Writing travel and the genealogical imagination: Afghan Kyrgyz migrations in contemporary perspective

The current ‘repatriation’ programme initiated by the Kyrgyz Republic presents a timely occasion to reflect on the ambivalence of predicating migration in ethnic terms through descent and territorial ascription. Instead, this paper looks at the way Afghan Kyrgyz migrants mobilize and modulate genealogical and territorial registers and the later fulfilment or frustration of their aspirations. A focus on the current ‘repatriation’ programme is doubly interesting here because it taps into broader questions of citizenship, autochthony, and the securing of durable rights and duties and secondly, because the programme’s realization casts ambivalence to the pre-eminence of ethnic ascription in both the experience of migration and migration research. It argues that migrants’ relative success in moving back and forth between places of ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ (in the programme’s own terms) complexifies the expected linearity of their ‘repatriation’ and implied definitive resettlement.