Till Mostowlansky is a Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute in Geneva who was awarded an Ambizione grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research explores notions of modernity, development, charity and humanitarianism in the borderlands of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, China and Pakistan. Allegra interviewed him to understand what he intends to study in the years to come.

Your first monograph, ‘Azan on the Moon’, was an ethnography of the border region along the Pamir Highway that explored issues of infrastructure and modernity. How did you move from such a focus to your current research on Shia development organizations in the borderlands of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, China and Pakistan?

In ‘Azan on the Moon’ I focus on modernity in specific sites along the Pamir Highway traversing southern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In the course of my research I encountered a range of past and present actors promoting ideas of modernity: Sovietofficials, road constructors, Islamic missionaries, the Tajik government and, of course, development institutions. In this regard, several NGOs of great importance in everyday life, especially in the western Pamirs, are part of the Aga Khan Development Network. The Aga Khan Development Network is chaired by the Aga Khan IV, leader of Shia Nizari Ismailis worldwide, and has been present in Tajikistan since the early 1990s when the Aga Khan Foundation provided much needed humanitarian aid to people in the Pamirs in the context of the Tajik civil war. A majority of Pamiris are Ismaili and since the 1990s the Aga Khan Development Network has installed a powerful development machinery in the region which operates through close ties to the international donor scene and is based on the Aga Khan’s religious authority.

In my first book on modernity, development institutions were just one part of the story, but I always felt that the merging of concepts from international development with forms of Islamic legitimacy deserved more attention. Once I had finished my research for ‘Azan on the Moon’ I began to focus on the role of Aga Khan institutions in everyday life and I soon realized that this required an understanding of transnational and transregional dynamics. Ismailis are not only present in Tajikistan, but also in adjacent border areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and far beyond in other places in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Initially I followed institutional and inter-personal links from Tajikistan to northern Pakistan where I began fieldwork in 2012. Some areas in northern Pakistan have been veritable development laboratories for Aga Khan institutions since the late British colonial period and have not only inspired later work in Tajikistan but have also influenced broader strands of rural development around the world. In northern Pakistan, there are, however, also sizeable Twelver Shia communities which have begun to compete in these development endeavours and who offer historical and contemporary intersections with Ismaili work throughout Asia. In the course of my research I have followed these connections in the borderlands and beyond. I am invested in better understanding these lesser-known forms of globalization that transcend a range of assumed frontiers – political, religious, institutional and social.
 

Read the complete interview

******

Image: Allegra Lab