****************

Carole: What constitutes the field always differs by scholar. Who we are in dialogue with, where, and why depends on one’s research project. However, no matter where we are or who we are, explaining our research topic and method is critical. In your research, with whom are you discussing ethnography as method, and how do you explain it?

Pasang: In my research, I discuss ethnography as method with village residents, diaspora communities, government officials, NGO officials, scientists, youth leaders, students, policy makers, technocrats, and conservation practitioners. These categories often overlap.

My research focuses on human dimensions of climate change, Indigeneity, and development in the Himalayas. I see these topics as intersecting themes that reveal contemporary contexts in the Himalayas. My ethnographic fieldwork thus involves multiple sets of questions, different sets of tools, and ways of explaining. My methodology also evolves, as it should, while conducting fieldwork.

For me, the field constitutes physical location, and virtual space. So far, I have conducted fieldwork among the Sherpas of Nepal, and people living in parts of Uttarkhand in India, and northwest Nepal. In order to study about peoples from these places, I often find myself interviewing in Queens, Boulder, or Kathmandu, outside their mountain villages. I also interact with my ‘informants’ using Facebook, and Apps like Viber and WeChat. The people I study direct my ethnographic approach.

Carole: This is so true. The people with whom we interact in the field are from a range of backgrounds and subject positions. Their thoughts on and responses to the research are situated in these different categories (and experiences), usually multiple and plural rather than some sort of singular “local’ or “villager” or “official” or “refugee” or “activist” perspective. Individuals have varied ways of interpreting our research, and of sharing and participating in it.

Pasang: I once interviewed a middle-aged monk in my village in the Everest region, who had lived in Queens for several years working as a sales person, and who had also actively participated in NGO-organized activities to conserve community forests. As an interviewee, he was formal, and forthcoming. I was able to explain my research project, and inform him about the voluntary participation step-by-step as outlined in the Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines. Another time, I tried to interview a young monk in his early 20s at the village monastery. He just smiled and smiled as I sat there describing the project to him. Once I was done, he ran away. My aunt explained to me (something I was suspecting) that the young monk was too shy to participate in an interview.

Carole: Not everyone is able to engage in this way, whether due to interest, personality, education, or societal prohibitions. I write about this in the context of who gets to narrate their own life history (“Narrative Dispossession”). Scholars tend to take things such as telling one’s story, or sharing one’s thoughts about events and ideas, for granted. IRBs do as well. But it doesn’t always work this way, no matter where one’s fieldwork is located.

Pasang: I agree. I recently turned my ethnographic gaze inward on myself to understand what it means to be a ‘Sherpa,’ ‘Nepali,’ ‘Himalayan,’ ‘South Asian,’ and ‘Asian.’ This process revealed to me how I as an individual, and a member of the society influence, and am influenced by what happens around me. I am fascinated by the uncovered cultural moments from my memory of growing up in Kathmandu in the 1990s that brought light to the many identities I have today. I remember reading about the Sherpas, depicted as people with flat nose and small eyes in our social studies textbook. I also remember how the term ‘backward people’ was used commonly to refer to groups that lived in rural parts of Nepal. For a young girl attending an English medium school in the capital city, it was confusing to hear that by definition I am a member of a backward group with flat nose and small eyes because I did not think I was backward nor did I have flat nose and small eyes.

In your research, how do you go about discussing ethnography as method, and with whom? Where is the field for you?

Carole: It depends on where I’m doing research—with whom and on what topic. Early in my career, in 1992, I did research in the village of Tirkhu in the Chaudabise Khola region east of Jumla. This was in conjunction with Dor Bahadur Bista’s Karnali Institute. Dor was the first Nepali anthropologist, the founder of the Department of Anthropology at Tribhuvan University, and was my first mentor in 1989 when I did anthropological research in Jhapa. His goal with the Karnali Institute was in part to use the methods of anthropology to encourage development, mostly in the form of education and small-scale economic projects. My role was an ethnographic study with women and girls. What were women’s ideas about what was needed in their community? I explained ethnography as method as having two components: (1) living in the community to learn what life was like there, and (2) talking with the women about what they thought about things. Open-ended. Learning. Listening.

If you asked the women why I was there, I think what they would’ve said is that I wanted to learn the work needed to live in the village (e.g., how to plant rice, how to mill buckwheat or pound corn, etc.), and I asked a lot of questions, and wrote lots of things down. Apart from being an outsider, one from a different country, literacy was a big difference between us. No woman in the village was literate, and in 1992, only one girl from the village attended the local school. She was the first girl to ever do so. My research “findings” were that the women primarily wanted things for their children, especially chances at education and other things that might improve their lives in the future. But, for themselves? They wanted to learn how to write their names. My main contribution was to teach a small group of mothers and grandmothers how to hold a pencil and write their names in Nepali.

I mention literacy because my next research project, which started in 1994 and that continues on today, was very different. It was with Tibetan resistance army veterans, almost all of whom were literate, and if not familiar with anthropology, were often very familiar with historical scholarship and cultures of documentation.

My research was both anthropological and historical, and I usually explained it when first meeting someone, as some version of the following: “The Chushi Gangdrug Army fought against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to defend Tibet and the Dalai Lama. But, histories of the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army aren’t included in Tibetan history. People don’t know these histories. What are they, and why don’t people know them?” I would explain my methodology as reading any and all written sources about the resistance, and also talking to people. Especially talking with people—with important leaders, but also with ordinary people to learn their experiences and thoughts. I would share that I lived with a Tibetan veteran and his family in Kathmandu, and that my research involved traveling to different Tibetan settlements in Nepal and India, and returning again and again to each place. This research-in-motion was very distinctly grounded in the Tibetan community in ways that were obvious and appreciated by the men from whom I learned.

But this was just the ‘first meeting’ sort of explanation of my topic and method I would give. Some of the people with whom I met, I didn’t encounter again, but that was rare. Most of the men (and some of their families) were individuals I came to know, sometimes well, over the course of multiple visits and conversations over the five-year course of my PhD research, as well as the two decades since. So in that sense, peoples’ idea of how I did my research, or of how I learned what I knew, was something that unfolded over time. And, I add: was something I was constantly tested on by some individuals. What did I know and how did I know it?

One thing that comes to mind is that in both of these settings, my research was valued and the methods weren’t questioned. People didn’t debate ethnography with me, and certainly didn’t devalue it. But you’ve had some different experiences, right?

Pasang: I’ve had interesting experiences mainly because of who I am, and where I study.

When working with my fellow villagers, people are happy to welcome me, and even take pride in the work I do. They share what they know with me. They are very supportive in that sense. It helps that I am careful about how I present my research and myself. I am also careful about the cultural etiquettes, and sensibilities. I think this comes naturally for me, and helps in making our conversations comfortable.

However, there have been times, when I’ve had difficulty reaching people and conducting interviews. I think it was largely because of my limited social connections in Kathmandu. Being a young-looking Sherpa woman also did not help. It seemed like every time I met someone new I had to explain not just what I was doing but my qualifications too. I had to prove that I am a professional to avoid getting dismissed, and I wasn’t always successful at that.

Exactly a year ago, I was presenting my climate change perception research findings in Kathmandu to a mixed audience (academic and nonacademic). I was a postdoctoral fellow at the New School at the time. Following my presentation, an environmental science professional from the audience shared that all social science presentations on climate change have the same conclusion: Development organizations are exploiting climate change for their own agenda. He was not interested in listening to another talk with the same conclusion. He said the reason he came to my talk was because of my institutional affiliation. He had expected ‘more’ from a New School person’s presentation, something that would challenge the idea of anthropogenic climate change. Instead, I was sharing my ethnographic findings of how people and institutions perceived climate change. [I gently introduced myself as a proud alumna of Washington State University.]

I recently watched your interview for WORLD101x, where you talk about the need to think of ethnographic stories as useful data for problem solving. Can you expand on that?

Carole: Sure. This is a question of what kind of data is ethnography. It is a truly unique form of knowledge. Ethnographic research generates fine-grained, detailed data that gives needed context to big questions or problems. In contrast with “big data,” ethnography is a type of ‘thick data” as Tricia Wang convincingly argues: ethnographic or thick data focuses on what is valuable rather than solely what is measurable.

For me, ethnography (and anthropology more broadly) is a form of theoretical storytelling. We use stories to make conceptual points and theoretical arguments. Professionally, the domain where I most do this outside of academia is in court. I use ethnographic data to make arguments to immigration officials and judges for them to use in decision-making. There is an element of translation involved as well, in terms of presenting ethnographic data as clear and coherent even with all of the contradictions and complications of actual human experiences. The key is in understanding how ethnography might be useful in new domains, whether it is in court, the corporate world (Nokia, in Wang’s case above), or in discussions with forestry or climate change scientists in Nepal. How can ethnography appear as recognizable, useful data in domains outside of anthropology? The conceptual work of translating and presenting ethnography to folks expecting numbers or other sorts of data is our responsibility, especially in this moment that feels so driven by “big data” in many ways. Stories are always needed.

Pasang: I agree. Stories are always needed. Stories are valuable because they help us understand everyday lives of people. Ethnography may involve extraordinary people, and their spectacular stories. They may also involve the ordinary people, and their routine lives. Each is powerful in its own way. Thank you for sharing your stories, and inviting me to share mine.

****************

Carole McGranahan is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Pasang Yangjee Sherpa is an anthropologist and co-director of the Nepal Studies Initiative at the University of Washington, Seattle.

How do scholars balance the need to write quickly and the need to write well? Pressures to “publish or perish” and the rise of “visibility indices” have led many of us to write in ways that will be recognized by our institutions, rather than in the other ways we also think and reflect. Some academics now are calling for a turn to slow scholarship, but this may be a luxury only the elite can afford. In a time of crisis, writing slowly does not work; instead, we need to write swiftly. Recently, I and many people who have conducted research in Nepal found ourselves under pressure to write quickly while still maintaining our academic integrity.

The April 25th earthquake in Nepal proved devastating for the country and spurred many in the anthropological world to action and comment. In the days after the quake, and propelled forward by the major May 12th aftershock, academics in the US, Europe and Asia found themselves overwhelmed by requests for interviews and op-eds, and many of us were eager to do something. I felt paralyzed and incompetent, sitting in Austin, Texas, trying to finish the semester, working closely with local student groups and NRN (Non-Resident Nepali) organizations and operating at a high level of distraction. Social media was afire with check-ins of who had survived, where the greatest damage had occurred and what resources were needed to keep people alive on a day-to-day basis. I found myself pulled into the social media world and addicted to email and messaging as I had never been before. Many of us sought to raise funds and awareness in our own communities, to establish contact with those we care about in Nepal, and to write brief articles as we felt able for media venues. After the initial flurry of media contacts, several of those who had written about the disaster were contacted by Anthropology News to write an article for their online forum. We hoped to get someone familiar with facts on the ground, yet many anthropologists who were in Nepal were dealing with everyday needs of seeking shelter, looking out for loved ones and trying to provide basic relief as they were able. AN Managing Editor Amy Goldenberg posted a brief piece that collected links to essays written by North American-based anthropologists for other venues, and there were promises from others to write more substantive articles when more research and reflection was possible. Then, Anthropology News—an official publication of the American Anthropological Association—found a respondent in anthropologist David Beine, Professor of World Missions and Evangelism at Moody Bible Institute.

Beine’s piece “Earthquakes and Culture” appeared on the AN website less than two weeks after the disaster. Beine discussed how certain cultural memes had, if not caused the earthquake, exacerbated the disaster and hampered response efforts. The cultural touchstones Beine pointed to are familiar to those who have visited Nepal – clichés about responses to inaction (ke garne) or claims to community insularity that are part of the oft-touted tropes of Nepal. After the Tohoku triple crisis in Japan, “collectivist culture” was often mentioned as a reason for the vigorous post-disaster mobilization, and a reason to celebrate the Japanese community spirit, but new stereotypes and politics also emerged as the crisis lingered on. In post-quake Haiti, stereotyped “culture of poverty” arguments also circulated. Many of Beine’s stereotypes of Nepal are deployed in negative ways, e.g. pointing to aphno manche (“own people”) as an idea of why aid might be unevenly distributed, rather than as a potentially effective form of networking and community support. He cited important historical phenomena that might complicate rebuilding and resilience after the quake, including Kathmandu’s expanding urban population and the oversized role that international aid has played in the last half century of Nepal’s history. But much was missing: the intricacies of bureaucracy in Nepal, local and national level political turmoil, social and economic inequalities, Nepal’s devastating civil war, issues of privilege and politics in international development, the great diversity of the country and any sense of actual, on-the-ground Nepali efforts in the post-quake period. As a result, his article fell far short of the standards expected of contemporary cultural anthropology, relying more on outdated themes one might find in Kiss, Bow, Shake Hands than in an official AAA publication. The article seemed to blame the victim, noting that the earthquake was exacerbated by “cultural features that have led to unpreparedness.”

In light of the earthquake, I too felt compelled to write quickly but (I hope) with reflection and in areas about which I have research experience to bring attention and knowledge to the global agenda of earthquake relief. When Dr. Beine’s article was shared with me by a graduate student who was aghast at his culturism and objectification, I had hoped that it would be buried online, or overwhelmed by other articles with a more sophisticated view of Nepal, articles that highlighted the diversity of the country and the complexity of response to a disaster of this scale. And for a time it was, but I was naive. Two Nepali anthropologists found the piece and wrote their own response questioning the role of anthropologists in speaking to the field in times of crisis. Gaurab KC and Mallika Shakya, respected scholars and researchers in Nepal, found much to criticize—appropriately so—in Beine’s article. While the authors note that Beine’s article was likely written in haste and that it was intended for a mainly non-Nepali audience, they nonetheless take it as representative of American anthropology. And why not given that it was published by the American Anthropological Association’s official newsletter? We are living in a connected world, one in which scholars from all over the globe can access information and contribute to the scholarly conversation, although not in Anthropology News, as one must be a member of the AAA to post comment on their website.

KC and Shakya’s article concludes with several provocative questions, including asking if “the anthropology on Nepal has kept pace with emerging anthropological movements elsewhere, especially within South Asia and the Global South?” I have long been proud to work in Nepal, and found the anthropological discourse on the Himalayas to be one that seeks to go beyond fetishism, Orientalism, and objectification in asking questions about “virtual Sherpas,” Prisoners of Shangri-la, and “Little America in Kathmandu,” and in thinking reflectively and reflexively about the role of anthropology in Nepal, especially in relation to aid work and cultural exoticization. Yet, as it now stands, the voice of the American Anthropological Association on the earthquake in Nepal suggests that if Nepalis had only been in well-constructed Christian churches, rather than decrepit Hindu temples, maybe fewer would have died on April 25.

All this prompts me to ask a question about editing decisions and peer review in Anthropology News. I write in Savage Minds, not because it is “peer reviewed,” but because I read the work of my peers there. Each year, I send hundreds of dollars to AAA, and yet I learn little of what goes into vetting the articles that are put up in “my name” and which are read by scholars around the world. I fully understand the offense taken by KC and Shakya regarding this article that purports to explain the “culture of Nepal.” There is far more at stake than “good methods and data” in vetting an academic article, but I wonder what editorial vetting was done of “Earthquakes and Culture.” As relief and recovery continue, aid organizations and journalists will still be clamoring for sound bites and quickly digestible “truisms” about Nepal’s culture. The discipline has been through this before, evidenced by guilt/shame culture from Benedict’s remote scholarship for Chrysanthemum and the Sword on to more recent adventures with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Shakya and KC present anthropologists with an important admonition, to think before we write, to be aware of our limitations, and to avoid playing to the stereotyped paradigms in which media and development agencies wish to slot our knowledge. But I hope that they and others will understand that Dr. David Beine does not speak for me, and certainly does not speak for all anthropologists concerned for Nepal.

What we did know was that a big earthquake was coming. One had long been predicted for Nepal. Despite this, emergency preparedness mostly took the form of prayer, of hoping it wouldn’t happen or that it wouldn’t be too bad. It did happen and it was bad.

For those in Kathmandu and those of us outside Nepal—Nepalis abroad, Tibetans from Nepal, everyone with connections to the country—social media has been crucial. Crucial for getting information about beloved family members and friends. Crucial for organizing and connecting people. Crucial for fundraising. Crucial for sharing pain and shock and relief and hope. But crucial only for some. Many cannot access the internet, or recharge their batteries, or were perhaps never quite online at all. As Nepali journalist Kanak Mani Dixit said on Twitter, “This was a very class-conscious earthquake, in town & country it targeted underprivileged households with mud-mortar construction.”

Many of the places and peoples most severely hit were the poorest, those in villages close to the epicenter where homes are made from mud and wood. Homes that collapsed in the earthquake. Homes in regions where there are no vehicular roads, where already weak communication infrastructure is now not operative, where rescue and relief operations are struggling to reach.

Some of these villages are known to anthropology students around the world. For better or worse, Nepal has a deep ethnographic literature, much of it centered on the sort of mountain villages so devastated by the earthquake. “If Each Comes Halfway” by Kathryn March. Order in Paradox by David Holmberg. Tibetan Diaries by Geoff Childs. People of Nepal by Dor Bahadur Bista. Body and Emotion by Robert Desjarlais. Rituals of Ethnicity by Sara Shneiderman. Sherpas Through Their Rituals by Sherry Ortner. The Navel of the Demoness by Charles Ramble. And so many more.

Some of these villages are gone.

Cornell University professor of anthropology Kathryn March writes on Facebook:

“My heart is heavier than the Heart Sutra, which is usually translated as: “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Gone. Gone. Gone beyond. Gone altogether beyond.” Mhanegang, where David Holmberg and I have worked for 40+ years, is gone.

According to our longtime friend, host and research partner, Suryaman Tamang, all the houses in Mhanegang have been destroyed. They have already lost seventeen people in this one small community. Up the mountain, in Balche, Jay Tamang reports that thirty people were killed by a single landslide. And at the head of the valley, according to Sarita Lopchen Himdung, the large dense community of Bomtang was flattened. Cremation pyres have been burning almost non-stop throughout the entire Salankhu Khola valley. I can almost hear the keening of mourners here.

It is incredible to me that we were just in Mhanegang a few weeks ago. The Cornell Nepal Study Program students and faculty were with us there a few weeks before that. We sang and danced well into the night: the CNSP students showed everyone the macarena and square danced; the Mhanegang villagers taught the CNSP students Tamang line and circle dancing. There were newborn goats and sel roti. The students bathed at the spring in the sun…

Mhanegang, like all of Nepal, was of course, very lucky that the first earthquake occurred at noon, when few people were asleep or in their houses, and on a Saturday, when no one was at school. Most people were relaxing or working outside with family and friends. They are not lucky now. Everything they had is buried under the rubble of their houses. They are not on anyone’s relief radar. And the quaking continues.”

Anthropology is the sort of discipline that involves personal as well as professional commitments. You cannot be an anthropologist without these. Our commitments are to peoples and places in good times and in bad, and to knowing and thinking hard about systems and structures and sentiments. Our commitments are to making sense of the frustrations, the possibilities, the unknowns. One way to do this is by writing. In this immediate moment, several anthropologists have already done so:

Sara Shneiderman and Mark Turin write about tragedy beyond Kathmandu and Everest: “Nepal’s Relief Effort Must Reach the Rural Poor”

Sienna Craig on the shaking of both earth and hearts: “The Ground Beneath Our Feet: How to Help Nepal”

David Gellner addresses serious problems of government and infrastructure: “Could Nepal’s Messy Politics Hamper Relief Efforts?”

From medical anthropologist and doctor David Citrin in far west Nepal: “From Remote Nepal, a Warning Against Ahistorical Disaster Relief”

Our commitments also stray from the text. They take root in hopes for improvement and for better, brighter futures. They take the form of small-scale projects and large-scale dreams. Some anthropologists and other scholars are on the ground in Nepal offering up their many skills and learning new ones needed in this moment. Those of us far away from Nepal are grateful for their updates on Facebook, for their eyes and ears and hands in this moment, for shortening the distance between here and there in ways newly needed.

Our commitments from afar are financial as well as moral and intellectual, getting money to respected aid organizations for rescue and relief, for operations taking place right now as I type. In the coming weeks and months, we anticipate needs will turn toward directing money and support to those organizations with experience and expertise in reconstruction and rebuilding. For those who would like to join in this efforts, here are some groups recommended by myself and other anthropologists of Nepal:

American Nepal Medical Foundation, respected teams of Nepali and American doctors. Immediate relief work.

Mercy Corps, respected international organization with decades of experience in Nepal. Immediate relief work.

Educate the Children, respected local group, Nepali-foreign collaboration, working in rural mountain villages impacted by the earthquake.

For more information on trusted organizations in Nepal, as well as how to contribute skills from afar, see the collected suggestions of the US-based Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (a group which includes many anthropologists).

Over these last five days, I keep finding myself thinking not only of Nepal, but also of Haiti. I turned to the words of my dear colleague and Haitian anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse. On the first day of the earthquake in Haiti, she reflected on one’s duty to Haiti, a duty felt by many who “despite their personal hardships, chose to engage in community-building.” In Nepal as in Haiti, we are witnessing duty and community in numerous acts of citizens responding to the devastation. Rescuing, caring for, organizing, making new commitments to each other, and in turn new demands on the state. These are not empty words or actions.

Where is the government? Where is the state? At the time of the earthquake, Nepal was trying to rebuild its government following a ten-year civil war that ended in 2006. This has been a complicated, convoluted process during which time there has been no constitution, no legal government from May 2012 through January 2014, and no governmental services in many areas. The security forces now involved in search and rescue missions are the same ones who attacked or could not defend citizens during war or its aftermath. Many related struggles have been beyond the reach of the government:

Out-migration and deaths of Nepali laborers in the Middle East.

Patchy local-level economic development depending on which families are receiving remittances from abroad and which are not.

New environmental crises and pressures throughout the country.

Dire conditions for Tibetan refugees in Nepal with the growing influence of China.

The 2014 avalanche on Everest, and grievances of the Sherpa community.

The continuing inability to hold elections for local level governance.

And so on.

And now.

When Nepalis say they want more from their government, when they ask where is the state, they ask in this context. This context of a country struggling to rebuild after war, of a country in which inequalities are painfully visible, and yet in which resilience and resourcefulness are a national tradition. The rebuilding from the earthquake will thus not only be a response to a natural disaster, but also to human conflict. May it be a rebuilding of the country that is led by people, not by politicians.

One of the first phrases a student of the Nepali language learns is ‘Ke garne?’ This all-purpose phrase is often posted as a declarative or reflective statement, a question not requiring an answer because it is both question and answer. Ke garne means what to do, and it is asked when there is no real answer, when the answer is obvious or absent. It encapsulates a sense of resignation, but right now, this is not the sense coming from Nepal. There is not a sense of resignation, but of commitment and care. This phrase that has always captured something so telling about Nepal no longer works. The question is not the answer.

And thus: Ke garne?

Help. Learn. Teach. Act.

Thank you.

The idea of a decision is a decision.

We build arguments around impermanence

But are not the sort of people to admit

To inconstancies.

—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, from In the Absent Everyday

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of the “unreliable narrator” these days, and what it might mean for us ethnographers, careful raconteurs of others’ stories, intertwined as they are with our own. The idea of the unreliable narrator emerges in literature, theatre, and film as a tool of craft that plays with senses of credibility or believability, sometimes to trick the reader or the audience, other times to push the boundaries of a genre or challenge the cognitive strategies a reader might employ to make sense of the story she is being told. Although unreliable narrators may materialize through a third person frame, they are most commonly first person renderings. In the most facile sense, an unreliable narrator is biased, makes mistakes, lacks self-awareness, tells lies not of substance but of form. The device can also be used in a revelatory vein: to twist an expected ending, to demand that readers reconsider a point of view, to leave an audience wondering. Like our anthropological propensity to classify, literary theorists have done the same for the interlocutors of our imaginations. Types of unreliable narrators include the Madman, the Clown, and the Naif, to name a few. Others posit that the unreliable narrator as a device is best understood to fall along a spectrum of fallibility, beginning with the contours of trust and ending with specters of capriciousness (Olson 2003). This is the shape of a character as she defies the expectations of a reader, who then may well pass judgment on this scripted self.

In medicine, the figure of the unreliable narrator emerges – perhaps too often – as the patient: that suffering middle-aged woman whose pain seems to be located at once nowhere and everywhere; the veteran who describes his sense of displacement upon return from battle in ways that fail to align with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s latest definition of PTSD, but simply must be that. Equally possible though sometimes more difficult to capture is the physician as unreliable narrator: the resident, credentialed as culturally competent, who presumes an immigrant family is “clueless” as they take in the diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder as it presents in their toddler; the oncologist whose strives for optimism in the face of the latest clinical evidence, suggesting aggressive, experimental chemotherapy against the evidence that his patient is preparing for death. Each presents a distinct form of unreliability that has to do with the vulnerable spaces that arise in narrating suffering.

***

I have known Karchung (a pseudonym) for twenty years. Still, her quick wit arrests me. Over spiced tea and biscuits, we chat about the past and future of her high Himalayan home. In speaking of migrations and the transformation of local lives as many decamp to the global village that is New York, she remarks, “I remember visiting a cousin in Brooklyn about ten years ago. She was fresh from the village and couldn’t read in any language. In giving me directions to her apartment in Brooklyn, she told me to go in the direction of the tap je, the frying pan! She meant the ‘Q’ train.” We laugh, seeing a cast iron skillet emerge from the contours of a foreign alphabet, handle and all. I marvel at the brilliant absurdity of this human skill to not just read signs but to read into signs and, in the process, to make sense of an unfamiliar landscape. In other words, far from being an unreliable narrator, she is providing a reliable interpretation of an unreliable world.

My phone rings. The number signals Nepal. It is another friend who happens to be from the same village as Karchung and who I have also known for many years. He and his wife live comfortably between Kathmandu and his rural village. All five of their children now reside in the United States. He knows that Karchung and I are about to gather with other people originally from their Himalayan homeland, a place that is culturally and geographically contiguous with Tibet but home to Nepali citizens. Although he would not frame it as such, he has called me now, knowing that Karchung and I are together, to assert his own reliability as a narrator of social change in the face of Karchung’s assessments of cultural disorientation, emptying villages, plays of power and influence between Nepal and New York. “There is no place like our place in the whole world,” he says, passionate. This is the tail of a speech whose body is the need to support a local nunnery not just by renovating its structure, but also by supporting the nuns. Once we are off the phone, Karchung quips that he is disingenuous: “His own daughter was a nun, and he helped her escape those obligations to come to America.” True enough, I note. But does this space between lived reality and ideals undercut his reliability, his narrative and affective claims?

The following morning I gather with a group of Himalayan friends now living in New York, in part to share data from a recent stint of fieldwork in Nepal – an effort at my own reliable narration, this looping back. The conversation moves from feelings of identity confusion to claims to citizenship. Some people from this region essentially pretend to be Tibetan exiles, either those born in Nepal or born in Tibet, as a strategy for seeking political asylum in the US. Even though there is truth to their figurations of Tibetanness – they speak a Tibetan dialect, practice Tibetan Buddhism – and to forms of oppression this can produce in present-day Nepal, they sometimes risk becoming unreliable narrators as they spin stories of exile. This move can make them more believable in the eyes of state authorities familiar with this particular plot line of political suffering. But when a person finally claims a paragon of US citizenship – that blue passport – things come full circle. Where once there was a Nepali citizen with land to his name and a country to call home, the reliable unreliability of an exile story becomes indelibly marked on official papers. Place of birth: People’s Republic of China. In his efforts to claim a new land, America, he who once lived between this river and that mountain, who belonged to a village and to a nation-state, has become a new kind of refugee, narrating a history that has been split open and pieced together again. Yet we might also ask different questions about narrative unreliability here. Do a small number of falsified political asylum claims come to generate a larger collective truth through being told and retold? Do assertions that asylum applicants “lie” come to circulate freely as truth even when they might just as easily be gossip? Here, too, we find unreliable narrators of a different sort.

***

As the child of a contentious divorce, I came to see my parents as unreliable narrators. Perspectives that felt too fraught, too invested, troubled me. And yet, I was also asked to believe such perspectives as evidence of allegiance, if not expressions of love. Speaking of vulnerability, I think this childhood work has shaped how I have come to cultivate an anthropologist’s sense of truth as deeply felt, emotionally charged terrain that is as real as it is unreliable. Those visceral question of who to believe and what to rely on has framed many of the deeper senses of self that, when cloaked in my academic costume, fashions me as an ethnographer. Beyond the mantle of my profession, though, I acknowledge that residual ache of personal history – the desire to be a generous listener, to resist taking sides – which has coaxed me toward the use of dialogue, irony, and shifts between first, second, and third person as strategies for trustworthy storytelling. But does this make me an unreliable narrator more than the cultivation of critical distance might?

To be clear: being an unreliable narrator is not about being unbelievable. Nor is it about faith, or a loss of faith, in the most catholic (small c) sense of this term. Rather this notion of unreliability raises questions about what we can count on. Whether a reader or a patient, a key informant or a collaborator, a new immigrant or those at the other ends of place and kin – or even each of us as we perform the work of writing culture from one day to the next – we want to know we are supported. By “count on” I don’t just mean a predictable show of support but rather a more exposed investment in the possibility of someone’s truth, however shape-shifting that truth may be. Perhaps this is what Veena Das (2007) means when she talks about the work of acknowledgement against the pretense of understanding. What can we come back to? Where do we hold on?

References

Das, Veena, 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Olson, Greta. 2003. Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators. In: Narrative. 11: 93–109.