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 Kyrgyz pastoralists settled there when military forces progressively closed borders drawn from afar. Since then, desires of outmigration and participation in conflicting national and international exchanges has fragmented their supposed ethnic cohesion. At the same time, aspirations for relative autonomy are constantly thwarted by opposing 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 far from being determined by national, environmental or socioeconomic boundaries. 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 faction of the Afghan conflict shares a stake in a pastoral economy that opens to China by Pakistani traders. 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.

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. © 2015 Tobias Marschall
Afghanistan Bactrian Camel Central Asia Landscape Mountains Pamirs Pathways Wakhan
Young Commandant
High mountains 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.
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
Afghanistan Altyn Saat Central Asia Gold Watch Interiors Pamirs Seiko Panj details yurt
The Trader and the Khan
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Khan Little Pamir Pamirs Portrait trader
Exhausting Trades
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Interiors Pamirs Portrait Trade exhaustion trader yurt
Summer Harvest
Afghanistan Central Asia Khan Little Pamir Pamirs fodder outdoors
Remote Pathways
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 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
Cloudy 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
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
Little Pamir
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 the shifting political and climatic situation. 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, some decided to move into the remnants of a buffer zone between Tsarist and British empires. A group of approx. 1'200 ethnic Kyrgyz remain throughout the year after a major 1978 emigration along with Soviet incursion 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 Little Pamir Pasture Snow Winter white
Dusty Clouds and Pakistani Winds
Afghanistan Wakhan clouds wind
Frozen Stones
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. The substance is rapidly inhaled, held and quickly released. We chat over the value and spread of the 'black drug' (kara dawa in Kyrgyz).
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
Pastoralism II
Nomads' categorial containment, or their distancing in a space remote, lagging in a different time (Afghan Kyrgyz stuck on the Roof of the World, nomads endangered because trapped in time, caught by international borders, etc.)? And indeed, the 'nomads' move and visibly do so in attending pastures in rather stable migration rhythms. If the ascription of the nomads' difference does not resume in an irreducible disposition toward migration, contested by the banal rhythmicity and cyclical temporality of their movements, where to locate alterity elsewhere than in the very images and imaginaries conveyed and endorsed along their varied migration routes? Thus, an ethnographic engagement could sideline the rather fetish image of nomads and attempt to respond to the way those images of difference move and foreground movements.
Afghanistan Central Asia FF Landscape Little Pamir üch Jylga
Walks
Threading paths, back a a time when haze blurs both way ahead and behind. Memories' power lie in their present significance, delving into them redraws affects and their contours. There is no single and stable vantage point but embodied and situated dispositions, time inflects affective states.
Afghanistan Badakhshan FF Little Pamir Wakhan
Flight
Patterned forms of circulation entail their own imagination, expressed in distinct tones and colours. They manifest broader trends in style and dress, marks of key differences such as us/them, inside/outside, etc.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Ergail FF Little Pamir Wakhan
Pastoralism VIII
Close and attentive, cutting the rug's fabric to stitch new clothes. When time stops, learning and growing up all along.
Afghanistan Badakhshan FF Little Pamir Seki Kalon Wakhan
Pastoralism VII
Bukka, the largest yak males wait. They were selected to follow Pakistani traders on their way back. After a break in markets, their journey aims for the Shimshal Pamir where they will meet new flocks.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Ergail FF Little Pamir Pamirs yak
Pastoralism VI
Playing, retrieving, pushing, serious end afternoon games.
Afghanistan Little Pamir
Pastoralism V
Their stepbrother left to Pakistan, retrieving the goods they ordered earlier that summer. Seki Kalon, Little Pamir, 2016.
Afghanistan Badakhshan FF Little Pamir Seki Kalon Wakhan
Pastoralism IV
Evenings Er Ali Bai, in the center, surveys and counts the returned yak. His children watch, while a cousin passed by for a visit. Daily but decisive routine, his constant monitoring and care surely were key to the wealth he managed to cumulate throughout his life. Er Ali Bai passed away in summer 2018 from a generalised stomach infection that could not be cured in Murghab, Tajikistan, nor did we were able to request an airplane emergency evacuation to Kabul at the time he was sent back to his camp by Tajik authorities. Summer 2015, Ergail, Little Pamir, Afghanistan.
Afghanistan Badakhshan Central Asia Ergail FF Little Pamir Pamirs Portrait
Pastoralism I
Sheep's triage with style, Winter in the Little Pamir.
Afghanistan Little Pamir
Chylap, April 2019.
Afghanistan Little Pamir
Pastoralism III
One of the very first sunset from summer 2015. Men call and bring the yaks back, women milk silently, their hands battling to get their share. Üch Jylga, Little Pamir.
Afghanistan Central Asia FF Landscape Little Pamir üch Jylga

Tobias Marschall

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

Sur les routes des Kirghizes Afghans

Addiction

Social Media