Sur les routes des Kirghizes Afghans

These photographs were exhibited in Geneva at the Salon Davis of the Graduate Institute (9-11.2019), the Swiss Anthropological Association's annual conference (8-9.11.2019) and la Galerie d'Anières (8-18.01.2020).

Inventing the Silk Roads
Ptukh, Wakhan Corridor. Bactrian camels tread pathways that Marco Polo reportedly walked on. Another wonderful species, no other equals their sway. Afghan Kyrgyz are known to make the best and nicest covers, dressed with typical patterns. Expensive, camels are worth 20 sheep but lost some value since motorbikes and larger engines started to make their way in the Little Pamir on yack back a few years ago. A good investment in luxury and prestige, owning camels is still an important sign of wealth, detached from practical value. Their sensible feet suffer from the stony and rugged trails that lead to the lowlands. Only in the Great Pamir do they enjoy larger and smoother paths to markets, financed by the curious WFP "Food for Work" program. There they carry yurts and equipments when camps are moving, form long caravans reminder of too well known Silk Road imaginaries.
Afghanistan Bactrian Camel Central Asia Landscape Mountains Pamirs Pathways Wakhan
Young Commandant
Being on the Afghan “Roof of the World“ did not shield people from the effects of war. The factions of the conflict share a stake in the important pastoral economy, trading livestock to armed groups in the lowlands. The image of a safe heaven promoted by tourist and development agencies hides and perhaps partly enables other power plays.
Afghanistan Wakhan soldier weapon
The Khan's Son
Motorcycles were recently brought to the Pamirs on yaks three years ago. Made in Iran, China or Pakistan, the engines provide valuable support to herding activities on the large valleys. Music is often plaid loud on their speakers to the agreement of everybody's ears.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Children Little Pamir Pamirs Portrait motorcycle
A Pastoral Existence
Breeding flocks requires patience as only slow and minute drive of the herd ensures its growth. Agile goats lead the way for slower and voracious sheep, both species complementing each other in their abilities and needs. The risks are as high as the reward, since a bad climatic event can decimate more than half of a herd that can otherwise rapidly multiply its original size.
Afghanistan Central Asia Great Pamir Malung Zhdan Pasture landscape. outdoor sheep
Talismans on Fragile Beings
"Children are a rare gift," as the saying goes among Afghan Kyrgyz. In the Pamir, the back of children are pinned with talismans for their health at times when good care becomes useless. During winter, the harsh climate is marked with lows reaching easily -40° C and summers are made of only two months over 0° C.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Children Landscape Little Pamir Pamirs talisman transmission yak
Bling bling and Exuberance
Gold watches made in Japan or China trade for cheap in the lowland bazars, travel upland in the pockets as small gifts in trade. Gold fits the vivid and warm colors, their use value reaching further than timekeeping. New trends in style mingle with older ones, their selection is but no random act. Gifts and preferences from far away made home, while in the lowland many rail the exuberant styles of mountain dwellers.
Afghanistan everyday gold watch mountain walkietalkie connection style trend Wakhan Pamirs everydayafghanistan seiko
The Trader and the Khan
Er Ali Bai and Mahmutali Khan quibble over their Kyrgyz and Pakistani hats. Both old friends as well as respected and wealthy leaders, they stopped their negociations to joke over stereotypes on their own Kyrgyz and Hunza communities. Mahmutali Khan connects Afghan Kyrgyz to the Pakistani port of Karachi and the important trade city of Kashgar in China by the intermediary of his shops and guesthouses.
ErAali died last year on these days. He was considered the wealthiest livestock owner, generous in his spending but constantly sitting with walkie talkie, binoculars on, shouting at his employed herders the directions to follow towards the best pastures. Careful management and sharing to poorer households made his fortune, along with perhaps less acceptable means, the rumours convey. He used to welcome newcomers with frontal accusations, partially hidden in jokes. "You taliban stone, what riches are you stealing from us this time?" People hard in trade are hard as stones. He kept shouting at me, partly curious, partly distant, playing with my camera too.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Khan Little Pamir Pamirs Portrait trader
Exhausting Trades
A trader rests after three weeks spent in the Pamirs. He is used to move upland since the nineties and knows most of the herders. His activities are now threatened by new traders from further places and with more resources. He doubts if his well known trading companions will continue to lend him preference against the greater profit they can make with other more wealthy but unknown traders.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Interiors Pamirs Portrait Trade exhaustion trader yurt
Summer Harvest
Men prepare on the fields for the long winter in the Little Pamir, a work done only with their own hands.
Afghanistan Central Asia Khan Little Pamir Pamirs fodder outdoors
Remote Pathways
"Vast migrations of people - some voluntary, most not - have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth's climate changes in the coming decade there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us." Carl Sagan 1994: Pale Blue Dot.
Afghanistan Central Asia Landscape Mountains Pamirs Pathways Walking outdoor travel
Speaker and Daughter
Mullah Abdylhak, a respected religious leader, took the role of speaker for his peers. An interview we shot together upon the death of past leader (khan) in 2018 made the headlines in Kyrgyz newspapers and reinstated new energies to the then dormant “repatriation“ program initiated in 2006.
Afghanistan Interiors Winter childcare father
Kyrgyz Style
Abdulkhani Hajji Butu, current customary leader (khan) of the small community features the largest yurt too. Brought from Kashgar, he ordered it from well known Pakistani traders at a time where borders were stil open.
Afghanistan Interiors Kyrgyz Aesthetics yurt
Homework
Teachers move upland in summer for three months and teach in the local school. The curriculum consists basically of Dari, Geography, Maths and History. Only boys attended, contrary to the NGO's promises to educate girls. Several organisations and the Afghan state sponsor the institutions that mene old and successful pupils to highschools in the district capital.
Afghanistan Interiors School TV connection reading young girl
Frozen Chakmaktin Lake
Afghanistan Little Pamir Snow Winter clouds frozen lake white
Smoke in Thin Air.
Parallel to opium, cheap cigarettes make their way upland in large boxes. Heavy smokers there are, claiming two packs a day, despite hypoxia. I quit smoking following my first journey upland. #afghanistan #Pamir #Smoke #Cigarette #gold #portrait #addiction #thinair #neverstopexploring
Afghanistan Altyn Saat Kyrgyz Aesthetics cigarette clouds glod watches smoke
Cloud Scapes
Afghanistan Little Pamir Snow Winter clouds white
Light Clouds
Afghanistan Little Pamir Snow Winter clouds white
Clouds without Rain
Afghanistan Sarhad e Baroghil Wakhan Winter clouds
Winter Pastoralism
Early morning, on our way to the Little Pamir. 5th day walk. We brought the yack herd of our hosts out to the pastures. Wolves are less a threat for yaks and can be left for some while without surveillance. Herding necessitates however constant management, impossible to leave the camps fo a while. If Afghan Kyrgyz settled the Little Pamir, it is a greater issue for Wakhi who leave families for 6-8 months a year down in the lowlands. Small camps of men only from which curious jokes and stories abound.
Afghanistan Little Pamir Snow Winter clouds livestock sheep white
Winter Harvest
Afghanistan Landscape Mountain frozen river outdoor shepherd
Development Dreams' Leftovers
Afghanistan Mountains Snow Winter clouds
View over the Tajik Border
Afghanistan Landscape Mountains Snow Wakhan Winter clouds day lowland
Whitewall
Afghanistan Landscape Mountains Snow Wakhan Winter day lowland
Walking Trails
A Pamir is a wide and open valley, ideal for grazing. Seen from above and a cartographer's perspective, the Pamirian Knot denotes the Massif at the northwestern end of the Himalaya. Prior to the 19th century's tracing and subsequent closure of international borders, people used to roam from valleys to valleys, moving to places along with shifting political and climatic situations. The Little and Big Pamir were used as summer pastures then, winters considered too harsh with their -40°C. As military troops increased their incursions in their dwelling areas by the 1920s, a group of approx. 1'200 ethnic Kyrgyz remain throughout the year after a major 1978 emigration that eventually brought their parents to Vang, Turkey. Now a tiny door, because of expensive administrative hurdles, opens for the wealthiest to Naryn, Kyrgyzstan.
Afghanistan Landscape Mountain clouds outdoor valley yak
Care
Khaibubu and her step mother prepare her newborn child for sleep. The father was away at the time, participating to the ifrst row of “returnees“ (Kairylmandar). He would eventually see his first child only a year later.
Afghanistan childcare home mother yurt
Winter in the Little Pamir
Afghanistan Landscape Little Pamir Pasture Snow Winter white
Dusty Clouds and Pakistani Winds
Afghanistan Wakhan clouds wind
Frozen Stones
Empty camps in Bozai Kümböz, the unusually high snow covered pastures when strong winds removed it from others further eastwards. "Hell in the Wakjir (valley)" I was told, were livestock died en masse. From there on we left our travel companions to join the eastern end of the Little Pamir and return visiting each camp on our way. We eventually learned to appreciate strong winds, -20°C weather, and clear sky instead of the mild, humid and snowing weather.
Afghanistan Little Pamir Pathway Snow Winter clouds white
Dry Rain over the Little Pamir
Afghanistan Camp Central Asia Ergail FF Landscape Little Pamir Mountains Pamirs Remoteness Connectivity Seki Kalon clouds
Addiction.
A small rope bathes in melted yack grease. Hands adjust the melting resin over the lamp. Short aspirations burn the substance rapidly inhaled and quickly released. We chat over the value and spread in the Afghan Pamirs of the *black drug* (*kara dawa* in Kyrgyz). "Everyone smokes, women, men, elders, we always did. Times are tough here, we need powerful drugs," he releases between two puffs, leaning back.
#Afghanistan #Pamir #Wakhan #hands #opium #rug #drug #addiction #ethnography #everyday
Afghanistan Little Pamir detail hands opium
The Right Hand
Milk tea, rock salt, bread and this time exceptionally some cheese. A typical serving and our daily diet in the Pamirs. Evenings, some rice and a piece of meat. Lack of vitamins is a matter of course that the specially enriched flour and rice people provision poorly helps compensate. Bread and tea, as well as lodging are prompted for free and without request to any traveler, tourists excepted, in the Pamirs. Small gifts and trust in trade are but tacitly expected.
No sugar but a bit of salt, simply pour your fried bread (borsook) in tea. Hands are marked by the sun and works but also mark trust or friendship in tending to the same meal, embracing another hand, etc. It would be impure or disrespectful to reach with the left. Works and preferences are realized with a touch of arbitrariness.
Afghanistan Central Asia Pamirs Remoteness Connectivity

Lying at the northwestern end of the Himalaya range, the Pamirs have long been known and exploited for their outstanding pastures, as Marco Polo and other Chinese and European travelers have recounted. In the 1920s, a small group of about 2,000 ethnic Kyrgyz settled there when military forces progressively closed borders drawn from afar. Since then, desires of outmigration and participation in conflicting nation-al and international exchanges has fragmented their supposed ethnic cohesion. At the same time, their aspirations for relative autonomy are constantly thwarted by opposing and abrasive affiliations.

The Afghan Pamirs resemble typical colonial anomalies – they are contemporary leftovers from the original designs of a buffer zone between Tsarist and British empires. Primarily used as summer pastures, the climatic and political pressures that people face there are extreme. Winters are marked with lows easily reaching -40°C and the rugged and mountainous plateau lying above 4,300 meters failed to shield the region from war and the series of conflicts that have now ravaged Afghanistan for more than 40 years.

If Afghans count among the world’s largest refugee population, it is worth noting that no major outmigration has occurred from the Pamirs since its 1978 Soviet occupation. “Prisoners of the Roof of the World”, as a famous documentary title called them, the fate of these Afghans is commonly resumed through an enclosure within national, environmental or socioeconomic boundaries, and explained by the down-playing of greater forces.

Despite the impression of extreme remoteness conveyed by the Afghan Pamirs, the place is not disconnected from global flows. Major IOs and NGOs tie Afghan Kyrgyz livelihoods to global discourses through development, humanitarian and conservation initiatives. Being on many cusps opens opportunities that conventional analysis scales do not grasp. The Afghan Pamirs’ pastures constitute an important ecological niche; each national faction shares a stake in a pastoral economy that opens to China by Pakistani traders/intermediaries. Important marginal gains arise from a proximity with international borders, which are important sites of control and exchange.

Recently, a tiny door opened to Kyrgyzstan through a highly mediated and contested repatriation scheme. Despite expensive administrative hurdles, what new challenges in terms of migration will people face?

Tobias Marschall

On the Edge: Afghan Kyrgyz Migration in an Era of Climate Change

Sur les routes des Kirghizes Afghans

Addiction