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.
PART I
ATTENDING TO BIRTH
Each thing
I did, then, I did for the first
time, touched the flesh of our flesh,
brought the tiny mouth to my breast,
she
