Ping-hsiu Alice Lin

This paper traces how geological surveys and prospecting across two centuries shaped Afghanistan’s enduring characterization as a mineral-rich “El Dorado.” By investigating the shift in survey methods from comprehensive terrestrial to aerial reconnaissance, I show how geological knowledge production served purposes far beyond imperial resource identification and extraction. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, including insights from a current emerald mine operator, I uncover how precious stones’ physical properties and circulating narratives about hidden riches propelled—and continue to propel—a vast network of individuals into mining enterprises: from state authorities and local powerbrokers to foreign geologists, mineral collectors, and international aid organizations. The result is the creation of new narratives about extractable wealth that interweave scientific practices and global market dynamics to transcend conventional periodization such as pre-Soviet, Soviet, and United States. These narratives have emerged from and reinforced asymmetrical relationships in both labor and expertise, ultimately positioning Afghan participants precariously within global mineral markets, made riskier still in times of conflict.

In the wake of the US-led and Pakistan-allied “war on terror”, residents in Northwest Pakistan have faced inconceivable structural and physical violence, in ways that pose ethical challenges in ethnographic writing and research. Over the last few decades, militancy, banditry and overall insecurity have hampered relief efforts in the area and significantly weakened basic infrastructure. In this article, the author illustrates how an initial security plan to undertake fieldwork research in this “volatile” region proved somewhat irrelevant because of her positionality, gender and race/ethnicity. The author explores the implications of these dynamics in contexts characterized by unequal gender relations and strict gender segregation. In addition, undertaking empirical work in the context of epistemological frameworks in a region that has been subjected to active conflict, militarised operations and a singular representation in the global and local media, poses other ethical challenges for anthropologists searching for new areas of study and decolonised models of representation. This paper reiterates the importance of a reflexive approach of ethics that acknowledges the interpenetration of race, gender and the thick web of relationships in the production of knowledge and is, at the same time, respectful of cultural specificity.

This article examines Kathak as an Inter-Asia dance form across India and Hong Kong. Typified as “classical” dance in India, Kathak’s twenty-first-century transposition to Hong Kong is enabled by members of the Indian diaspora and local performers. Kathak’s expansion is also facilitated by an interest in popular Indian culture across Asia, notably through Bollywood. Against this background, Kathak cohabits a tension between a classicized identity in India, and an ethnicized folk representation abroad. Drawing on perspectives of Kathak practitioners and my study of the dance in Hong Kong and India, I examine structures that enable the institutionalization of certain art forms and popularization of others. An analytical consideration of dance as performance art, academic discipline, and professional pursuit requires an Inter-Asia methodology of triangulation to examine narratives of “high” culture. Such an approach offers a variegated understanding of Kathak as an embodied art form that resonates across postcolonial Asian societies.

Acknowledgements: This article benefited from the many conversations, camaraderie, and shared passion for dance within the Kathak community in Hong Kong. I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Soo Ryon Yoon and Emily Wilcox, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts. Xuenan Cao and Mejgan Massoumi generously offered comments and important corrections, which significantly improved the article. Any remaining shortcomings are my own.

As the US-led global “War on Terror” enters its third decade, the structural, physical, and epistemological violence it has wrought continues to shape lives and landscapes in Afghanistan and Iraq. At present, the scholarship of an entire generation of Middle Eastern Studies has been embedded in the geopolitical realities of this indefinite war, even those whose work does not directly confront it. Yet despite the war’s enduring presence, scholars working on Afghanistan and Iraq rarely find the opportunity to reflect with one another on how the global assemblage of international military intervention and the creation of a shifting target of terrorism has narrowed our foci. Instead, these geographies are yoked together in often destructive and superficial ways, erasing older forms of interregional connectivity and longer genealogies of violence.

This report explores the Chinese diaspora in Pakistan, whose presence in the region spans multiple generations. The founding members of this community are considered “twice-migrants” in that they arrived in present-day Pakistan via British India and the former East Pakistan. In studying this diasporic community in Pakistan and their migratory trajectory, I pay particular attention to how regions of Asia were connected and the links within the Indian sub-continent in the early twentieth century across the port cities of Calcutta, Dacca, Chittagong, and Karachi. Drawing on firsthand interviews with ethnic Chinese in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Karachi, this report aims to create a picture of what their lives are like, and particularly discusses their adoption of Christianity and its intermixture with Chinese religious ritual in the context of a Muslim-majority society.