Readers rarely associate anthropology with highways. However, this is the setting of Till Mostowlansky's research in Gorno (Mountainous) Badakhshan, Tajikistan's easternmost region, abutting Afghanistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan. Billed as a study of modernity, the author's explanation reveals his interest in what Soviet transformation meant to Tajikistanis. What did it mean regarding remnants of the national, the traditional, and the uniquely local that anthropologists use to understand how larger entities imposed their will and changed culture in this nook of the Soviet world since the 1930s?
Mostowlansky asserts that allowing people to represent themselves illuminates ideas of modernity and traditionalism. Furthermore, self-representations give us a more grounded understanding of linguistic and ethnic complexity than one gains from outsiders’ perspectives (even as it takes an outsider to bring it to light).
For anthropologists, Badakhshan is a near-mythical land, remaining as remote and pure as it gets, as unchanged and mysterious, and as cultural and otherworldly as one hopes to find in an untouched part of the former USSR. Even Tajik scholars seem to think of it as the place of “our oriental others” (3)! Mostowlansky shatters this mythologizing by appealing to people living in and along Pamir Highway towns, such as Tokhtamysh, Khorog, and Murghab, to discuss characterizations about their ways of life, beliefs, and takes on society. Topics covered include religious activism, television, migrant labor, and presidential speeches. And this is what distinguishes his work as contributing to our understanding of Badakhshan and our awareness of the conundrums of globalization throughout Central Asia.
From 2008–15, Mostowlansky traveled more than 10,000 kilometers between Khorog and Osh (northern terminus of Pamir highway in Kyrgyzstan) (9). What readers learn less than systematically are his ethnographic subjects. He shows that they represent a range, including gender, ethnicity, professions, generations, and education levels, and that he attended weddings, Friday prayers, election campaigns, and funerals. He does not provide quantification, however. Mostowlansky undertook a fieldwork technique of “open interviews,” something “rarely … explored from an anthropological point of view” (6). Because he does not specify if he means overall or just in Badakhshan, it reads oddly. One may ask, who doesn't conduct “open interviews”?
Mostowlansky discusses theoretical influences mainly in chapter one. He invokes modernism as globalization, space, temporality, roads, and the state. Selecting ideas from Bruno Latour, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Göran Therborn, Richard McBrien, Anna Tsing, and Richard V. Reeves, the author shows that modernist projects contain expansive and unintended developments that people accept and construe in ways different from powerholders. This does not mean that Badakhshanis opposed or rebelled against modernity. Rather, what roads and building projects mean may or may not coincide with original intentions. Applying the idea of “friction” to localized uses and purposes, the author discusses traders and truckers from Afghanistan and China as well as the profusion of “technology, ideas and innovation” (27).
In exploring understandings and analyses of identity and religion, he provides intimate portraits of just several individuals. It functions as an ethnographic strength that just several people express opinions toward language, the Tajik government, the Soviet past, the presence of fundamentalist Sunni puritans (Tablighi Jama'at, Chapter 4), and appropriate gender roles. Whether or not Badakhshanis are unique, they themselves think so. And while Mostowlansky captures senses of dread that people harbor about the economy, development, and the recent regional history of extremism and warfare, his interlocutors are also proud that Badakhshan remains immune to the more grievous problems nearby.
The Pamir highway operates to create divisions, separating people into regions and co-ethnic populations, but also unifies as roads do. Additionally, the highway needs constant repair as it cuts its path atop the “roof of the world.” It must be cleared of snow and debris in order for it to continue bringing in the outside world. Also, if the Caucasus were said to have been the “mountains of languages,” then the Pamir Highway is a microcosmic “road of languages.” Through sojourns he experiences dizzying code switching, featuring Tajik, Kyrgyz, Russian, Shugni, and Dari, the uses of which do not cleave easily by national group, let alone conversational contexts. Mostowlansky enriches our experience of sociolinguistic intricacies.
Interestingly, Central Asianists will note the similarities in attitudes people express toward phenomena that animate many studies of the current generation, proving, if nothing else, that we gain regionally-consistent insights. Mostowlansky demonstrates competence with the comparative sources of his contemporaries.
Mostowlansky writes sagaciously when explaining recondite theory and lucidly when describing notions wedded to identity, values, and ideologies. He describes his settings and encounters vividly. Chapters and sections concerning Islam, a presidential visit, discussions of civilization and backwardness, and interpretations of the kind of state and government Tajikistan needs will resonate with readers.
The book should fit nicely in anthropology courses on modernity and globalization, in advanced graduate courses in the social sciences of post-Soviet space, and it is not beyond the grasp of undergraduates learning about Central Asia as long as they are provided guidance.
Lastly, a word about the title: As a reflection of the region's altitude and isolation, people occasionally talk about being on the moon, especially given the appearance of some landscapes. However, the azan is the Muslim call to prayer and refers to a story in a popular pamphlet on Islam and science that concerns what Neil Armstrong supposedly heard on the moon and related to an Egyptian audience. Thus, the title deals with concurrent senses of remoteness and universality, appropriate for so many of the topics Mostowlansky examines.
