Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life

This talk is based on my recent book researching what migration is and what it does in rural Tajikistan – one of the most remittance dependent countries in the world. Exploring this dependency, I move beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration and foreground the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. In my talk, I will focus on the main paradox of migration my research revealed. One must go to Russia to become recognised as a good person by one’s community, while at the same time going to Russia can undermine the foundations of one’s personhood. This tragic paradox points to the scope and complexity of my interlocutors’ embeddedness within the largely unequal relations of interdependence at difference scales – Russia’s and Tajikistan’s economies, places, ideas and bodies. I will unpack this ethnographically through looking at the entanglements between migration and people’s preoccupation with crafting themselves as certain kind of modern subjects. I will show that the departure of Soviet modernity followed by the normalisation of mass migration of Tajikistanis to Russian cities has resulted in migration becoming intrinsic to the very project of becoming a ‘modern’ person.

Elena Borisova is a social anthropologist working on migration, (im)mobility, and citizenship in Eurasia. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester. She conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. Currently, she is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, working on wartime mobilities of Russians to Central Asia.

 

An Zoom-Meeting teilnehmen

https://zfl-berlin-org.zoom.us/j/89235172300?pwd=7c4QU7H6YXbSB4UgKWaNKqrNf28sbd.1

Meeting-ID: 892 3517 2300

Kenncode: 372436