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From Kabul to Kiev: Afghan trading networks across the former Soviet Union*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2015

MAGNUS MARSDEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, United Kingdom Email: m.marsden@sussex.ac.uk

Abstract

While the territory of Afghanistan is widely connected in the popular and historical imagination to long-distance trade, Afghan society continues to be popularly represented as being made-up of ‘tribes’, who subscribe to static ‘honour codes’, and tenaciously cling to archaic tribal values. This article examines the significance of traders of Afghan background to commodity flows across a wide range of contexts in the former Soviet Union, especially in Russia and Ukraine and the Muslim-majority Central Asian Republics. It charts the social and political backgrounds of the merchants who make up this trading network, the nature of their connections to one another and the forms of mobility that make these connections possible, their complex relations with the communities amongst whom they live, and the types of moral value they attach to their work as traders.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was funded by a Leverhulme Research Grant in support of a joint project with Prof. B. D. Hopkins entitled ‘Islam, Trade and Citizenship across the Frontiers of South and Central Asia’. For valuable comments and suggestions I warmly thank the two Modern Asian Studies anonymous reviewers, Dr Diana Ibañez-Tirado, Dr Kit Davis, Dr Abdul Iloliev, Dr Gabriele vom Bruck, Dr Kostas Retsikas, and Prof B. D. Hopkins. The article has also greatly benefited from audiences of seminar series at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the University of Kent; the University of Durham; the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies; and the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, as well as participants at the British Association of South Asian Studies conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in April 2014. Following anthropological convention, pseudonyms are used throughout.

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