Till Mostowlansky

Till is an anthropologist whose research interests include mobility, materiality, and religion as well as diverse practices of “doing good” (e.g. development, charity, humanitarianism and philanthropy). He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, The Graduate Institute Geneva. Till was previously a lecturer at the University of Bern (2013-15), where he obtained his PhD, and he has also held Postdoctoral Fellowships at the National University of Singapore (2016) and The University of Hong Kong (2017-18). He is currently the Principal Investigator of a Swiss National Science Foundation funded Ambizione project on Muslim humanitarianism in the borderlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan and is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

 

List of publications (selection)

2020    “Humanitarian Affect: Islam, Aid and Emotional Impulse in Northern Pakistan.” History and Anthropology 31(2), 236–256.

 

2020    “Managing Karbala: Genealogies of Shia Humanitarianism in Pakistan, England and Iraq.” In: Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain and Michael Feener (eds.). Political Theologies and Development in Asia: Transcendence, Sacrifice and Aspiration. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 55–67.

 

2019    “Faraway Siblings So Close: Ephemeral Conviviality across the Wakhan Divide.” Modern Asian Studies 53(3), 943–977.

 

2019    (with Tobias Marschall). “Affective Labor: Afghanistan’s Road to China.” Roadsides 2, 73– 87

 

2019    (with Magnus Marsden). “Whither West Asia? Exploring North-South Perspectives on Eurasia.” Journal of Eurasian Studies 10(1), 3–10. 

 

2018    “Development Institutions and Religious Networks in the Pamirian Borderlands.” In: Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer and Alessandro Rippa (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. New York and London: Routledge, 385–395.

 

2018    (with Amelia Fauzia, Nurfadzilah Yahaya). “Muslim Endowments in Asia: Waqf, Charity and Circulations.” The Muslim World 108(4), 587–592.

 

2018    (with Hasan H. Karrar). “Assembling Marginality in Northern Pakistan.” Political Geography 63, 65–74.

 

2017    Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

 

2017    “Building Bridges Across the Oxus: Language, Development and Globalization at the Tajik-Afghan Frontier.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 247, 49–70.

 

2017    (with Brook Bolander). “Language and Globalization in South and Central Asian Spaces.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 247, 1–11.

 

2016    “‘The very act of cutting’: Ethnomethodology, Interaction and the Emic-Etic Debate.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28(4-5), 400–420.

 

2016    (with Andrea Rota). “A Matter of Perspective? Disentangling the Emic-Etic Debate in the Scientific Study of Religion\s.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28(4-5), 317–336.