The social life of pathways: building infrastructures through giving and walking in the Karakoram, Pakistan

Fontanari, Thibault
(2022) Himalayan journeys. Circulations and transformations. — Location: EHESS. Campus Condorcet. Centre de colloques. Aubervilliers (22.June.2022)

Files

FONTANARIThibault-HimalayanJourneys_EHESS.docx
  • Closed Access
  • Microsoft Word XML
  • 41.13 KB
Request a copy

Details

Authors
  • Fontanari, Thibaultorcid-logoUCLouvain
    Author
Abstract
Wakhi farmers and herders of Shimshal in the Hunza Valley, in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan, build their mountain pathways through a complex pooling of gifts called nomus: a family offers resources to build an infrastructure (a pathway, a bridge, a canal) in honour of a loved one, and the other families mobilise their workforce to build it. Everyone walks and everyone gives, but by giving in order to walk with ease and by experiencing the need to give while walking, the Wakhis of the Karakoram invite us to think about the intertwining of the circulation of the gift with the circulation of people along their mountain paths. This paper first shows how the perception of the built environment through walking generates the obligation and the motivations to give. According to theories of the gift, social relations are (re)generated through gift-giving between groups and individuals. Landscape studies have also shown how people weave relations between humans, non-humans and their environment through walking. This paper argues that these two important dynamics intersect in the building of infrastructures by local people. The living and the deceased (re) generate their relations through the circulation of gifts, but also through the building of collective infrastructures that will enable them to circulate. Moreover, motivations to give are experienced not by beings detached from the world but within an ontological relationship with this world. The paper furthermore explores how motivations to give have changed as a result of the construction of roads. The Karakoram Highway, built between 1966 and 1978 to connect Kashgar in China to Mansehra in Pakistan, and then the Shimshal Road, built between 1985 and 2003 to link the village to the Karakoram Highway, offered new forms of connectivity and provided the ground on which the inhabitants circulated and encountered cultural differences. These encounters led them to develop new imaginaries, giving rise to new reasons for giving and ways of organising themselves to build new kinds of infrastructure in the village such as schools, religious buildings, and roads suitable for four-wheel drives.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Fontanari, T. (2022). The social life of pathways: building infrastructures through giving and walking in the Karakoram, Pakistan. Himalayan journeys. Circulations and transformations., EHESS. Campus Condorcet. Centre de colloques. Aubervilliers. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/105709