Professor Dr Alessandro Monsutti
Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
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Talk
'Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan'
Alessandro Monsutti is Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. He has been Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (1999-2000) and Yale University (2008-2010), Grantee of the MacArthur Foundation (2004-2006), and Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna (2012) and Arizona State University (2014). He is also Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre (University of Oxford). In addition, he has worked as a consultant for several international and nongovernmental organizations such as UNHCR.
He has carried out extensive field research in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran since the mid-1990s, and more recently in the Western countries among Afghan refugees and migrants. Among his current research interests: the political economy of reconstruction in Afghanistan as an example of emerging forms of sovereignty and global governance; asylum seekers and refugees in Europe; migrants and non-migrants in urban neighborhoods; the changing nature of borderlands in Europe and South Asia.
His is the author of War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan (2005), Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan (2020); and co-editors of several volumes, including The Other Shiites: From the Mediterranean to Central Asia (2007), Entre ordre et subversion: logiques plurielles, alternatives, écarts, paradoxes (2007), Le monde turco-iranien en question (2008), Migration et développement, un mariage arrangé / Migration und Entwicklung: eine Zweckallianz (2008), Connivences et antagonismes: Enquête sociologique dans six rues de Genève (2015), Complicity and Antagonism: Anthropological Views of Geneva (2017).
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Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan
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Homo Itinerans: Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan (already published in French, English version forthcoming in November 2020)
Afghan society has been marked in a lasting way by war and the exodus of part of its population, but also by the presence of a myriad of international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as armed forces from many countries. Homo itinerans comes in many ways. The movement of refugees trying to get to Europe, Australia or North America is matched by the flow of experts who exercise their talents in Afghanistan after having been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine or East Timor. The latter travel from North to South and promote social and political norms supposed to be universal; the former move in the opposite direction from South to North and unmask through their mobility the inequitable distribution of resources, whether it is economic well-being or the possibility of living in security.
Turning resolutely away from the image of Afghanistan as a country suspended outside the historicity of the surrounding regions, as a margin that might be magnificent but is resistant to change, this book deals with these multiple mobilities, which intersect but do not unfold in a horizontal world. By their very differences, they express power relations and global inequalities.
By small impressionist touches, by telling scenes of everyday life observed among the villagers of the Afghan mountains or during an evening between expatriates in Kabul, during a training program given in a luxury hotel in Abu Dhabi or during a visit to the Calais jungle, this book evokes places, brushes atmospheres to show, hear and feel the life of people encountered during more than two decades of ethnographic itinerancies. Adopting mobility as an analytical key, playing with scales, it proposes a global although intimate ethnography of Afghanistan and offers a decentered perspective on the contemporary world.
