Kunduz and Dushanbe). 

During the course of these visits, I’ve met many people I knew in Chitral as refugees and found that they continue to live mobile lives - often making return visits to Chitral where they have family and business interests and also rich networks of Chitrali friends and sometimes kin. Through extensive interviews, developing my already existing networks with people in the region, and embarking on long-distance journeys with these men and their families within and beyond Afghanistan and Tajikistan, I’ve started to build up a sense of the complicated trajectories that their lives have taken over the past thirty years. 

I’m interested in the types of insights these trajectories afford into understanding the tactics that people in the region deploy in order to move between the starkly discontinuous yet nevertheless connected spaces that make-up the transregional setting in which they live. Besides contributing to the understanding of Muslim life in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, I also aim to contribute to wider anthropological debates concerning the after effects of colonialism and the ethnographic exploration of the ways in which people experience, understand and interact with complex and discontinuous political spaces. I am also addressing a range of more methodological issues. These include the possibilities and constraints of inter-disciplinary work bringing together anthropologists and historians, as well as forms of ethnographic fieldwork that combine both long-term fieldwork and expertise in one place with what is now widely referred to as ‘multi-sited’ ethnography.

Expertise

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Available for

• Radio
• Press
• Briefings
• Special Study Programmes
• Short Term Consultancy
• TV
• Long Term Consultancy

Regional Expertise

• South Asia

Country Expertise

• Afghanistan
• Pakistan
• Tajikistan

Languages

Publications