In 2013 and 2014, I spent seven months in Tajikistan speaking to veterans of the Soviet– Afghan War for my PhD thesis, which examined the emergence of the Soviet– Afghan War veterans as a discursive group in the late Soviet period and involved oral history and archival research.

I had not been to Tajikistan before and had only a limited number of contacts in the country. Much of my time in Tajikistan was therefore spent forging connections with Soviet– Afghan War veterans and others who could assist me in my research. I soon realized that in this process my initiative and pro-action were less important than factors that were outside of my control. Serendipity and the willingness or unwillingness of individuals to speak to me shaped my research process in a basic way, forcing me to shed a number of assumptions that I had imbibed from methodological literature. This was particularly true for collecting oral historical data. Beholden to luck and the need to interact with respondents on their terms, I was in most cases not in a position to insist on formal interviews. Nor would it have been ethical to do so, as this chapter will point out.

This chapter suggests that some of the assumptions about good interviewing that are mainstream in Western methodological literature were inappropriate for, and even harmful to, my research in Tajikistan. Early on in my research I realized that attempts to adhere to established standards of interviewing caused my respondents’ discomfort, weakened their trust in me as a researcher and indeed jeopardized their anonymity. In the course of my research, I came to view the interview as a culturally and socially situated performance that was not necessarily suited to the research context that I encountered in Tajikistan. My learning process in Tajikistan involved finding methods of work that took their cue from established forms of interaction among my respondents; in doing so, I found myself surrendering part of my ability to direct the research.

Collecting oral information in unfamiliar contexts

My first exchange in Tajikistan was with Rustam, a well-dressed taxi driver who spoke an uninflected Russian and drove a beat-up Opel in the inner districts of the capital of Dushanbe. I made his acquaintance after stumbling into his car on a rainy day while looking for a quick ride to an important appointment.