Magnus Marsden's Trading Worlds is a thoughtful, wide-ranging ethnographic study of the “moral and political imaginations within and beyond Afghanistan” of Afghan merchants (p. 10). This study builds upon themes from Marsden's earlier work in Northern Pakistan and along the Afghan–Pakistani frontier, but is geographically much more ambitious. Here Marsden gathers eight years of research from periodical visits to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, the Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, weaving together diverse accounts and narratives into a series of arguments about morality, sovereignty, trade, and Afghanistan's role in the global world.
Marsden is particularly focused on complicating simple tropes about Afghan merchants. Merchants defy both narratives about Afghanistan as locked into centuries old tribal politics and more neoliberal notions of merchants as global, entrepreneurial versions of homo economicus. Refreshingly, he intentionally avoids focusing on either the drug trade or smuggling, which, as he points out, have received an undue amount of attention, while the lives of more everyday traders, who do everything from importing cement and dish soap from Central Asia to selling fruit in the streets of London, has largely been ignored.
This work is part of a wider scholarly project attempting to move Afghanistan from the political and scholarly margins of Asia, to study the role of Afghanistan in creating trans-national and trans-cultural ties. It joins works like Robert Crews's Afghan Modern (Cambridge: Belknap, 2015) and Alessandro Monsutti's War and Migration (New York: Routledge, 2005) in rejecting narratives of Afghanistan as an isolated, “traditional” society or a place that modern history has somehow passed by, putting it squarely into the story of modern capitalism and global economic and social flows. More widely, Marsden's study parallels recent anthropological studies that nuance scholarly understandings of Islamic reform movements by reflecting on the complex religious and economic lives of modern Muslims taking part in global economic changes and transnational cultural shifts.
Marsden does this by primarily focusing on the intersections of the economic and social lives of a series of merchants who live inside or outside, and move through, Afghanistan. The merchants he studies are not obsessed with migration to the West as many media accounts seem to suggest. Instead, migration is a process filled with ambivalence, ambiguity, and multidimensional travel. While much of Marsden's material focuses on Afghan merchants in Tajikistan, these merchants also circulate between Kabul, Dushanbe, and Peshwar. They settle in Moscow, London, and Dubai, sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Their sentiments about their homeland are complex and dynamic.
These dynamic travels upend many assumptions about the social lives of these figures. In Chapter 3, for example, Marsden attacks many of the forms of trust and identification that are assumed to be embedded in shared kinship, religion, or ethnicity. Instead, he suggests, kin can be a burden as much as a form of support and merchants establish relations with friends from other groups, Russian “wives” and others with whom they are in transit. Later, he complicates typical approaches to the notion of hospitality in Middle Eastern studies as a kind of stable, unchanging moral code. Instead, he focuses on the “ongoing acts of balancing, management, and negotiation of the ambiguities and explosive moments of hospitality” (p. 255), which can threaten both host and guest in uncertain social worlds abroad. Here there are continuities with earlier studies of Afghanistan, such as David Edward's Heroes of the Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Before the Taliban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), which focus on the ways in which Afghans navigate moral worlds by deploying diverse strategies as groups and as individuals. Similarly, the merchants in Marsden's study move between locations and change the goods that they trade, but they also continually rework their social and ethical lives.
Marsden builds on Michael Lambek's work on morality and his material strives to reflect “on people's strivings for excellence in particular aspects of their lives, while also recognizing the varying rewards that achieving or, indeed, striving to achieve excellence brings itself: the meaning of achievement is situational, rather than something that can be judged in terms of whether a goal has been lived up to or otherwise” (p. 161). Among these Afghan merchants much of this thinking about morality is done through the casting of themselves as “diplomats.” Marsden describes the ways in which “[t]hey live spatially suspended lives. . .[they] are skilled and internationally oriented actors, but they are also suspended in terms of their work and family relations” (p. 21). Their diplomacy plays out in material ways by shifts, for example, in the style of dress that they deploy at specific moments, but such flexibility comes with moral hazards and merchants are concerned about being cast as hypocrites or traitors. As diplomats, merchants profess political neutrality, while being deeply embedded in multiple political worlds. Merchants are meant to strive in particular for autonomy. At the same time, however, they are constantly being constricted by vigorous and unpredictable immigration regimes, untrustworthy trade partners, and the burden of familial obligations.
Focusing on merchants as diplomats means the analysis emphasizes “trade's status not solely as an economic strategy deployed at times of necessity but also as a creative and social field of thought and actions that offers unique insights for anthropologists seeking to understand the overlapping domains of morality, politics, economy, and religion” (p. 305). This has some implications for several key themes in the study of Afghanistan, such as the role of ethnicity and national identity. Instead of ethnicity as political deterministic, as depicted in some studies, Marsden points to the ways in which merchants constantly renegotiate their identities vis-à-vis ethnicity and state, demanding a more dynamic and modern understanding of these concepts than are usually thrust upon Afghans by politicians.
To support his claims, Marsden scatters ethnographic vignettes throughout the text. These pieces are insightful and refreshing, though at times feel somewhat disjointed from the rest of the work. Contributing to this feeling, Marsden bends over backwards to insert comparisons with studies of traders in South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere to compare patterns of trade and social practices in an attempt at reasserting the global nature of the merchant world he is exploring. Somewhat ironically, this also makes perhaps the greatest feat of the text less striking during an initial reading: Marsden's ethnography almost effortlessly brings together different groups of individuals from merchants who live in Dushanbe with Russian wives, to large-scale global businessmen in Dubai, to fishmongers in London. The reader is entirely convinced of the way that similar moral and ethical struggles and negotiations bring these individuals together, which makes some of the sudden, repeated comparisons with other cases somewhat distracting from the rich portrayal of these fascinating actors.
After the intense international focus on the country following the American-led invasion in 2001, one of the subtexts of the book seems to be the fear of Marsden and his interlocutors that Afghanistan will again slip away, back into Orientalist clichés and overly simplified media narratives. This sprawling ethnography of Afghanistan's place in modern capitalism's ebbs and flows and the transnational lives of the merchants in it, however, does much to ensure that this will not happen.
