This talk considers Islamic second wife marriage (nikoh) between minority Uzbek businesswomen in Kyrgyzstan and persecuted Uyghur traders from Xinjiang. It analyzes the practice of linking business and marriage as a form of mobile intimacy that leverages the affordances and movement of commodities and goods over present-day geopolitical borders that circumscribe the movement of particular groups of people. Looking at forms of both mobility and immobility, I argue that commodity-mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of carceral immobilities, state violence, and gendered limitations.
Grace H. Zhou is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research brings detailed ethnographic engagement to questions of labor, care and transnational exchange across Asia, particularly where China’s Belt and Road Initiative finds traction in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. She received her BA and MA from Columbia University, her PhD from Stanford University, and is currently a President's Postdoctoral Scholar at OSU.
