‘How are you doing, Farishta? Is everything fine? Are you in good health?’ asked the voice on the phone, instantly projecting an image of a smiling face and kind eyes wrapped in wrinkles to my inner eye. ‘I am in Dushanbe now, selling apples at the market (bozor) in Giprozem. When can we meet?’

The voice on the phone belonged to Muzaffar, a 69 years old man whom I met two weeks before while travelling to Tajikistan’s western town of Panjakent, located only 20 kilometres away from the border with Uzbekistan.[1] Astonished to meet a woman from Germany speaking Tajik in his friend’s minibus (marshrutka), he decided to give me a local name, Farishta, to mark this unusual encounter and to express his desire to integrate me into local social worlds. Muzaffar and his elderly friend, the driver of the at least 20 years old minibus, were on their way to Panjakent to attend a commemoration feast and took some passengers along the road to cover the costs and help out fellow travellers.

Muzaffar and his fellow marshrutka-driver-and-friend were neighbours, as I learned several weeks further into my fieldwork, when returning to the region to follow up on my new encounters. One year apart in terms of age, they often called upon each other to get around for business and attend to their various social commitments. ‘We are old,’ as Muzaffar explained, ‘it’s good to have a co-driver to help with cash and navigation, and to have company.’

Older adults’ quotidian mobilities and labour migration

Muzaffar and his friend’s quotidian and transregional mobility sparked my interest during fieldwork, because it contradicts the widespread idea that older adults are less active and more bounded to their places of residence (e.g., King et al 2017). In Tajikistan, old age is commonly portrayed as a time of rest and devotion to spirituality, when the younger generations take over family affairs and begin to run the household. However, sufficiently providing for a multigenerational family is not easy in present-day Tajikistan and many people in working-age have to leave the country to earn their living abroad.

In Muzaffar’s case, three of his sons and one daughter-in-law live and work in Russia, while he and his wife dwell together with their two younger daughters-in-law and grandchildren. His youngest son currently toils on Russian construction sites to renovate Muzaffar’s compound, which he will take over in the future, while the older sons channel their revenues into building their own houses. Like in many rural regions of Tajikistan, in the Zarafshon valley it is often only possible to establish an independent household with money earned through migrant labour, usually over the course of decades.

During long periods of his sons’ absence, Muzaffar and his wife manage the incoming administrative, financial and practical family business. For example, Muzaffar oversees the construction work around his eldest son’s house, situated in the same village, checking on the employed workers, procuring building materials from the market in Panjakent (around 30 minutes’ drive by car), and paying the electricity bills. He also takes care of the fruit trees growing on his son’s plot. The apples that he traded at Dushanbe’s farmers market were harvested from this garden, which further supplies the family with apricots and walnuts, and serves as a grazing ground for their three cows.

The dairy products that Muzaffar’s wife makes from the cows’ milk – butter, local varieties of yoghurt (jurghot and chakka), hard cheese (qurut), and cream (qaimoq) – are consumed not only by the family members, but also sold on the local market. Most of the vegetables that sustain the family around the year are grown by Muzaffar’s wife on their own plot adjacent to their house.

While Muzaffar’s wife remained occupied mostly within the household and on the village level, Muzaffar’s mobility was by far not limited to activities around his sons’ construction work and the apple trade. As an elder community member, he regularly attended the Friday prayers that filled the calm main road leading to Panjakent with older men and joined as many daily prayers as his various obligations permitted. Friends, former working colleagues, and relatives often called upon him to visit commemoration feasts all around the region, including in distant mountain villages.

Furthermore, he oversaw the water distribution in his village daily switching water pumps on and off according to the schedule, collected the water supply fees from each household, and submitted them to the municipality in Panjakent once per quarter. “It’s a voluntary work. I don’t gain anything,” explained Muzaffar. Nevertheless, it assured him authority within the community and diversified his social networks.

Relational dynamics of mobility and older adults as pillars of local infrastructures

Far from being static, withdrawn, or inactive, Muzaffar, his wife and his friend, the minibus driver, continued to exercise physical work around the house and served as important pillars for their families and the wider community. They remained mobile because their ageing bodies permitted them to stay physically active, despite being in the middle and end of their sixties. However, their quotidian and transregional mobility is also linked to their children’s absence, who have to move between Tajikistan and Russia in order to build a desirable life at home.

Within mobility studies, it is well established that the movement of an individual, commodity, or social group can facilitate, shape and constrain the mobility of others (e.g., Hannam et al 2006). The dynamic interplay between the mobility of older and younger generations in Muzaffar’s family is an exemplification of this claim. The mobilities of older adults that I describe above are significant also in another say. Amidst mass labour migration, these mobilities make up the social fabrics of family and community life and keep things going at home.

It reminds of the varied, multilayered, mobile and open-ended activities of Johannesburg residents, whose ‘transactions’ and ‘conjunctions become an infrastructure’ of the city in the words of AbdouMaliq Simone (2004, 408). Certainly, the density of Johannesburg inner-city life stands in no comparison to rural Tajikistan. In quality, however, the quotidian and transregional mobility that Muzaffar, his wife, and his friend exercised made them a fundamental part of their communities’ social infrastructure (see also Wignall et al 2019).

About the author

[1] All names are pseudonyms. The age of my research participants corresponds to their age at the time of my first research stay in Tajikistan within this project, in September and October 2022. The follow up fieldwork took place during the same period in 2023.

References

Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry (2006) Editorial: Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities 1(1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100500489189

King, Russell, Aija Lulle, Dora Sampaio, and Julie Vullnetari (2017) Unpacking the ageing-migration nexus and challenging the vulnerability trope. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (2): 182–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2016.1238904

Simone, AbdouMaliq (2004) People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-407

Wignall, Ross, Katie McQuaid, Katherine V. Gough and James Esson (2019) ‘We built this city’: Mobilities, urban livelihoods and social infrastructure in the lives of elderly Ghanaians. Geoforum 103: 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.022

Central Asia, mobility, Tajikistan