Tobias Marschall "From Trade Corridor to Dead End? Walking Paths of Conflict and Integration in Eastern Afghanistan"
ContoursTalks series
30.06.2022 16:00 – 18:00
Location: Rachel Carson Center, Conference Room 2nd floor, Leopoldstr. 11B, 80802 Munich
Or you can join us online via Zoom:
https://lmu-munich.zoom.us/j/98568425239?pwd=NnFhcjVKdnE1UFQxY2lFOVdNQ0NTZz09
The Afghan Pamirs appear on maps and in geopolitical imaginaries as an exceptionally remote and in many ways endangered borderland topography. Across its landscape, road tracks used and made by trucks and tanks dating back to the Soviet-Afghan war, continue to guide movement. Their trajectory is criss-crossed by finer lines drawn by motorcycles and by marks left by MRAP’s tires of Chinese army vehicles. Along main pathways, flocks of yak, fat-tailed sheep, dogs and long-haired goats leave traces of their seasonal journeys, countless threads that endlessly converge and disentangle.
In this talk, Tobias Marschall follows the contours of a walked ethnography of patterned forms of circulation in the Afghan Pamirs, and retrace how war and violence, their unnerving aftermaths and pre-emptive forces shape space and map onto enduring imaginary distinctions. In attending to the multispecies temporalities of circulation in Eastern Afghanistan, he looks at how enduring tropes are the object of everyday appropriations and create patterns of difference and migration.
About Tobias
Tobias is an anthropologist and photographer currently based in Geneva, Switzerland. Between 2015 and 2019, he grounded his visual ethnography in walking the rugged terrain of the Afghan Pamirs, in attending migrants' Central Asian nodes and in participating to their online extension.
For more on Tobias and his stunning visual (&) ethnographic work please visit: www.tobiasmarschall.com
About ContoursTalks
The ContoursTalks series is organized by the ERA.NET-funded research project CONTOURS: Conservation, Tourism, Remoteness.
For more information on the CONTOURS project and ContoursTalks, please see www.contours.fi
If you have any further inquiries, please send an email to carolin.maertens@rcc.lmu.de