'The Sheep Roads of Central Asia: A Global History of the Karakul Fur Trade" - Professor Magnus Marsden

In this episode, we bring you a fascinating exploration of the global history of the karakul fur trade in South and Central Asia. This keynote address by Professor Magnus Marsden, and chaired by Professor Susan Bayly, was delivered for the “Nations, Networks, Narratives: Rethinking South and Southeast Asia”  conference, held over three days in September this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the Centre for South Asian Studies and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. His work is centrally concerned with the study of Asia's Muslim societies. Magnus has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, as well as with diasporic communities from this region in the Gulf, Eastern Europe, and China. He is the author of Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Northern Pakistan (Cambridge, 2005), and Trading Worlds: Afghan Merchants across Modern Frontiers (Oxford, 2015). He also jointly authored with B.D Hopkins Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (Oxford, 2015) and has co-edited Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds (Springer 2013, and Beyond Swat (Oxford 2013). He sits on the International Advisory Board of Central Asian Survey and the Editorial Board of Modern Asian Studies. He completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2002. Between 2002 and 2007, he was the Graduate Officer in Research at the Centre of South Asian Studies and a Title A Research Fellow at Trinity College. He then moved in 2007 to the Department of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, before joining Sussex as Professor of Social Anthropology in November 2013. Over this period, his research has been funded by major grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the ERC (Advanced Grant), and AHRC. His research has also been supported by smaller grants awarded by Trinity College, Cambridge, SOAS, University of London, the University of Sussex, the Nuffield Foundation and the British Academy. Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology (Emerita) in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia's former French and British colonies. She regularly conducts ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She has completed a study of Hanoi intelligentsia families in the former socialist world system, and more recently a comparative project with Dr Nicholas Long of LSE on Achievement & Competitiveness in Vietnam & Indonesia, involving fieldwork on the ways achievement is enacted and understood in these two key sites of Southeast Asian transformation experiences. She is also researching the many forms of official and personal visual culture that form a key context for the understanding of citizenship and the modern family in today's Hanoi. Professor Bayly retains a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She is a former editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, visuality, theories of historical change, and the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her recent publications include Asian Lives in Anthropological Perspective: Essays on Morality, Achievement and Modernity (Berghahn Books: 2024). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system, and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts. Visuals: Photo sourced from Unsplash.Music: “Treetone” by Airtone, used under Creative Commons license via CC Mixter. Mixer & Editor: Lily Tekseng