Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 10

People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others.

—TEJU COLE, OPEN CITY

On December 16, 2016, just before noon, I was walking through a forest steeped in snow in rural Vermont. Sun came and went between clouds. It was quiet, spare. Crystalline light reflected off the frozen surface of a nearby pond. The world felt peaceful, filled with grace and presence, even as it was marked by absence: bare birch trees, pale winter light.

I did not know it at the time, but as I was walking, Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista, the twenty-fifth King of Lo, was leaving the shell of his body, his consciousness released. He was eighty-six years old. Although he died in Kathmandu, Bista ruled his cultural and political domain in the northern reaches of Mustang District, Nepal, for more than half a century. I had the good fortune to have known him, in some small way, for twenty years. We shared an affinity for horses and a love of the place he called home.

Mustang’s northern border abuts the Tibetan Plateau. Much of the district lies in the rain shadow of Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain in the world, and the Annapurna massif. This geological effect burnishes Mustang’s landscape ochre, with pockets of verdant irrigated fields under a cerulean sky. Village homes of rammed earth and mud brick, stone and timber, are whitewashed and striped with pigments that invoke protector deities who guard this land. Sand-colored ruins of castles, cairns, and fortresses dot the landscape. These architectural palimpsests recall this area’s place in the history of western Tibetan dynasties. The kingdom of Lo itself dates to the fourteenth century. Mustang’s caves, in turn, hold much earlier histories of high-altitude human settlement, indigenous religion, and early traces of Buddhism. The Kali Gandaki river runs like a spine through this land, the gorge it creates a centuries-old conduit for trade between high Asia and the Gangetic plains to the south. Until the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1959, and the closing of the Nepal-China border soon thereafter, the kingdom of Lo and its leaders retained close ties with neighboring Tibetan communities, even with Lhasa, Tibet’s capital.

Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista was known by many names. As a way of signaling his status, he was granted the high caste Hindu surname Bista by the royal family of Nepal, themselves descendants of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the figure whose armies “unified” the country through military and cultural conquests during the eighteenth century. Nepal’s unification included strategies of alliance, including incorporation of the territory that would come to be known as Mustang. In this and other senses, the people of Mustang are, and are not, Tibetans. Like most of us, they hold multiple identities—ways of knowing themselves and being known by the world that can render the specifics of belonging transparent and opaque, by turns.

In Nepali, people referred to Bista as the Mustang Raja. He was one of four “petty kings”—including local rulers in the districts of Bajhang, Salyan, and Jajarkot—who retained regional power even as their territories were merged into a national political geography. These “raja” figures were recognized by Nepali law from 1961 until 2008, when Nepal transitioned from a Hindu monarchy and parliamentary democracy to a secular federalist republic.

In Logé, the local variant of Tibetan language, Bista was called Lo Gyalpo, wherein gyalpo means “king.” This title evokes respect and deference akin to that given the king of neighboring Bhutan as well as royalty from the erstwhile Himalayan kingdoms of Ladakh and Sikkim in India. The fact that this nobleman was stripped of his “raja” title in 2008 by the new Nepali state did little to affect his importance in the lives of Loba, the people of Lo. To them, he was far from “petty” in his influence. Many Loba referred to this man as Kundun, which means “presence.” It is the same term of address used by Tibetans to speak of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This shows just how important he was locally. The Lo Gyalpo helped to define and defend a people, a place, a way of life, and a sense of rootedness in the high pastures and valleys, the canyons and plains, the monasteries and villages of this Himalayan enclave.

Bista’s lineage dates to the founding of Lo in 1380 by Amepal, a noble from the western Tibetan kingdom of Gungthang. Amepal’s son and heir, Angun Zangpo, established the city of Lo Monthang, a place named for the “plain of aspiration” on which this settlement was built and where Bista was born. In 1964, when Bista was in his mid-thirties, he assumed his title after the death of his father. He was his father’s youngest son. Bista married Sidol Palwar, a refined, elegant woman who traveled from Shigatse, Tibet, to Lo as a bride in 1950. They had no surviving biological children, so the couple adopted their nephew as son and heir. Over the past half-century, Bista ushered his community through massive political-economic and sociocultural transitions, which it is the work of this book to describe.

When I picture the king, I see his stately dignity. Framed by a broad face, his expressive lips formed words of advice or considered action for his people and, especially in his last years, shaped the syllables of Buddhist prayer with humility and devotion. He was a beautiful, intense presence. During our meetings, be they formal audiences at Khar, the palace in Monthang, or over quiet cups of tea with his family in Kathmandu, I remained in awe of him. He could be serious, even stern, but then his regal countenance would melt into a smile, his gold-plated tooth and turquoise earring glinting brightly.

One of my most cherished memories of the king is from 1997, when I traveled with him and his entourage to his summer pastures for days of sheep shearing, yak wrangling, picnicking, and ritually bathing his horses. It was here that I saw the king as a man at work, filled with purpose. I will hold on to that memory, as I do the ones of him and his male companions each morning circumambulating the wall that borders Monthang. There was a sense of routine in these movements but also dedication and communion, kinship and connection to place.

The king’s heir, along with others who belong to his generation of Mustang nobility, are invested in the future of Mustang. The family remains central to many aspects of local life—cultural, political, economic—even without continued recognition of this kingdom as a kingdom by the Nepali state. And yet the death of Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista marked the end of an era. A Nepali media report in República, which came out in the wake of his death, said that his last words to his family were, “Never migrate from the village and the district.”

I cannot confirm the veracity of this statement, but I believe in its essence. The late king loved his home fiercely, with his whole being. Even so, this dying wish is a promise that is impossible to keep.

When I traveled with the Lo Gyalpo to his summer pastures, momentous changes were beginning to occur in and through Mustang. People were leaving their villages for the village of New York. Like so many migrants the world over, they were departing in search of economic opportunity, life experience, and the chance to offer their children a different future. As is the case for the millions of humans on the move across our Earth today, for those from Mustang, it is not easy to parse the pull of socioeconomic advancement and the rite of passage of youthful migrations from the push of political oppression and environmental change. By the late-1990s, a civil war that would last a decade had crippled many sectors of Nepal’s economy. Although wage labor abroad and a deep reliance on remittances at home had yet to become the national norm, seeing migration as a pathway to economic and social well-being had taken root as an ideal.

This is not to say that people from Mustang were new to movement. Subsistence in the high Himalaya, where growing seasons are limited and weather can be fierce, demands creative strategies. For centuries, people from Mustang have combined agriculture, pastoralism, and trade to lowland Nepal and northern India as a way of life. Beginning in the 1980s, locals, mostly men, began traveling as contract laborers to Korea and Japan. Like their neighbors from Manang District, some did business in Asian centers of wealth: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore. However, these moves were not viewed as permanent. Rather, they were annual or life-stage tactics for generating cash for school fees, medical expenses, acts of religious sponsorship, or investments in land or business opportunities back in Nepal. But the movements between Nepal and New York have been different. They have become more permanent, even as they are allowing for further cycles of mobility and opportunities for finding home in more than one location. This change has happened rapidly—within about two decades and one generation.

Now, as lives are forged between Nepal and New York, survival no longer depends solely on agriculture, animal husbandry, and regional trade but also on service-sector employment (running tourist lodges in Mustang, painting nails in Manhattan) and the potent entanglements of remittances. Based on demographic trends in Nepal’s 2000 and 2010 censuses, Mustang District has experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in the country. Numbers vary, but from records kept by villages and rural municipalities in Mustang as well as by diasporic social service organizations in New York, it is estimated that about a quarter of the nine to ten thousand culturally Tibetan people from Mustang District live in New York. In most cases, this number does not include Mustang-American children born in the United States. Nor does it account for those from Mustang who are living permanently in urban Nepal. The demographic transition grows ever starker when examining age cohorts of educated and able-bodied people, now gone from the mountains. Yet these numbers are nearly imperceptible when considering the immigrant populations in places like Jackson Heights, Queens. I am left contemplating the interplay between the profoundly visible depopulation of Nepal’s Himalayan highlands and the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in New York.

New York is not the only destination for people from Mustang. In addition to those who have established residence in India, and monastic and lay youth who are educated there, others have migrated to cities in Europe and Asia. They have worked on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan; some now serve in the U.S. military. Others work as contract laborers in Japan or Korea, as their uncles and fathers might have done before them. Many of Mustang’s senior monastics take regular dharma tours across cosmopolitan East Asia, North America, and Europe.

At a broader level, migration and remittance defines contemporary Nepal. Since 2000, there has been a tenfold increase of Nepalis laboring abroad. Of Nepal’s approximately thirty million people, about four million have migrated for work, or about 15 percent of the population. As documented by the work of Nepal’s Centre for the Study of Labor and Mobility (CESLAM) and by other scholars, approximately 1,500 people leave Nepal each day, and remittances account for a third of the country’s GDP. I have met Nepalis—including people from Mustang—at train stations in Lisbon, on public buses in Auckland, in Parisian cafés, and many places in between. As Nadeem Aslam describes in his novel The Wasted Vigil, “Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”

The embodied act of walking clockwise around a sacred space—which the Lo Gyalpo would do at dawn around Monthang and which many Himalayan people do each morning and evening around the Boudha and Swayambhu stupa in Kathmandu—is known as kora: .

This term is linked closely with another word, khorwa , a Buddhist principle that defines the nature of desire, interdependence, and cyclic existence—what in Sanskrit and in popular culture is called samsara.

People walk kora, but this act exists, as language and as lived experience, under the larger umbrella of khorwa, the cycle of birth, aging, sickness, death, and rebirth through which sentient beings travel. In Tibetan Buddhism, such reckoning is often symbolized by a wheel—of life, of time, and of the Buddha’s teachings. These two interlocking concepts have been crucial to my thinking about migration and social change. Throughout this book, I have chosen to use the term khora as a way of representing, imperfectly in an English language text, these two interwoven concepts.

At its root, “diaspora” means dispersal. It is a casting out and across, a transformation of ways of life, a re-imagining of belonging. But experiences of dispersal are not uniform. They do not run in straight lines. Instead, they figure in circles, in cycles. I have come to understand migration and attendant markers of diaspora as khora. Broadly, khora is a way of being in and moving through the world. This concept illustrates patterns of mobility, processes of world-making, and the dialectical relationship between loss and wonder around which diasporic experiences turn. To see such human movement as khora is to expand the affective register of diaspora beyond a one-way trajectory, toward what it means to be—and to belong—in and through forms of circumambulation and transmigration. Many lives can exist within one human lifetime and between one life and the next.

The extent to which one feels at home depends on where one is situated, with whom one walks khora, literally and figuratively. For people from Mustang, as with the seasonal shifts of grazing animals between summer and winter pastures, the transitions between farming and trading, or even taking the subway to and from work, khora signifies a routine, embedded in social networks, that provides solace, guidance, and support. At times, khora enables contemplation of impermanence in a Buddhist sense. The khora of migration is enfolded within the turning of the wheel of cyclic existence—with all its vicissitudes of ignorance, attachment, and aversion. Even so, practicing khora can have a centering effect. Through movement, we find stillness.

Anthropologist Carole McGranahan has described fieldwork as a type of khora. I concur. In fact, I would expand this idea to say that the practice of anthropology can also be khora, in that it is a literal and figurative circling around the sacred center of human connection, over time and across space. Through decentering cycles of departure and arrival, anthropologists learn to navigate uncertainty and practice compassion. This book traces such movements, at once internal and external. I also recognize that the terrain through which anthropologists and our interlocutors move can be uneven, punctuated by power and circumstance, by papers and politics.

All too often in anthropology, we assign the term “theory” to the ideas of (primarily) white, male Continental philosophers, and we discount or minimize theoretical work that gets done in other ways. Yet when stripped down, “theory” is simply the creation and use of concepts that help to explain social phenomena. Khora does such work. I have chosen to root this book in a framework that comes from Himalayan and Tibetan communities not only because it reflects vernacular understandings—not just because people speak about and practice khora—but also because it carries conceptual weight. The work of critical Indigenous scholars (I am particularly grateful to Zoe Todd and Bernard Perley) have helped me to trouble the assumption that theory must emerge from a Western intellectual pedigree in order to be recognizable, let alone capable of opening up new ways of knowing. The difficulties and benefits associated with the daily practice of khora in specific Himalayan contexts reflects the complexities of migration in a more catholic sense, from its legal obstacles and economic prospects to the ways it reshapes families and communities, including their connections to land and lineage, to language and culture.

As a category of experience, khora stands for the pathways we travel from one life or one country to the next—and back again—and how we are changed through these processes. The concept resonates with anthropological discussions of modernity and mobility: circulations of capital and labor across the globe. In this sense, khora connects to dynamics variously described as globalization, transnationalism, and the worlding of people, ideas, and things. Globalization is a gloss for the circulation of resources and neoliberal ideals, transnationalism emphasizes the dissolution of geopolitical boundaries, and worlding troubles assumptions about how or in what directions global movements occur. Onto the bones of these intellectual ideas, khora adds a layer of muscle memory: of cyclic movement, of ethical action, of a walking temporality that links the past and the present to possible futures.

Still, khora is not simply a mode of explaining something, in the ways that a term like “transnationalism” becomes a shortcut for intricate, varied experiences, nor is my use of khora about making a universal claim. Instead, consider khora a way of doing and being, a mechanism for action. Khora can help us to see how the circulation of people, things, and ideas is affectively and materially complicated. The khora of migration interweaves threads of care and belonging as lives are stitched together through time and space. In this sense, khora is rooted in relatedness, in kinship.

Migration at once depends on and works on kinship, the genealogical bonds of descent and alliance that shape humanity. We follow the paths and the footsteps of those who have moved before us. People call upon kinship networks to facilitate the logistics of migration—visas, jobs, apartments—and to help one another through less visible but equally challenging emotional transitions. No matter where people from Mustang find themselves, the cultural obligations that anchor community mean that one’s first effort in any situation is to establish—through a recitation of place-based social history and by speaking names—where and how you fit into networks of kin. In Himalayan communities as elsewhere, such webs of belonging keep people at once beholden to, and endeared to, one another. This says something about love and understanding, and about home.

The Ends of Kinship explores what it means for people from Mustang, including those who have migrated to New York, to care for one another, steward a homeland across time and space, remake households elsewhere, and confront distinct forms of happiness and suffering through this process. How do people honor and alter their shared responsibilities and senses of connection to one another and to a particular geography, not only in spite of but even through the turning of the wheel of migration? How do different generations abide with one another, even when language fades and people struggle to comprehend? I ask these questions across distinct social ecologies, from high mountain villages of northern Nepal to some of the most diverse urban neighborhoods on Earth, at the heart of America’s immigration story.

This book’s engagement with one small region of the world speaks to broader dynamics. Immigration is a lightning rod issue of our time. Whether located in New York or experienced in the places from which new New Yorkers hail, immigration articulates with legal rights and claims to property; the division and reunification of families; legacies of state violence, processes of settler colonialism, and dynamics of political uncertainty; and aspirations for living beyond what is captured by the terms “refugee” or “economic migrant.” This is true for highly visible groups—Central American migrants, Syrian refugees—and for those, like people from Mustang, who remain nearly imperceptible within the demographics of New York and the greater United States but whose presence in America has dramatically reshaped their home communities.

What do I mean by the ends of kinship? At its heart, this book focuses on the fabric of duty and desire that is kinship, as it is experienced through the transformative process of migration. By definition, “ends” references more than one place. It bespeaks physical distance—points on a map, say—even as it signals temporal shifts, notches in a time line, moments of initiation and completion. This book is not only about people who have moved from one place to another. It is also about how people live in and through multiple places, about what it means to leave, to remain behind, and possibly to return. I am not speaking of an end, singular. Quite the opposite.

The relational dynamics of kinship can give meaning to people’s lives in accordance with, or even in spite of, physical and political abilities to move—the warp and weft of citizenship and identity. As with rope or thread, some relationships fray through migration while others are newly knotted. The ends of kinship are ties that bind people to one another in dialogue with the emotional and structural forces that can sever or reformulate these bonds. In this sense, we are all living at the ends of kinship—if for different reasons. I feel the ends of kinship with my parents, even as I sense these ends within the families with whom I have lived, worked, and learned, in and through Mustang, over the past twenty-five years. One aim of this book is to highlight the lived experiences of pain and loss inherent to the ends of kinship and to illuminate the senses of possibility and hope that can occur through the khora of migration.

True to the nature of khora, the book’s structure follows the turning of the Wheel of Life: from pregnancy, birth, and childhood to making a living and creating families to old age, death, and forms of rebirth. The text proceeds in six parts, each of which includes a fictional short story and a chapter of narrative ethnography. A short essay and an ink line drawing by the Himalayan artist Tenzin Norbu frames each part. Taken together, image and text distill an essence rather than make a neat argument. With the exception of Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista’s portrait that opens this book, I’ve chosen not to include photographs. In opting for likeness over literal realism, I am making both an ethical and a creative decision. Also, I have foregone conventional footnotes for an essay on methods and sources at the end of the book along with a bibliography of works that have shaped my thinking and writing. This is an aesthetic choice about how words occupy a page and a creative response to the politics of citations in academia.

Speaking of creativity, I believe it takes imagination and, sometimes, the crafting of fictional accounts to see social truths. As method and form, fiction reveals the strengths and limits of ethnographic knowing, specifically when it comes to fostering empathy and curiosity. Anthropology enfolds distinct human dramas within larger webs of meaning. Fiction shapes the stories held within “data” into complex sensory, affective, and dramatic experiences that speak to and beyond the generalizations of theory, the specifics of culture. Each mode illuminates the other. As Walter Benjamin insists in The Storyteller, the power of stories rests precisely in what is evoked rather than explained. To couple fiction with ethnography is to resist singular interpretation.

I drafted the stories first, writing from memory. The stories guided me as I reviewed more than two decades of material to craft the ethnographic chapters, which are written purposefully as fragments, without neat beginnings or endings. Like a tile mosaic or a quilt, pieces that may initially seem temporally or geographically dissonant are stitched together, revealing intricate patterns of life forged between Nepal and New York. Though narratively neater, the stories allow for a different kind of honesty. In them, I write about intimate things from multiple perspectives. To be clear, the events described in the stories are fiction, but they emerge from my years of relationship with people from Mustang. As such, these stories are real in the sense that they are credible. They have been crafted into form in a different way than field notes or interview transcripts become ethnographic text. Both processes involve distillation, culling, coding.

I am inspired by writerly anthropologists and by writers whose art reflects the thickness of life in ways that could be called ethnographic. Tacking between short stories and ethnography provides an opportunity to consider what each genre offers as well as the limits of that offering. What is seen. What is elided. One form reveals the negative space of the other. And, as my painter mother has taught me, negative space is not empty but filled with possibilities for new ways of seeing.

In Tibetan, lam means “road” or “path,” but it also signals consciousness: a way and the Way. The word indicates effort, practice, progress toward a goal. In Tibetan Buddhism, this goal is spiritual enlightenment. My path—of learning, collaborating, and writing across languages and cultures—began in Nepal a quarter-century ago. In many ways, people from Mustang are the family I’ve chosen, rather than the family into which I was born. Even so, I have learned so much from Mustang about what binds families together and what can wrest them apart.

Yet while I may be “big sister” to some people and “little grandma” to others, I will state the obvious: I am not from Mustang. And what I am—a white, educated, middle-class American woman—is reflective of a politics of difference. These optics are worth stating plainly, since anthropology has a long and checkered history of writing the words and worlds of others. Yet for all its faults and fissures—its colonial legacies and its reflective turns—anthropology remains a vital way to practice humility and to listen.

The Ends of Kinship is an effort to represent the lives of people about whom I care deeply. I hope to share a fraction of what I have learned from these remarkable individuals whom I respect, but in whose shoes I will never walk this khora. Honoring the confidences that have been entrusted to me has shaped how and what I write, where I let silence breathe. I admire the capacities of those from Mustang to maintain and transform who they are in Nepal and through diaspora—this wrenching dispersal, this liberation. Telling these stories requires shedding light not only on creative and courageous capacities but also on insecurity and conflict, disappointment and trouble, power and authority. To not do so—to idealize or over-expose—would not serve those about whom this book is written.

The individual and collective memories that form this book might be thought of as an archive of experience. Like any archive, it is incomplete. It amplifies certain voices over others. It has blind spots. No matter who makes the archive or who does the writing, no treasury of lives can ever be wholly representative. So much remains untranslatable, hidden. Anthropology has taught me this much.

Still, there is value in the telling.