Suchergebnisse

"Ends of Kinship explores dynamics of migration and social change between Nepal and New York City. It asks how individuals, families, and communities care for each other and carve out spaces of belonging from high mountain villages in the Himalayan region of Mustang, on the border with Tibet, to the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork with people in and from Mustang, this ethnography engages with foundational questions in cultural anthropology: What makes and sustains kinship? What does education prepare us for? How are traditions governing birth, death, marriage, and moral economies defended and transformed? How do different generations abide with and understand each other? The Tibetan Buddhist notion of khora encompasses cyclic existence as well as the daily act of circumambulating the sacred in order to make and remake oneself. Sienna Craig draws on this concept to think about cycles of mobility and patterns of world-making between Nepal and New York. Stylistically, Ends of Kinship contributes to experiments in ethnographic writing. Its core chapters are written as teachable and publicly accessible literary ethnography. Between the chapters sit short stories that present a sense of some of the most difficult aspects of migration while respecting the privacy of the author's informants. Line drawings by Tibetan thangka artist Tenzin Norbu illustrate the contrasting worlds in which Mustangis now encounter the central life experiences addressed in each chapter"--

We walked the spine of Montparnasse
searching for Durkheim's grave.
Winter sun pinned us to sky,
illuminating turrets and spires:
ornate edges of civility in this city
of sensuality and light.

This essay analyzes the impacts of global and national pharmaceutical governance on the production of traditional medicines—specifically the making and marketing of Tibetan medicines in contemporary China. Based on research conducted in Tibetan medical factories and with practitioners, producers, and consumers of Tibetan medicines in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and Qinghai Province between 2002–2010, this article presents ethnographic evidence for the ways Tibetan knowledge systems and the value of medicines themselves are being transformed through interlinked engagements with science, technology, and the market. I focus on the implementation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and related regulations: state-mandated standards that govern the conditions under which raw materials are evaluated, medicines are made, and finished products are sold. This article responds to calls for an anthropology of pharmaceutical practice in the context of social transformation. I propose that ethnography of Tibetan pharmaceutical production provides an apt illustration of global governance in action because it shows how shifts in medical production practices are tied to much larger processes of political and economic change within China and beyond. Further, my examination of points of incommensurability and ambivalence with respect to GMP regulations contributes to an anthropological analysis of the constitutive role cultural politics plays in the construction of value and meaning with respect to traditional medicine.

Sowa Rigpa is generally translated as 'the science of healing' and often used synonymously for 'Tibetan medicine'. Historically, Sowa Rigpa can be considered a borrowed term from Sanskrit, accompanied by an adopted sense of 'science', which initially signified all forms of medicine known to the Tibetan world, regardless of their place of origin. Over the centuries, Sowa Rigpa became linked to local, indigenous, and 'enskilled' practices; later, to nationalist political sensibilities; and of late to cultural belonging. The term evokes territoriality, claims to ownership of knowledge, concerns over sustaining national identities, and considerations about how place-based healing practices and material resources relate to the globalizing ideas about traditional Asian medicines. Textual and ethnographic analyses and interviews with practitioners from China, India, and Nepal show how Sowa Rigpa exists at once as a marker of shared intellectual and cultural histories and forms of medical practice and as a label for a globally circulating medical system with distinct interpretations. Looking at Sowa Rigpa as operating in de- and reterritorialized global spaces makes visible how, why, and to what end modernity forgets (Connerton 2009), thereby allowing for broader conclusions applicable to other medical contexts.

ABSTRACTNew York City (NYC) garnered significant national and international attention when it emerged as the coronavirus epicentre in the USA, in spring 2020. As has been widely documented, this crisis has disproportionately impacted minority, immigrant and marginalized communities. Among those affected were people from Mustang, Nepal, a Himalayan region bordering Tibet. This community is often rendered invisible within larger Asian immigrant populations, but the presence of Mustangis in the US has transformed their translocal worlds, lived between Nepal and NYC. Seasonal mobility and life‐stage wage labour in cosmopolitan Asia have been common in Mustang for decades. More permanent moves to NYC began in the 1990s. These migrations were based on assumptions about attaining financial stability in the US in ways deemed unattainable in Nepal. An ethnographic focus on one translocal Mustangi family frames this discussion of how COVID‐19 has overturned previously held ideas around migration to NYC and uncovered new forms of precarity. The authors build on theories of transnationalism and translocality to position migration as a cyclical process whereby the well‐being of Mustangis in Nepal and NYC rests on the reliability of global migratory networks and translocal kinship relations — a basis for security and belonging that COVID‐19 has challenged and reconfigured.

How do high mountain communities, facing the grave effects from climate change and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the local tourism industry, perceive and navigate multiple protracted disasters? This article takes up this question from the perspective of a specific mountain community, that of Mustang, a culturally Tibetan region of Nepal bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China. Our findings stem from collective ethnographic research conducted with Mustangi communities in Nepal and among the diaspora in New York City to investigate the nexus between high mountain livelihoods, particularly tourism, and the consequences of two distinct yet interlocking disasters: climate change and the global health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the pandemic has undermined elements of Mustang's economic future and simultaneously prompted a resurgent appreciation for and reliance on more traditional modes of community governance and social support. The fact that these dynamics are unfolding amidst ever-present concerns over the effects of climate change in the Himalayas, against the backdrop of labor- and education-driven outmigration, adds a profound layer of complexity to thinking about the future of tourism but also of Himalayan lives, from built infrastructures to the community resilience needed to sustain both. (Crit Asian Stud / GIGA)

Through audio diaries and interviews, former SSRC fellow Sienna Craig and her collaborators chronicled the experiences of Himalayan New Yorkers during the pandemic. Many Himalayans live in central Queens, the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak in New York City. This essay shares the many challenges faced by the Himalayan community, not least their struggle to be seen as a "community" with its own needs. But it also emphasizes the responses of Himalayans in terms of collective self-help and making claims on city government for attention and essential services. https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/covid-19-fieldnotes/negotiating-invisibility-at-the-epicenter-himalayan-new-yorkers-confront-covid-19/