Depth of Fields: Travel Photography and Spatializing Modernities in Northern Pakistan

Abstract

Western travelers move throughout the world—especially to places in ‘the East’—believing themselves to be harbingers of modernity, spreading capitalism, socioeconomic development, Western culture, and other promises of modernization to places they assume are existing in states of pristine Otherness. In this paper I look at interactions between travelers and locals that reveal differing spatial imaginaries of ‘modernity’, and at how these reflect and produce different narratives of who is modern and where modernity exists. By using ethnographic material, I examine discursive and material interactions surrounding modernity through the examples of travelers' practices of photography, dress, and knowledge of Muslim women's veiling. In this paper I look to a located, gendered, and particular expression of an Islamic modernity, one that embraces improvements in quality of life that modern technologies of health care, agricultural production, and sanitation may bring, and which simultaneously embraces nonsecular ways of being in the world.