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
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?
