Ethnographer of disaster and decolonialism Omer Aijazi’s book Atmospheric Violence aims to capture the “feel and mood of life” in the borderland pahars (or mountainscapes, home of the ethno-linguistically distinct Pahari people) of Kashmir. Since the 1990s, the Line of Control has demarcated sections of this contested territory controlled by Pakistan from those controlled by India. Liberation movements against India’s occupation are ongoing, with the region and its people having long suffered from colonial violence. Compounding these troubles were the impacts of a devastating 2005 earthquake, which killed 80,000 people and injured another 138,000, leaving 3.5 million without shelter and destroying buildings, infrastructure, livestock, and livelihoods. The combined effects of these natural and human disasters offer a glimpse into the lives of some of the planet’s most marginalized communities, whose resilience and efforts at repair and a kind of flourishing have attracted the interest of scholars like Aijazi. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Neelum Valley of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir from 2014 through 2022, the book seeks to tell the story of this unique place and people.
Rather than focusing on state violence, its victims, or resistance campaigns to it, Aijazi writes about the people of Kashmir in their efforts to go on living in its wake. As he writes, his aim in the book “is to sharpen our view of how people live, refuse and flourish amid everyday suffocations and environmental ruin, while in the shadows of empire” (p. 5). While subject to violence, he backgrounds it by locating it within the “atmosphere,” described as “an emplacing arrangement to appreciate life’s textures and tonalities” (p. 6), focusing in the foreground on “the labor of life within everyday chronicity in the pahars, where violence constitutes the very atmosphere” (p. 14). This allows him to focus on the “repair work” undertaken in response to violence and disaster, and through that develop a sense of flourishing, understood as “the ethical and moral risks people take in their daily life that carry political and existential stakes and offer clues on the aesthetics and poetics of desirous futures and wanting pasts and presents” (p. 11).
The book’s core is thus comprised of a series of “scenes,” or “framing devices through which specific aspects of the feeling world are rendered palpable” (p. 24). Each of the five chapter-length ethnographic studies of individual protagonists residing within the region but in some way also marginalized from their already-marginalized communities reveals a character, but also their community and culture through their individual and collective struggles to go on living in the midst of atmospheric violence and despite having suffered tremendous loss. Interlaced with theoretical musings and reflections on his own outsider status, cultural misunderstandings from sharing food and other gifts to the effects of monetary payments to research subjects, and the role of academics in liberation movements, each scene paints a rich tapestry inspired by its focal character, as well as conveying mood and affect emanating from the life of the communities of those under study and the circumstances in which they now find themselves.
Characters in each scene are compellingly sketched in terms of their histories, relations, fears, and aspirations while avoiding cliches and archetypes. Niaz, confined to a wheelchair, has trained to become a teacher but is unable to find work, yet perseveres and hopes against all odds to recover from his disability. Parveen, a midwife with one of the few paid health care positions in the only clinic near her village, gifts others with kindness and compassion after her children had grown and left and her husband had passed. Sattar Shah, the tenant farmer and voluntary outcast whose renunciations serve Allah but keep him at a distance from others, prioritizes the spiritual over the social. Abrar, whose father owned the guesthouse where Aijazi stayed during his years of fieldwork, searches for work beyond Kashmir and embodies the tension between rootedness and desires for connection. Chandni Bibi, who stubbornly attributes her blindness to the 2005 earthquake but refuses to be defined by it, finds purpose and support through caregiving to her brother’s family. All are affected by the area’s geopolitics, endemic poverty, and aftermath of the earthquake, but none are defined by it, instead drawing their breath (a rich metaphor that Aijazi uses throughout) from their relations with others in the community and their unique topography.
As an ethnography of ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances (of natural disaster and empire), Aijazi’s scenes portray their characters sympathetically and with deference to their self-understandings rather than through patronizing caricatures or embellishments. He resists the temptation to use them as pawns in a larger narrative, or to draw conclusions (about Kashmir and its future, about natural disasters, about decolonialism) from them. As he writes in the book’s concluding chapter, he understands his task as an ethnographer to be “to enlarge and expand the frames of legibility of Kashmir, to stretch the relation between possibility and desire, and to prod and poke the realisms of imperial cartographies, borders, and boundaries” (p. 217). In this, he responds to Rob Nixon’s call to bring those suffering from slow violence into view (in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011), telling their stories in part so that readers can better appreciate how global forces connect victims with those contributing toward their victimization. However, Aijazi does not view or treat them as victims so much as people whose horizons as well as current predicaments are shaped by forces beyond their control but who nonetheless manage to carry on living within domains of autonomy and with resources that are available to them. The violence and deprivation come across as no less real to the reader, even as they are mostly relegated to the background in favor of a focus on the resilience of humanity.
Readers from political science might be disappointed by the backgrounding of politics and government. However, those concerned with decolonizing the discipline, and indeed those critical of the constraints of academic disciplines and seeking examples of social science work that challenges disciplinary boundaries, will find ample provocation in several extended reflections on the possibilities and constraints therein. Likewise, for those enamored with all kinds of theory, from the normative to the critical and interpretive; from decolonial to feminist and critical race theory, from theories of disaster and repair, of affect, of culture and identity, and of world systems. Aijazi interprets the social world that he encounters through a running dialogue that moves effortlessly between sometimes disparate theoretical voices, most of which are mobilized sympathetically, as expressions of what he wants his readers to understand or what he himself is struggling to understand. For those who study borderlands and the marginalized people that reside within them, or even for those who reflect on the challenges or importance of doing so, the book offers itself as a guide, a scholarly and personal resource, and a model for how to engage in such difficult but vital and edifying work.
