Intimacy and touch: Closeness, separation and family life in Kulob, southern Tajikistan

Abstract

This article examines the emotional, embodied and sensuous aspects of intimacy within and between two families from Kulob, southern Tajikistan, as it is embedded in imminent or/and impending conflict. It focuses on touch and its importance to the fashioning of family life that is also informed by government policies and Muslim subjectivities. The ethnography highlights bodily sensations such as shaking chills, and visceral episodes such as vomiting, fainting, or sensuously-dreaming because they materialize the narrative, experience and performativity of the qualities of touch. The article advances the notion that touch pertains not only to both physical immediacy and intimate closeness, but also to processes of physical separation and estrangement between two or more intimates.