Shafqat Hussain Hometown: Lahore, Pakistan Advisor: Michael Dove and Carol Carpenter

In my Ph.D. research I intend to understand the social and political processes through which margins are constructed. To understand this process, I will do ethnographic and archival research in Shimshal village, a remote agro-pastoral community among in the Karakoram mountains of Hunza region in northern Pakistan. The archival research will be based on looking at representation of Hunza and its people in the 19th century colonial travel and exploration literature, while in ethnographic research I will look at how Shimshali marginality is constructed in contemporary global environmental and nationalist discourses. The ethnographic research will be located within a context of a conflict between the village of Shimshal and the Government Forest department over the establishment of a National Park on the traditional grazing grounds of Shimshal village.

I argue that the social construction of margins from the center is constitutive of and constituted in a particular structure of interrogation. Thinking of margins within this structure allows us to think of margins in terms of epistemological margins, that is, the way in which they delimit and bring a closure to knowledge constructed by a powerful center. I argue that epistemological margins give knowledge a coherent and stable form by containing it within an abstract conceptual space. Giving knowledge a coherent and stable form (by delimiting it) turns it into a rationalized category that can be easily recognized, deployed and controlled. But in the same process the margins (of knowledge) are constructed as zones of ignorance, obscurity, chaos, mystification and confusion.

With its focus on conceptions of margins and centers, this research is about representations of the self and the Other. The purpose of the research is not to carry out analyses of discourses of representations alone - these analyses are only instrumental to my larger project. I believe that analyses of representational categories such as margins and marginality will only help produce theories of particular consciousness and not a theory of change. I am interested in understanding how conceptions of margins as epistemological margins are maintained and change over time, thus reflecting formation of a new consciousness about the Other and the self. A theory of change of conceptions of margins and marginality must be understood within the framework of structure and agency. Through understanding the everyday practice of Hunza’s intervention into the dominant discourses, this research will look at how agency can be exerted and applied in diverse ways in situations of asymmetrical power.