Scholars agree that improvements in communication and transportation technologies, and the integration of national economies into a global market in new ways, characterize the distinctive era of globalization. The changing scale, volume, and velocity of global connections have transformed even the minutiae of everyday local life, so that the global and local are embedded in the ways people live out their daily lives and make decisions pertaining to it. In trying to map out how the global mobility of people in urban Pakistan, in both physical and virtual ways, affects their sense of place and personhood, this dissertation conducts an ethnographic investigation of the transnational social relations and narratives of people living in Lahore. Speaking with varying demographics in Lahore, it explores the aspirations and motivations of people in urban Pakistan that shape their desire to go abroad or stay in Pakistan, and the effects on people in Pakistan of the migration of relatives abroad. By delineating these aspirations, motivations, and effects, this dissertation brings to light the friction between global and local ways of being and how that tension is experienced differentially in line with factors such as gender, class, and generation. It studies transnational social relations, material exchange, and digital communication among people in Lahore and their relatives abroad to understand how these practices enable them to maintain a sense of place and personhood, even as they simultaneously also shape a politics of place and belonging, in an imperial global neoliberal order. This dissertation takes inspiration from anthropological, sociological, philosophical, and cultural studies theoretical frameworks of place, personhood, and affect, and builds upon scholarship in transnational migration, globalization, and kinship studies. It illustrates the operation of kinship and affect as people in Pakistan, and some of their diasporic counterparts, try to hold onto a sense of place and personhood in a globalizing world.
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