Tahir H. Naqvi, Ph.D.

I am a cultural anthropologist whose research examines migration, nationalism, political identity, labor, and economic life in Pakistan and South Asia. Across my work, I am interested in how large-scale political and economic transformations become embedded in everyday categories, social relations, material practices, and moral worlds.

My first major research project focused on the formation of Muhajir ethnic nationalism in post-Partition Pakistan. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and historical research in Karachi, I examined how Muslim migrants from India and their descendants came to understand themselves as a distinctive ethnic and political community. This research culminated in my book, Questioning Migrants: Ethnic Nationalism at the Limits of Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The book traces how migration, state formation, urban settlement, and political violence reshaped the meaning of national belonging in Pakistan. It was shortlisted for the 2026 Bloomsbury Prize for social scientific writing on Pakistan.  

My current research turns to the social and material life of scrap metal in Karachi. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among traders, laborers, brokers, and processors in the city’s industrial peripheries, this project investigates how discarded objects are classified, disassembled, repaired, refined, and returned to circulation. I am particularly interested in how value is produced under conditions of material uncertainty, volatile markets, environmental exposure, and precarious livelihood.