Manly Merchants

Abstract

This article explores intersections between masculinity, mobility, generation and commerce through the everyday lives of Afghan men who make up trading networks that are active across Eurasia. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Afghan traders in Ukraine’s port city of Odessa and in the international trading city of Yiwu in China. Building on recent work in anthropology concerning the ‘emergent’ nature of Middle Eastern masculinities, the article brings attention to the flexible and adaptable nature of the notions of masculinity held and performed by mobile Afghan traders. It emphasises the need for such conceptions of masculinity to be treated historically and draws attention to the forms of caregiving that are especially important to the traders’ intimate lives and self-understandings. The article also highlights the significance of complex notions of trust both to the traders’ articulation of conceptions of manliness and to their everyday modes of securing a livelihood.

‘Good men don’t elope’: Afghan migrant men’s discourses on labour migration, marriage and masculinity

“…For the role of commodity trading in connecting Afghanistan to external markets in the nineteenth century, see (Hopkins 2008;Hanifi 2011). For a contemporary account of Afghan trading networks active in the broader Asian arena, see (Marsden 2016(Marsden , 2019. 2.…”

“…5. For a critical discussion of such culturally static imageries of Afghan men, see (Marsden 2019). 6.…”

Remarking the Unmarked: An Anthropology of Masculinity Redux

“…very usefulness of the concept of gender when applied to men with so little societal influence, because, he argues, theories of gender are inescapably linked to questions of power. As mentioned elsewhere in this article, among the few ethnographic treatments of men and migration are Ewing (2008) on Turkish men in Germany, Thao (2015) on the impact of women's migration on men as caregivers in Southeast Asia, and Marsden (2019) on Afghan traders in Eurasia.…”

“…Certain topics related to men and masculinities receive more attention in other disciplines such as sociology but are worth noting here for the promise they show for future studies by anthropologists, including areas such as money, work, sports, and religion. On work and money, see, for example, Yang (2010), Salzinger (2016), Marsden (2019), andCheng (2021). For a survey of the anthropology of sports, see especially Besnier et al (2017), Thangaraj (2015) on basketball in the United States, and Kovač (2022) on football in Cameroon.…”