David Butz

Autoethnography: A Limited Endorsement*

In this commentary, we wish to draw from Kathryns experience in Askole to complicate the argument we developed in favor of an autoethnographic sensibility in the earlier article in this issue (Butz and Besio 2004). Just as we used Davids first-person singular voice in much of that article, we use Kathryns voice here to reflect the central influence of her research circumstances on the points that we make. We will return to the first-person plural voice in the commentarys conclusion where we attempt to synthesize the lessons of our two sets of research experiences.

INVESTIGATING PORTERING RELATIONS AS A LOCUS FOR TRANSCULTURAL INTERACTION IN THE KARAKORUM REGION OF NORTHERN PAKISTAN

Since European contact about 1835 a specific set of coercive labor relations-porters carrying loads for foreign travel- ers-has significantly shaped local/Western interaction in the Karakorum region of Northern Pakistan. This paper offers a prelim- inary attempt to outline some theoretical and methodological issues relevant to understanding portering relations as a historical and contemporary site for structuring cross-cultural interaction in the region. It draws on the concepts of contact zone, transcul- turation, discursive formations, and public and hidden transcripts. It then sketches the rough dimensions of an unfolding empiri- cal project to trace metropolitan and indigenous transcultural discourses of self and other into, through, and out of the specific material relations of portering. Two brief examples discuss (a) the European-initiated formalized regulation of porter employ- ment in the late 19th century, and (b) indigenous practices of publicly resisting unequal labor relations through strategically-situ- ated work stoppages.

Mobility Justice in the Context of Disaster

Abstract This article contributes to the critical mobilities literature by developing the concept of mobility justice in relation to its social justice referent. To meet this objective, we draw on two resources. Theoretically, we deploy Iris Marion Young’s theory of social justice that includes relations of institutional domination, alongside those of material distribution, as key aspects of just social relations. Empirically, we focus on the Attabad landslide, which destroyed a large section of the arterial roadway in the Gojal district of northern Pakistan, stranding those living north of the landslide. Our analysis of this mobility crisis demonstrates that state domination is an important mobility justice issue, which tends to be overlooked in studies of mobility exclusions that implicitly privilege relations of distribution. State disaster management strategies enact domination, but also render visible preexisting relations of domination that were established in the context of road infrastructure development and the region’s political liminality, and that have organized and shaped an unjust mobility regime overtime. Achieving mobility justice in post-disaster Gojal requires democratic institutional change at the state level, which will be particularly difficult to realize by this politically peripheral jurisdiction.

Why International Development Neglects Indigenous Social Reality

ABSTRACT Development initiatives often result in degradation, rather than improvement, in the well-being of recipient communities. In part, this is because development agents lack adequate perceptions of indigenous priorities, and fail to appreciate the holistic nature of traditional rural communities. In this paper we outline, then critique, four prominent theoretical approaches to development: modernization, dependency, intermediate technology and sustainable development. We demonstrate that these theories, theories from which initiatives derive, neglect the social reality of recipient communities.

Legitimating Porter Regulation in an Indigenous Mountain Community in Northern Pakistan

Portering—carrying loads for pay—is an important source of cash income in the high mountain community of Shimshal, northern Pakistan. In this paper recent changes in the regulation of portering opportunities in Shimshal are interpreted as a tentative outcome of ongoing struggles among villagers over the ideological power of two integrated and competing conceptualisations, or discourses, of political legitimacy. These contemporary ideological discourses trace to historical conflicts between commoners and royalty in the feudal kingdom of Hunza, of which Shimshal was an outlying settlement. Specifically, an ‘authoritative’ position in Shimshal perpetuates a tradition of elite privilege developed by the kings of Hunza to justify their penetration of community-level political, social, and economic life. A ‘discursive’ position draws from an alternative tradition of equity and solidarity which originated in the consensual clan (and later, community) assemblies of commoners, and which was used historically to resist the infiltration of royal prerogative into everyday life. An account of recent struggles between advocates of these positions over portering regulation in Shimshal is developed from ethnographic material collected in 1988 and 1989. Aspects of Habermass theory of communicative action are utilised selectively to interpret the implications of those struggles for political legitimacy in Shimshal. It seems that Shimshal is experiencing a tenuous shift away from authoritative forms of legitimacy toward more discursive ones, although a strongly Habermasian conceptualisation of discursivity is unwarranted.

The Atta Abad Landslide and Everyday Mobility in Gojal, Northern Pakistan

Abstract In early 2010, the massive Atta Abad landslide blocked the Hunza River in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan. It also buried or flooded 25 km of the Karakoram Highway, the only vehicular transportation route connecting this region to the rest of Pakistan. Since the Karakoram Highway opened in 1978, road mobility has become deeply integrated into the everyday economies and time–space fabric of Gojali households. In this paper, we focus on what happens when a natural disaster unexpectedly slams the brakes on movement as a way to understand more fully the sociodevelopmental implications of roads in the rural global South. We review the history of mobility in the region to explain the importance of the Karakoram Highway as a mobility platform that restructured sociospatial relations in Gojal. We then turn to interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and local news sources to outline how residents of 4 Gojali communities were experiencing the economic, social, and emotional impacts of landslide-induced mobility disruptions in the 18 months following the disaster.

Serving Sahibs with Pony and Pen: The Discursive Uses of ‘Native Authenticity’:

In 1923 W Heffer & Sons Ltd published Servant of Sahibs: A Book to be Read Aloud, an autobiographical account of Ghulam Rassul Galwans service, from 1890 to 1901, with English and American adventurers traveling through Kashmir and Central Asia. The focus of the book on Rassul Galwans growth through colonial labor, combined with the authenticity imposed on him and his account through a number of textual and editorial devices, allows the book to be read credibly as a text that aids the colonial establishment in utilizing a discourse of Native authenticity in support of a somewhat discredited discourse of benevolent colonial labor relations. We begin by introducing the sociopolitical context within which it was useful for such a book to be published, sponsored and described as authoritative by the colonial establishment. In the second main section, we describe the ways it was a useful authenticating text, arguing that the interplay between Rassul Galwans narrative and the introductory and editorial comments fulfils three attributes of a convincing piece of ‘Native authenticity’: to identify what the text is meant to authenticate, to establish the authors authenticity as a Native voice in terms acceptable to a Western audience, and to tell the appropriate story in a way that sounds authentic to a Western ear. In the third section we demonstrate that Servant of Sahibs cannot be understood as unproblematically accommodative either to colonial constructions of trans cultural labor relations or to the notion of Native authenticity. Without necessarily crediting Rassul Galwan with intent to resist, we argue that the accommodative text he helped create contains within it a tactical alternative to the very discourses it ostensibly naturalizes. This, we suggest, is characteristic of cultural products of transcultural contact zones, as well as of public transcripts of accommodation more generally. We end the paper by examining briefly (a) the possibility that Rassul Galwans major theme of growth through colonial labor is informed less by satisfaction with his subservience to colonial masters than by interests only tangentially related to the field of domination which he is ostensibly addressing, and (b) the editors apparent willingness to include Rassul Galwans tactical disruptions and thus potentially recuperate those disruptions into colonial discourse.

Political Ecology of Human-Environment Change in Gojal, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

In the past half-century, the Gojali people of northern Pakistan have experienced dramatic human-ecological change, the dynamics of which have been shaped by key aspects of the region’s environmental governance context, including Gojal’s geographical peripherality and constitutional liminality, the emerging influence of global conservation and international Ismailism as non-state transnational governance actors, the construction of the Karakoram Highway and subsequent development of a regional road network and the 2010 Attabad landslide disaster and associated influx of food relief. These contextual features have complemented and sometimes contradicted each other to influence Gojal’s political ecology in three ways: they have (1) diminished Gojalis’ inclination and capacity to maintain and productively use agricultural and pastoral environments, (2) limited locals’ access to their ecological resource base and undermined the legitimacy of local resource control and (3) created new Gojali identities that are both less materially rooted in the local environment and more capable of acting politically in support of local resource control.

Sustainable Tourism And Everyday Life In Shimshal, Pakistan

This article investigates the implications of everyday life for the development of sustainable community-based tourism in Shimshal, Northern Areas, Pakistan. Focusing on the circumstances of Shimshals trekking porters, it argues that the sustainability of community-level tourism strategies rely to some extent on their success at complementing the tactics community members develop to incorporate tourism involvement into the exigencies of their everyday lives. This claim is situated in a more general discussion of the need to avoid abstracting from the scale of the individual to that of community, and from the realm of tactics to that of strategy, in conceptualizing and operationalizing sustainable tourism.

Risky subjects: changing geographies of employment in the automobile industry

This paper examines employment in the Canadian automobile industry in terms of Beck’s (1992) Risk Society. We demonstrate that risk transcends terms of employment, to encompass injury, lay-off, and displacement. Work becomes increasingly risky with the blurring of employment relations within and among three geographic scales: the globe, the locale and the plant. We argue for an embodied account of the experience of risk which emphasizes the inscription of different temporal and spatial configurations of work on the body.