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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Chiu Tuen Yi Jenny, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Situated in Peshawar, this paper follow British Afghan migrants on a return visit to their families in North-West Pakistan. Combining theorisations of mobility, liminality and commensality, it takes the picnic trip (chakar)—the pleasurable activity of transporting one’s “home” outdoors—as a little-explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of Pashtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration, rest, and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, chakar map destinations left and not-yet arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multileveled constellations of political and economic insecurity on migrants living between Britain and Pakistan. The paper reveals that chakar are at once therapeutic, and also reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the “round-trip”. This transnational perspective on refugee migration, occurring against the backdrop of border and nationality disputes between British India, Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan, usefully disrupts the colonial ethnographer’s gaze on Anglo-Afghan relations and, given Pakistan is the largest host country for Afghan refugees, also brings the political territory of Afghanistan firmly into the fold of South Asia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nichola Khan am a social anthropologist and chartered psychologist based at the University of Brighton (UK). For the past decade her research has focussed on the nexus of violence, war and migration—specifically, violence and conflict in Karachi in Pakistan; Afghan transnational refugee migration to Pakistan and Britain; and the human and mental health effects of war, forced displacement and conflict—particularly in cities. She is the author of Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi (2017, ed. Hurst and Co.; Oxford University Press, New York and Karachi); Penguin, Delhi), Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights (2017, University of Toronto Press), and Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan (2010, 2012, Routledge). She is currently writing a fourth monograph on Afghan migrants in Britain. Related to historical migration from Afghanistan, she is visiting the Asia Research Institute in order to conduct research onto Afghan trade migration and settlement in Singapore in the nineteenth century. She is currently also expanding my mental health research to cities in Asia.

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