Much research on humanitarianism operates with the underlying assumption that practices of aid are somewhat inspired by originally Christian – and now secularized – ideas about life and inter-human relations. This becomes particularly visible in approaches that historicize contemporary notions of suffering and 'bare life' as the re-translated ethics of compassion. Such reasoning helps to understand the genealogies of humanitarian institutions from the Global North. Yet the question arises of how we can make sense of actors who have navigated South-North and South-South connections in past and present.
In this talk, Till Mostowlansky will address this question based on anthropological and historical research in northern Pakistan and its adjacent borderlands in today’s Afghanistan, China and Tajikistan. He seeks to do so through a focus on individual and institutional humanitarian actors that have drawn on various sources of legitimacy, including Islam, British colonial rule, entrepreneurial ideologies and ideas of masculine passion.
About the Speaker
Till Mostowlansky is an anthropologist of humanitarianism, infrastructure and Islam in contemporary Central Asia and at its historical crossroads between Russian, British and Chinese influence. He is currently an Ambizione Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute. Till holds an MA from the University of Vienna in Austria and completed his PhD at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Before taking up his position in Geneva he was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bern, the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences of The University of Hong Kong.
Till is the author of two monographs and numerous journal articles. His latest book Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press) was published in 2017. His articles have appeared in, amongst others, Central Asian Survey, Modern Asian Studies, Political Geography, and The Muslim World. In his current project on Muslim humanitarianism, Till works on the transformative force of Muslim networks which dissect the borderlands of Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and Tajikistan and mediate connectivity to places across Asia. In the context of this project, Till also researches the significance of Chinese-built infrastructure for these networks, and he edits the series 'MUHUM - Muslim Humanitarianism' at Allegra Lab.