ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dynamic interaction between religious education and social imaginary in the production of a Pamiri consciousness among youth born in Tajikistan a few years after independence. It argues that a standardised religious educational approach, as part of the integration in the Ismaili global community, has been actively appropriated by the youth generation of Pamiri in their process of self-identification in everyday life in and outside the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast. Self-identification processes involve various worlds of meaning that include, among others, stereotypes. Two important spaces of identity production appear at the forefront: the Tajik government and the religious Ismaili transnational organisations. Identity processes are thus inevitably always interactional and stereotypes are an important part of the fabrics that express publicly and subjectively those hierarchies. The chapter discusses in greater length later, educational achievement as an important social value has a long history in Pamir and thus cannot be attributed to the global Ismaili community alone.
