"If Each Comes Halfway": Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal [CD with original Tamang songs ed.] 9781501728457

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
SONGS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: CLOSING A TEXT OF OPEN CONVERSATIONS
I. THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK
II. MONDZOM
III. NHANU
IV. JYOMO'S LIFE OF WORK
V. PURNGI'S TALES OF DOMESTIC INTRIGUE, LOVE, AND LICE
VI. SUKUMAYA'S TWO HOMES
VII. WORKING WITH TAMANG WOMEN, THEIR WORDS, AND THEIR WORLDS
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

"If Each Comes Halfway"

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

"If Each Comes Halfway" Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal

Kathryn S. March

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED WITH THE AID OF A GRANT FROM THE HULL MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

Copyright© 2002 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 1485o. First published 2002 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2002

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data March, Kathryn S. "If each comes halfWay" : meeting Tamang women in Nepal / Kathryn S. March. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-4017-3 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN o-8014-8827-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Women, Tamang. 2. Tamang (Nepalese people)-Sociallife and customs. 3· Songs, Tamang. I. Title. DS493.9.T35 M64 2002 2002007 945 3o 5 .4 8'8954-dc21 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

10 10

987654 321 987654321

This book is dedicated to our children. They are the seventy-seven children, living and dead, of Tschirto, Jyomo, Tasyi, Tikiri, Nhanu, Purngi, Phurko, Mondzom, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, Sukumaya, Setar, Hrisang, David, and myself. They are: Aiti, Akal Bahadur, Bahadur Singh, Biba, Bijaya Singh, Bir Bahadur, Birbal, Chandra Singh, Chaturman, Chinta, Christopher Allan, Damji, Dawang, Dewan Moktan, Dudhi Maya, Gadurman, Jayaman, Jyauki, Kalu, Kamala, Karchung, Karsang, Lali, Lama Shangbo, Laudari, Makku, Man Kumari, Man Singh, Maya Kathryn, Menchyung, Mohan Lama, Ngyhanggu, Ngyhema Wanchyu, Nurbu, Parta Singh, Patta, Pempa Hrinjen, Phai Ghale, Phul Maya, Phurphu Lama, Poti, Purngi Singh, Purngi, Puthiman, Rabindra, Rita, Santu, Sanu Maya, Sarki, Selkar, Setar, Sete Ghale, Sher Bahadur, Sriman (formerly Birman), Sinen, Sopar, Sujana, Suku, Suku Maya, Suryaman, Susila, Suwan, Syam Bahadur, Tarshang, Thigyal, Thute, Tschendzom, Tschirto, Tula Bahadur, Tuli Maya, Urken, the twin daughters Ganga andjamuna, and four babies whose names were also lost. They are the reasons this work was undertaken. They will have to find their own reasons to pass the memory of Tamang life down.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Songs Acknowledgments

ix XI

xiii

Introduction: Closing a Text of Open Conversations The Who, Where, and How of This Book

14

Mondzom: Narrating a Life, Framing a Life

32

III

Nhanu: Parsing a Life, Naming What Matters

79

IV

Jyomo's Life ofWork

125

Purngi's Tales of Domestic Intrigue, Love, and Lice

167

Sukumaya's Two Homes

203

Working with Tamang Women, Their Words, and Their Worlds

233

Glossary Bibliography Index

249 255 265

I II

v VI VII

ILLUSTRATIONS

Photographs

following page 124

Figures 1.

2.

3· 4·

5· 6. 7· 8. g. 10. 11.

Kinship relations among the four core women Relationships among all fourteen women First page of original transcription notebook Orienting Mondzom and her audience Orienting Nhanu and her audience Jyomo 's extended household Jyomo's household residents in 1977 Cross-cousin marriage A fuller view of Tamang bilateral cross-cousin marriage Purngi's relationship withJyomo's elder co-wife Sukumaya's marriage

26

27 30

34 82

146 1 47 170 170 182

205

Map Density ofTamang residence in Nepal

ix

SONGS

* Included on CD Chicken Song* Calfs Lament* Setar's Bomsang* Popcorn Song* Marriage Song Lama's Bomsang* Setar's Bomsang* Wara Wara Hwai* Courtship Song Wild Garlic Song LingmaSong Song of the Loom* Gangjyung Bomo Hwai* Butter Lamp Song*

Inside the yellow chicken Incenses please and suit the mountain-gods Trees are said to be old and gnarled Popcorn, popped If you go in marriage Gather round, boys and girls, sons and daughters Beautiful, oh beautiful The leaves of the juniper growing by the spring Will we find love or not? On the tops of the mountains [Name and] purify with incense! When the cycle of rebirths was beginning The very water of Lhasa A dead lifeform may take [re]birth

6

7 11 41

54

59 61

72 99 115 129 1 33

160 192

xi

Tek Soli Tek* Sai Khola* Tobacco Song Cooking Pot Song*

xii

SONGS

Will we find affection or not? Moss hangs in the breeze The golden flower of a water bowl The cooked rice crust might be thrown out

204 219

223

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Above all, thanks to Tschirto, Jyomo, Tasyi, Tikiri, Nhanu, Purngi, Phurko, Mondzom, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, Sukumaya, Setar, and Hrisang-the fourteen beloved women of Stupahill who have so generously shared their lives. The patient assistance of Suryaman (Nghyema Karma Himdung) Tamang, Tularam (Dimdung) Tamang, and Sriman (Birman Himdung) Tamang made this work both possible and enjoyable. Their tact and advice were always essential. They are exceptional in their willingness to work and rework translations, to search out and research songs, and to question the meaning of it all, over and over. To these people and to all my other friends and fictive relations in and around Stupahill: many, many thanks. Because this book has been so long in the making, there are many other friends, colleagues, students, editors, research assistants, and funding agencies to thank. I cannot possibly list all of them here, but I would like to try. The original research for this book was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (National Research Service Award) and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies). Subsequent grants have included a Cornell Humanities Faculty Research Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Grant, and a Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute Fellowship. A Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship not only made further work possible but also reXlll

suited in friendships with John Paul at the U.S. Office of Education and with Ann Lewis, Penny Walker, and Michael Gill in Nepal at the U.S. Education Foundation-Fulbright Commission, to whose dedicated staff I continue to be grateful. In Kathmandu, good friends Al Eastham and Carolyn Laux, as well as Carelton Coons Jr., and still later Barbara Butterworth and Mike Gill, and Bob,Jo, Ryan, andJyoti Yoder all at one time or another gave refuge and encouragement generously. The hospitality Dharma Ratna Sakya and his family offered us in Trisuli Bazaar transformed a hot dusty stop at the end of the bus route into a friendly haven. I also express enduring thanks to Chandni and Mohan Joshi, Doss Mabe and Adel Boehm-Mabe, Durga and Bimala Ojha, Bina and Jyoti Pradhan, John and Claudia Scholz, and Megh Thapa for their very special friendship, which began during the first years of field research in Stupahill. Friends and family who visited or accompanied us on various trips to Nepal brought much welcome love and support. Thank you, Chantal Henry, Jacques Henry and Nicole Thimister, Anna Holmberg and Mark Wagner, Eric Holmberg and LeAnn James, Casey Holmberg and Damon James, Laura Holmberg,JanJolles, Camille Kurtz, Sally and Carl McConnell-Ginet, Jayne Dohr and James G. March, and Elaine and Bob Schroeder. For support during various stages of writing, I thank many friends and colleagues. I am particularly grateful for input and patience from Jane Fajans, Nelly Furman, Ann Grodzins Gold, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ernestine McHugh, Kirin Narayan, Sherry Ortner, Robert]. Smith, Toby Volkman, and Margery Wolf. At the Bunting Institute I found particularly welcome support from Bina Agrawal, Judith Berman, Ann Bookman, Valerie Smith, and Rachelle Taqqu. As graduate students, Harihar and Romila Acharya, Stina Almroth, Kim Berry, Suzanne Brenner, Thamora Fishel, Sara Friedman, Kathryn Hartzell, Judy Ledgerwood, Dale Nafziger, Sarita Neupane, Lazima Onta, Robert Philen, Stacy Pigg, Katharine Rankin, Cabeiri Robinson, Ann Russ, Abraham Zablocki, and Elayne Zorn all had to put up with my endless ruminations about life history work in general and this Tamang volume in particular; thank you, all. I also thank Laura Ahern, Steve Curtis, Ter Ellingson, Elizabeth Enslin, Steven Feld, Linda Iltis, Carmela Schwartz, and Debra Skinner for their suggestions and ideas about Tamang and Nepali song or ethnomusicology more generally. For help with translation, thanks go to Andras Hofer, Krishna Pradhan, and Amrit Yonjen for advice regarding details that only another linguist and translator would care about. In addition, Pashuram Tamang, as well as Susan Hangen and Mukta Singh Lama Tamang, were generous in helping me to understand the new ethnic pride associations and their efforts. At the Tribhuvan University in Nepal, colleagues such as Krishna B. Bhattachan, Ram Chhetri, Gyanu Chhetri, Ganesh Gurung, Om Gurung, Laxmi Keshari Manandhar, Kedar Bhakta Mathema, Gopal Singh Nepali, X~

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dhan Prasad Pandit, Bina Pradhan, Kailash Pyakuryal, Navin Rai, Rishikeshav Regmi, Bihari Shrestha, Mohan Man Sainju, and, of course, the late Dor Bahadur Bista, have always made me most generously welcome. I also acknowledge the long friendship and collegial assistance of both Banu and Shambhu Oja, who, between them, have been the Nepali language teachers and In-Country Director of Cornell's program in Nepal-they have been integral to the growth and success of Nepal and Himalayan studies at Cornell. I also thank the students in my seminar on anthropological life histories over the years: Italo Barros, Nicole Benjamin, Elena Berg, Sofia Betancourt, Amelia Bookstein, Catherine Broadbent, Rima Brusi, Elizabeth Butler, Jennifer Burlingame, Mary Cathcart, Florence Cherry, Amy Chilcote, Mary Churchill, Laura Conklin, David Corrigan, Colleen Costello, Steven Curtis, Valerie DelRosario, Alexandra Destler, Bethany Dreyfus, Diana Drylie, Jean Fang, Julie Hemment, Ileana Hernadez, Lynn Hine, Terry Jean-Louis, Erik Jenson, Tamara Kraus, Laura Krevsky, Barry Kronefeld, Obiagele Lake, Jane Lee, Katherine Long, Julie Lorber, Wanhua Ma, Bonnie Macintosh, Earl Martin, Gabrielle Moehring, Mary Moye, Binu Nair, Brigette Orkild, Esther Ortiz, Jenny Park, Loida Perez, Sara Pollock, Rebecca Prentice, Kavitha Rajaram, Cabeiri Robinson, Samantha Shaber, Elizabeth Shea, Diane Sternberg, Anneke Swinehart, Leshan Tan, Tatiana Thieme, Kathryn White, and Patricia Yoon. I know I may have forgotten some names, but I appreciate the input of all of my students. For editing, I am deeply grateful to Grey Osterud, Bevin McLaughlin, and Karen Hwa, who guided me through the final surgeries, and to Peter Agree and Fran Benson, who never lost faith that the book could be done successfully. Thanks also go to both Mukta Singh Lama Tamang and Julia Cassaniti for their assistance in verifying the bibliography. I am especially grateful to the reviewer who argued for-and to the Cornell University Press for agreeing to support-the CD associated with this book. And I am deeply indebted to Martin Hatch who guided me through the intricacies of producing a CD from field tape recordings. It is a special pleasure to be able to include my own children among those to whom this book is dedicated since they are especially beloved to me. But I also want to mention the children of my good friends Bhim Bahadur and Dolma Tamang-Bina and Louise-who lived with us and with Cindy, Donna, and John Dempster-McClain to complete their secondary schooling in Ithaca. For all of these children, and I hope many others in the growing Tamang community worldwide, the traditions described in these women's tales are distant but important parts of their experience and heritage. Through it all, and more than any author is due, my family has been remarkable for their forbearance. They even learned (mostly) not to ask whether this book was "done yet." Both Mohan Lama Holmberg and Maya Kathryn Holmberg are now reaching an age at which they appreciate the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XV

subtlety and depth of the support their father has given this work: David H. Holmberg is the reason I came to work among Stupahill Tamang; his dedication and support inspire me. I am deeply grateful for all your encouragement, enthusiasm, advice and, above all, patience. I am glad-finally-to make good on your faith.

XVI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"If Each Comes Halfway"

INTRODUCTION CLOSING A TEXT OF OPEN CONVERSATIONS

Twenty-five years: this book, like my acqu aintance with the Tamangi women whose stories I retell, has been a meandering odyssey. How to reconcile the negotiated openness of dialogue with the people of Stupahill and the authoritative closure of a written text? Twice I thought I had completed this work. Each time I found something critically lacking and returned to Nepal to correct what I could. This book reflects a long learning process, with each stage adding a new layer of concerns. Those of us who live in the less famous Ithaca tire of allusions to its classical namesake and its notorious vagrant. In one respect, however, I must compare the work at hand not to U lysses and his adventures but to Homer's way of telling-as an epic narrative. Without overstating the parallels to that great account, these stories of the Tamang women should also be read as an epic. The problem with epics is that, as tellings, they a ppear to wander, get lost, and retrace their steps. Somehow, though, it is through these same devices that epics lead us to the heart of the adventure, the adventurers, and ourselves. They are meant to be heard and reheard, told and retold. 1. Pro nounced with equal emphasis on both syllables and a soft ng: roughly, tah-mahng, not ta-mayng.

The sense of repetition and retarded pace in reading an epic requires a different kind of patience, closer in kind to a living, spoken telling. So, too, Tamang speakers do not use truncated names: William Shakespeare cannot become a 'Willie" or a "Will," nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt a "Frank" or even "FDR"; everyone is always addressed or referred to by their complete name. Reading such a work takes longer; you must slow down; you cannot get impatient with the space the names or the stories require. By including all of the dialogue, questions, and interruptions from my original interviews with the full texts of songs that the women sang or recalled, I have insisted with these women that their accounts be given their original space and wholeness, as far as possible, so that you can appreciate how the accounts were told, where the teller wanted to take you, and what was deployed to get you there. These stories go on and on, backwards and forwards, to faraway places-geographical, interpersonal, and imagined. How could I provide guidance through the stories of the Tamang women without overtaking them? How could I make them understood, without claiming perfect understanding, to leave space for your own reactions and your own understanding? Therein lay the greatest challenge. I wanted the stories to take you somewhere you hadn't been without either losing you or taking you only where I have been. I wanted to engage you in understanding my Tamang women friends based on our shared humanity but also to make room for unexpected differences. One decision I faced was how to present the women's songs within their narratives and how to balance my scholarly hand with their more poetic ones. The songs show the creative energy of the Tamang authors and allow us to see their life histories as carefully crafted tales and not 'Just facts"-to return to Lila Abu-Lughod's ( 1993) phrase-but as important signage on the path to seeing lives different from our own. Like the stories that Angela Smith, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned insisted that Julie Cruikshank ( 1990) incorporate as integral to their lives, the songs in the lives of Tschirto, Jyomo, Tasyi, Tikiri, Nhanu, Purngi, Phurko, Mondzom, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, Sukumaya, Setar, and Hrisang are important to them not as ornament but as constitutive of their lives' most emotive meanings. I imagined how I might read these stories aloud, as I had read them in my classes. I would reproduce some of the spoken pace and intensity of detail. I realized, too, that I would not limit my commentary to introductory remarks or notes. Instead, I would almost certainly read some of their stories, talk a little, read more, provide a comment, add a story of my own, explain a story of theirs, and maybe even sometimes beg you to listen more carefully and try to tell you why. Thus this book emerged. As it wanders between their words and mine, between analysis and song, between answers and questions, I have tried to produce a text that is itself a conversation. Representing interactions on several planes, the text is, first of all, based in the relationships among Tschirto, 2

INTRODUCTION

Jyomo, Tasyi, Tikiri, Nhanu, Purngi, Phurko, Mondzom, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, Sukumaya, Setar, Hrisang, and myself, as well as the relationship between their transcribed words and my emergent understanding of them. There is play, too, between the spoken and the sung word. And, finally, of course, there is the movement between voiced realities, theirs and ours. This book arises in conversations not only with Tamang women but also with itself, about the nature of narrative constructions of life and about sharing and understanding them. Translating and understanding difference The process of translating spoken words into a written text and taking that text across national, cultural, linguistic, and other borders is complex, as Ruth Behar attests in her aptly titled book Translated woman ( 1993). Many of my musings revolve around process and ask whose work this is, how and why. Like so many who have asked, "Can there be a feminist ethnography?" (Abu-Lughod 1990, Enslin 1994, Stacey 1988), I was concerned about the tensions between the ethnographer and the ethnographed, as well as those between the possible irrelevance of scholarly debates and the pressing need for social action and a commitment to shared research goals. I wanted to see what might emerge from work that conscientiously attempted to foster and acknowledge the points of view and purposes of the Tamang women as well as my own. Two mutual goals came into the foreground: the project of getting to know one another and that of creating an enduring record. For me, the most moving aspect of the years of fieldwork in and around Stupahill has been the affection and friendship that people have offered me there. Getting to know Tschirto, Jyomo, Tasyi, Tikiri, Nhanu, Purngi, Phurko, Mondzom, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, Sukumaya, Setar, and Hrisang has been a true adventure. The process of entering into their lives has been immeasurably satisfying, the more so as I began to realize how well they had come to know me. When we first met, their lives and worlds seemed vastly different from my own-technologically, economically, socially, emotionally, spiritually, physically-as mine must have seemed to them. I agree with Uma Narayan's succinct depiction of perspectival knowledge as "the view that our concrete embodiments as members of a specific class, race, and gender as well as our concrete historical situations necessarily play significant roles in our perspective on the world .... No point of view is 'neutral' because no one exists unembedded in the world" ( 1989, 262). People in Stupahill have been unstintingly generous in their attempts to communicate their worlds to me and their inclusion of me in their worlds. As the years have gone by, the children who run up to me each time I return to the village have changed their call of greeting from Tschang kaji! (Daughter-in-law has CLOSING A TEXT OF OPEN CONVERSATIONS

3

come!) to Amagren kaji! or Anyi kaji! (Elder Mother or Aunt-mother-in-law2 has come!). Now when I enter Stupahill, it is: Mum kaji! (Grandmother has come!). I make no claims to anything but partial entry into the lives of the women of Stupahill, or to an unobstructed view of the world as they see and live it. But I also share Narayan's humanistic optimism: It would be a mistake to move from the thesis that knowledge is constructed by human subjects who are socially constituted to the conclusion that those who are differently located socially can never attain some understanding of our experience or some sympathy with our cause. In that case, we would be committed to not just a perspectival view of knowledge but a relativistic one. Relativism, as I am using it, implies that a person could have knowledge of only the sorts of things she had experienced personally and that she would be totally unable to communicate any of the contents of her knowledge to someone who did not have the same sorts of experiences. Not only does this seem clearly false and perhaps even absurd, but it is probably a good idea not to have any a priori views that would imply either that all our knowledge is always capable of being communicated to every other person or that would imply that some of our knowledge is necessarily incapable of being communicated to some class of persons .... Our commitment to the contextual nature of knowledge does not require us to claim that those who do not inhabit these contexts can never have any knowledge of them. ( 1g8g, 263-64)

I count myself privileged to record, write, and ponder my acquaintance with the Tamang women. That privilege, however, requires some direct consideration. Among the many differences between me and the women of Stupahill troubling my anthropological and feminist interest in representing their lives are the material demands of their lives. However much I envy them some aspects of their lives, and admire them deeply for all, I would not change my life for theirs; they, meanwhile, repeatedly assert that they would change theirs for mine, given the chance. Why? Because my life is easier: my house has heat in the cold months; I cook on gas; I don't have to walk everywhere or carry loads. My life is more modern: I have television and computers and video games. It is also more developed: I have indoor plumbing, access to doctors, and an education. We argued about the value of our respective endowments, and I pointed out that in many ways the Tamang women's lifestyle is as physically, socially, and emotionally rewarding as it is challenging. I envied them the

2. Compound kin terms, such as "aunt-mother-in-law" or "cousin-brother," are necessary because some of the most important Tamang kinship relations encompass more than one relationship: an anyi, or "aunt-mother-in-law," for example, could be the father's sister or mother's brother's wife (both aunts in most English-language usages) or the mother-in-law (because of the distinctive patterns of Tamang marriage). See discussions in later chapters for details.

4

INTRODUCTION

quiet and dark of their nights, their closeness to the moon and the seasons, their songs, the richness of their oral traditions, and their interconnectedness. But my appreciation for their lifestyle did not do much to change their arguments. I return to Uma Narayan's consideration of epistemic privilege. Mter arguing that we should neither abandon all hope of communication across human differences nor take our differences too for granted, Narayan reminds us that "those who actually live the oppressions of class, race, or gender have faced the issues that such oppressions generate in a variety of different situations. The insights and emotional responses engendered by these situations are a legacy with which they confront any new issue or situation" ( tg8g, 264). To rephrase Narayan, "[I] should realize that nothing [I] may do ... can make [me] one of the oppressed" ( tg8g, 265). I look forward to the day when Tamang women write their worlds in their own words; that is when things will get really complicated and interesting. Until then, I offer not only my own reticence to simplify my empathy with their situations but also a warning: awareness of both difference and privilege cannot be broken down into partial identification. This "crisis about difference," as Abu-Lughod calls it ( tggo, 23), is absolute and nondivisible; it means a change in paradigm about the right to represent, but it cannot be permitted to paralyze. If "we" can't speak about "them," and "she" can't speak about other "she's," into how many mutually unintelligible pieces shall we slice humanity? It was Carl Sandburg who asked: Who shall speak for the people? who has the answers? where is the sure interpreter? who knows what to say?

I cannot answer with Sandburg's brilliance, but it is to the task of such a representation that I have put my training, grants, visas, tape recorder, transcripts, long days and nights, and all the patience of friends, colleagues, students, and family.

Memory If, in addition to my attempt to understand another people, there is a shared project at the heart of this work, it is remembering and making a record. I sought to record the Tamang women and their lives as I have known them; they, to record their lives as they want their children and grandchildren and children after them to know them. In our early exchanges about the interviews and the book they might become, I spoke with the various Tamang women about the people who might read them-in English, in college classes. This audience was very far away in every sense. "Why would they want CLOSING A TEXT OF OPEN CONVERSATIONS

5

to read about us?" I was asked repeatedly. I had no answer except my own: out of curiosity, to get to know you, to learn about other people's lives. It was the ever-astute Jyomo who reinterpreted my words for a group of listening women; she told them that things written don't get forgotten. I believe she was as much chastising me for the inadequacy of my verbal memory as she was extolling the virtues of texts. No matter. She declared, and it became a communal rallying point, that things were changing rapidly in Stupahill, that much had already been forgotten from their grandfathers' and grandmothers' times, that their own children would live lives very different from theirs, that the children might even forget the Tamang language. Thus it was agreed that we would record their way of life and that the record would be dedicated to all our children. At the end of her recording session, Phurko, the oldest woman I worked with, was joined by Hrisang, her classificatory sister and a formidable local figure. Her classificatory grandson, Tularam, who helped me with these interviews, asked her, "Of those long-ago times, what seems to come to mind when you compare those times then and these times now?" PHURKO replied: What comes to mind? What comes to mind indeed. I forgot everything about long ago. And now, what? Nothing. No memories arise. Long ago, people said in the song: "Clever mother's daughter, 'Wake up with the rooster!' They say." That's the song anyway. Now, though, when the rooster crows, what work can I do? All kinds of things would come to mind. But now. Nothing. I'm not even consciously aware of the daylight now. HRISANG: You mean the one about "A good mother's daughter gets up before the rooster; the lazy mother's daughter sleeps in past the sunrise"? PHURKO: It was called the "Chicken Song," that one was. When there was only the one, when there was only your egg, still it had to be counted:

[Singing] Inside the yellow chicken the white egg came to be. Inside the white egg, it seems gold and silver happened. Inside the gold and silver, a spot of blood was born, it seems. On top of the lake of blood, the nose and eye filled out. The nose and eye filled out, then the whole world resounded. A wise mother's daughter rises with the chickens; a cowardly mother's daughter keeps on sleeping until the sun is high.

6

INTRODUCTION

[Talking normally again] It's said the lazy mother's daughter just sleeps until the sun has risen. It's said the wise mother's daughter says, "Get up right with the rooster!" That one's the "Chicken Song." [Everyone chuckled.] Now when the rooster does its so-called crowing, you'd wake up, wouldn't you? We, well, we'd do everything. Now ... too ... if I were able .... But now, I think of something; then I forget. Even when rebuked extremely gently, still, I don't remember anything at all. Mter Phurko sang the "Chicken Song," there was a long silence on the tape. Finally Tularam and I asked Phurko about other songs she remembered. At first she said, "There aren't any others." Tularam asked her, almost jokingly, "Were there others? About goats' kids, or cows' calves, or?" Phurko responded tartly, "We didn't sing about goats' kids or about calves, you silly!" But a moment later, after Tularam had made a small apology, Phurko volunteered, "Actually, there is a calf's song," and began singing again: Lha-hai-lo!

Incenses please and suit the mountain-gods. Milk pleases and suits the serpent-gods.3 You eat cheese and even golden butter, but you don't give even a little bit to me.

She interrupted her singing to explain: "The herder ate all the mother cow's butter and cheese and didn't give any of the milk to her calf." The herder didn't give any to the calf? PHURKO: Yes. No milk.

TULARAM:

[Singing again] When you didn't give me any milk, tears rolled down from my eyes. Mter tears rolled down from my eyes, downstream a river came into being.

[Explaining] It's said the calf's tears created that downstream river, that Butter River. That was in the beginning. In the era of gods. HRISANG: That very Marsyandi River4 across over there, you know! PHURKO: We used to know that kind of song and things. So there were others. That one was the "Calf's Lament." KSM: And that's all of it? PHURKO: That's it. 3· Incense is the proper offering for ("pleases and suits") the category of divinity known as lha (gods); milk is appropriate to the divinities of the lakes and underground sources of water, the lu, often glossed with reference to the Hindu naga or serpent-divinities. 4- The name of one of the major river systems found in central Nepal as it is called in Nepali. Tamang speakers borrow the Nepali name, with slight alteration in the pronunciation, but the punned meaning is only significant in Tamang, in which maris "butter" and syongis "river."

CLOSING A TEXT OF OPEN CONVERSATIONS

7

But, then, what did the herder reply? What indeed! He consumed it all up himself. He drank the milk in one gulp. It's said he'd drink the milk in one gulp; it's said he wouldn't give the poor calf even the tiniest little bit. When that happened, the calf sang this song that way, they say. It was someone else's mother's milk, though, wasn't it!? He should have given it at least a little bit. Doesn't it have to eat, too? After all, it was someone else's mother's milk! A little ... it has to eat just a little bit, doesn't it. But he would drink every last bit, he would! That's what they say he'd do. So when he was doing like that, just after the calf sang its song, the Marsyandi River sprang up, in the beginning then, in the time of the gods, from the calf's tears, they say. Then, that's the kind of thing that happened then. Now, well. ... The era of the gods was long, long ago. It's not the same now. Long, long ago, there were no people. Long, long ago, there was no time. Long, long ago, we didn't reap the same harvests. TULARAM: PHURKO:

Near the end of each original taping session, I asked the women whether they had anything more in their sem (hearts-and-minds)5 that they wanted to say. The women had very mixed thoughts about the past, the present, and the future. As young women and new mothers, Tschirto, Mlangdzom, Mhojyo, Santu, and Sukumaya, perhaps not surprisingly, reflected on the many uncertainties still before them. They found it hard to know what the future would bring and, hence, hard to say exactly what they wanted of it. Mhojyo, with only a few days to go before her next daughter was to be born, was understandably preoccupied with the fullness of the moment. She said, "These days, in my heart-and-mind ... ," continuing very deliberately, after a pause, "I wonder how it will be for me. If what's inside of me is a source of grief and trouble, how will I survive? What might happen? That's what comes to me now. I don't think about anything before now, or anything that might come after." Mlangdzom, Tschirto, and Santu echoed this sense of uncertainty. "How is it that others' children get beautiful clothes to wear? How is it that they get to go travel around? These thoughts come to mind," said Mlangdzom. "I go to festivals, and then, 'Where have you been? Where did you get to?' they ask, and then, in my heart-and-mind, just like that, all of that is forgotten, washed away. And I wander about." Middle-aged women-like Setar, Jyomo, Tikiri, Nhanu, Tasyi, and even Purngi-were generally clear about the things they wanted to do: see the last 5· Sem, the inner seat of both thinking and feeling, is different from the other organic bases of feeling, such as the ting (heart), tu (heart), and pho (stomach). The brain is known and named but little elaborated upon. For a more nuanced discussion of the Gurung concept related to sem, see McHugh (1g8g).

8

INTRODUCTION

daughters married, see the youngest sons set up in their own houses, divide the property among the children. They spoke as if the fulfillment of these obligations were nearly in sight. Nhanu described her plan to endow her various children, saying, 'There's nothing else I have to do. I'll tell each of them, 'Here's this much land for you. Here's this much household wealth for you.' Then, after telling each of them of their shares, well, whether they find they are happy with each of their shares or not, my dharma6 will be all worked out now, won't it?" At this point, her son and daughter-in-law and their children came home to make the afternoon snack. As the din of their cooking and crying rose, I joked, "And now you've become a herder of children again, herding your grandsons and granddaughters." replied: Oh, well ... I guess you could say that. It seems I can't just sit here. It's actually more relaxing to get out and about a bit; I like the freedom of walking around outside. I like that freedom and feeling of space. Whenever I can, I try to find time to walk around outside a little. Whenever I stay here in the house, first one child cries, then another. [Indeed several are crying loudly even as she is talking.] It gets me all confused-crowding my head with noises. They're all still just crying babies, too; not one is even old enough to be a child yet-just babies. That's it. There's no more; nothing else comes to mind. NHANU

And, indeed, it had become impossible to talk about hopes and desires, past or future, over the chaos of the present. Older women-like Phurko, Hrisang, and Mondzom-often asserted that they had nothing left to say or do, and wondered if anyone would listen to their words. According to Hrisang, "If I had been able to go to school as a child, I would have learned everything. I remember if it happened on suchand-such a calendar-year date, such-and-such a day of the week-I remember it all. Other people forget things quickly. I remember everything. But now I am a useless old woman. Why remember what happened in my childhood?" Things were so different "long, long ago": different songs, different marriages, different money, different harvests. The older women spoke poignantly about being weary of caring for children, herds, homes, and fields; they spoke bluntly about waiting to die. Hrisang, again: "Such has been my hardship. You simply have to swallow your joys and sorrows and not let them always be coming out of your mouth. Whatever one's own hardships may be, it's better just to join in everyone else's laughter. No matter what sorrow you have endured."

6. Dharma is a term widely used in South Asia. As it is used here, it roughly means "duty," in the sense of a religious or predetermined responsibility. (See also the discussion in chapter 3.)

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9

"If each comes halfway •.• "

I have learned much, listening to these words and trying to make them understandable to you. Regina Harrison, who worked with painstaking care to distill as much meaning as possible from Quechua song traditions and whose attention to the problems of translation was acute, admonishes: The skill of the translator, as Walter Benjamin ( [ 1955] 1g6g) suggests, is to approach that essential "untranslatability" in the original text and convey, not its informational content, but an additional measure of differentness which makes that society not like our own. Translating in this mode takes us beyond the matter of semantic equivalence to a realm of unfamiliar cultural values. Translating these different "forms of life," starting from the simplistic dictionary definitions, can serve to have us see the extent to which our rewording of a cultural utterance reveals our society's relationship to the people who have spoken the words which we write down .... The quality of that alien speech, articulated by an individual and a society, must not be muffled in our own desire to translate those words to our literate tradition, which operates with its own set of codes.

( 1g8g, 28-2g) My objective has been to make these Tamang words neither too familiar nor too alien but to strike the right balance. Jyomo and others exacted a specific promise from me: they did not want to sound stupid; they wanted you to understand that they are just like you, equally smart and interesting. I knew (and they knew), however, that you and I are not just like them because our experiences and our opportunities are so different. And so I have tried to show that we need not depend on similar stories as the only basis for recognizing our bonds with these Tamang women: we are rooted with them in the subsoil of humanity, and our distinctive blossoms emerge from that soil. I encourage you to read the words of these Tamang women slowly, out loud, nurturing the images they offer, trying to produce a sense of the women's voices and lives. In the end, I think of these stories as I do the picture Setar asked to have taken of her as David and I left Stupahill one year. In the picture, composed and framed according to her instructions, Setar is holding a jug of lamchang, the trail beer that is traditionally offered to those who depart the village. Normally a drink would result in an answering drink; in this case, however, a single round is offered with blessings for a safe journey and a safe return. Setar asked not just that we drink her beer but that we take a photograph so that we wouldn't forget her, the beer, or Stupahill. It was Setar, too, who first taught me about personal bomsang laments by teaching me hers. Bomsang are the most self-consciously crafted and poeti-

10

INTRODUCTION

cally framed life accounts of Tamang people. It is fitting, then, that I conclude this introduction with the overture to Setar's bomsang: Ha, he! Trees are said to be old and gnarled;

they call flowers young and fresh. Hwai, ho, li!When the thought of saying "I will die" arises, I wonder why was I born in my honorable mother's body. He, ho! Listen! Oh, please listen, you young men and women! Ho, ho, li! Does the heart-and-mind remember being born? Will my body remember dying? Hwai, ho, li! As the thought of dying arises, I wonder why I was born. Ha, he/They call trees old and gnarled; they call flowers young and fresh. Ho, li! But even as we cannot decide whether to tuck a flower into our hair or not, it is gone, faded and withered. Ho, li!Listen! Oh, please listen, people of my grandfather's line everywhere! Ho, li! Listen! Oh, please listen, neighbors and friends of my village place! Ho, li! Listen! Oh, please listen, Noble sons and daughters, my children! Ho, li! Listen! Oh, please listen, Ifl were not such an old woman, how could what I know be explained? Ho, li! Beautiful, oh beautiful, the rhododendron flower is beautiful. Ho, li! It has no fragrance only because the Tsen-Men divinities adorn themselves with its scent. Ho, fi! Beautiful, oh beautiful, the laurel flower is beautiful. Ho, li! It has no fragrance only because the Tsen-Men divinities adorn themselves with its scent. Ho, li! Listen! Oh, please listen, neighbors and friends of my village place! Ho, li! Beautiful, oh beautiful, the tall palm tree is beautiful. Ho, li! Because its branches emerge in an order that is not an order, ho, li!Just so, will the coming year be said to have happened the same as this year, in the same order that is not an order? Ho, li! Mter bending down branches of the mountain cedars, after bending down the lowland pines, ho, te! Let's make a shelter where men and women can rest. Ho, te! If there are men and women of a heart-and-mind to rest, after making the beer offerings, after making the rice offerings,

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11

welcome them, saying, "Come down, sit and rest." Ho, tel Listen! Oh, please listen, neighbors and friends of my village place! Ho, le! Among all the hills and mountains, the Langtang Himal is the greatest, the oldest, the most senior. Ho, tel Among all the rivers, the greatest, oldest, and most senior is the Mhasyul. Ho, tel But so it is with the power of greatness, age, and seniority that it is just like that of insignificance, youth, and juniority. Ho, le! Listen! Oh, please listen, neighbors and friends of my village place! If I were not such an old woman, how could my knowledge be explained? If I were not indeed such an old woman, how could I know what I know? Ho, tel If a beloved man is on one side of the river, hill, or mountain, and if a woman is on the other, their affection, their love is called great, ancient, and most senior, if, after tucking flowers in their hair, each comes halfWay. This book is above all about listening, remembering, and coming halfway. Another time, I will explain to you that the Tsen-Men divinities are especially associated with women, referring you to David Holmberg's work on the symbolic femaleness of Tamang shamanism ( 1983). I should certainly tell you that Setar was a woman shaman and that, although most Tamang shamans are men, they become shamans by deploying this female imagery. I'd love to tell you stories about Himalayan rhododendrons: how they grow as big as trees and turn whole hillsides red and white, and how deep and alien is the sleep produced by their honey. I'd beg your forgiveness for a word like juniority in this translation, for a single root word in Tamang means "biggest of all"-in size, age, or value of any sort, while its opposite stands for everything little. Ifl could, I'd have you hear bomsang the way I first heard them, sung solo by a blind Tamang elder, sitting in the hollow of a wall on the side of the trail, with echoes of his wavering "Ho, le'' refrain haunting the far hills, just as the internal rhymes of the verses resounded one back on the other. But what I really want is for you to discover and cherish Setar's central plea: what we think we know, knowledge itself, is produced in the human effort and pleasure oflistening. These tales are epics because what they tell is larger than any one telling, larger even than the sum of all possible tellings. They reach beyond themselves, full of connections apparently outside of, but in the end an integral part of, the stories. A a pause, an interruption, a name, a song: these are not simple facts, but are surrounded by the fullness of what I am inviting you to 12

INTRODUCTION

understand as an epic narrative. Reading these stories for speed will point only to finite referents, leaving out all innuendo and ambiguity. Instead, these Tamang women's stories must be read so that each voice is heard, the sweet and the sad, down to the roundest vowel, until every echo straining your ear quiets, in the text as in the hills we call Himalaya.

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13

I

THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

Who and where are the Tamang?

Anchoring the northwestern regions of Tamang residence in Nepal-home to some three hundred thousand of the country's almost one million Tamang people-is the Trisuli River. It cuts one of the world's most precipitous valleys through that most colossal of mountain ranges, the Himalayas, from the plateaus of Tibet to the plains of the Ganges. Travel for trade, diplomacy, military campaigns, religious pilgrimage, and adventure has moved through this great canyon ever since people began living in northern India and southern Tibet. On the northern side of the Himalayas is the Yarlung Tsangpo (or Brahmaputra) River. Meandering its way from Mount Kailash across the high steppes of Tibet, the Tsangpo passes near the town of Saga (or Gyagya) to within sixty miles of the headwaters of one of the many Bhote Kosi, or Tibetan Streams, flowing into Nepal. The ancestors of the women telling these tales came into Nepal along these rivers from central Tibet, past stunning landlocked seas, to the fortified border and market town of Kyirong. According to legends, as retold by Dharma Ratna Sakya (n.d.), the first Tamang people came into Nepal:

In the year A.D. 911, [when] there was a king in Tibet named Galangcharan, who was opposed to Buddhism. Nowadays, he is called Gyalbo Lungdar. He brutally suppressed the followers of Buddhism, which was spread by Acharya Shanta Rakchhit. He buried the idols of Buddha at different places in Bihar under the sand and forced the Buddhist monks into family life. Because of such religious persecution, one monk gave up ecclesiastical clothing, rode on a horse artificially stained black, and in a dramatic way pretended to be saluting the anti-religious king. Then he shot him with an arrow and killed him. He then rode the same horse across a river [which washed the black off and revealed the horse's original white color] and headed toward the south. His followers, too, were unable to return to Tibet out of fear of the government. Some were chased to Kyirong from Tibet. These horse riders started settling at different places in Nepal. Initially, they were called Lama. Later, they were called Tamang because ta refers to "horse" in the Tamang language and these people had come riding on horses. 1 Few people today really believe this to be an accurate historical account of Tamang origins, but the story continues to play an important role in the emergent sense of Tamang ethnic solidarity. Whether the first Tamang arrived in A.D. 911, fleeing on horseback, or, more probably, moved across the border in many successive waves of migration, there is no question about the deep affinities between Tamang and Tibetan peoples, especially in language and religion. "Tamang" today refers to the largest non-Indic-origin ethnic group in Nepal, living to the north, east, and south of the Kathmandu Valley (see map). The name Tamang, however, is new. It only definitively replaced the earlier Lama, Murmi, Sain, and Bhote/Bhotiya in 1932, in what Andras HOfer ( 1979, 73), calls that "famous legislative decree." This decree ordained that henceforth only Tamang should be used as the group's official name.

The land From Kyirong, the Trisuli River catapults past what is now the Nepali national border at Rasuwa Gardhi and is joined by the equally surging Langtang Khola at Syabrubesi.2 As more waters converge, the river, in its precipitous narrow gorges, roars like a jet plane flying overhead. At first, I assumed this cyclone of sound came from the cobbled stones on the river bottom rolling over and over constantly. Apparently, though, it is produced by the force of

Other versions can be found in Holmberg ( 1989) and P. Tamang ( 1994). See Andrew Hall ( 1978) for a preliminary history and description of Tamang/Tibetan contrasts in this region. 1.

2.

THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

15

less than 5%

5-15%

15-30%

30 -50%

Density ofTamang residence in Nepal

Percent reporting Tamang as mother tongue (Nepal Pofrulalinn Census 1971)

0 0 0 D

•

more than INDIA

TIBET (CHINA)

the water streaming over itself-exactly, in fact, as the sound of jets is made by streams of air on air. By the time the Trisuli passes Betrawati, it has lost the wild abandon of a high-mountain river; it has also lost over 12,000 feet in elevation. Here, the Trisuli River valley is lower than the Kathmandu valley, making it a tropical paradise, famous for poinsettia in winter and mangoes and malaria in summer. Nepali history was transformed permanently when a wooden cantilevered bridge, a sangu, was spanned below Betrawati across this tumultuous river. The bridge made possible the A.D. 1644 eastward conquest of Nuwakot by the first Shah kings, leading to the foundation of the state of Nepal. Trade flourished, giving the name Sangu Bazaar to the year-round market town that was established in Nuwakot in the late eighteenth century. With the further passage of time, and the reconstruction of the bridge, this market town became called, as it is today, Trisuli Bazaar, this time taking its name from the mighty river itself. According to Hindu legend, again retold by Dharma Ratna Sakya, the Trisuli River has its origins in mythic times: When the Gods and Demons had churned the ocean, the poison called Malabal was produced from the ocean. Mahadeva, the everpleasant, had drunk the poison but was unable to swallow it down his throat. As his throat burnt, he madly headed towards Gosainkund and hit a place with his cane walking stick, and as a result, water was produced. This water stream is still popularly known as Betrawati. Similarly, he created a pond by accumulating the water which spouted out when he struck with his trident. Because he pacified his torment with this water, the pond came to be known as Gosainkund. When Tamang people today take part in the annual pilgrimage to Gosainkund, they point out all these places in the landscape. There is Laurabinayak, the place where the great ascetic god planted his walking stick, and Betrawati, the stream tumbling down to the Trisuli River. Above all, both figuratively and-at 14,370 feet-literally, is the lake (or kund) of the holy pilgrim (or gosain). Gosainkund is one of two sites in all the western Tamang regions of residence deemed "worth a detour"-as if there were motorable roads-by the Marco Polo tourists' guide map ReiseKarte of Nepal. Some detour: from Trisuli Bazaar to Lake Gosainkund, a vigorous hiker gains (and loses) 12,000 feet across landscapes that are both the wildest and the most worked in the world. At the elevation of Lake Gosainkund, you are nearly to the moon. It is hard to believe that thousands and thousands of pilgrims pass this way each year. There seems to be nothing except rock, water, sky, and your own breathing. The rock is, on close inspection, host to masses of lichens and mosses and, in summer, small grasses and tenacious flowers. As a composite vista, however, these heights could pass for Mars: millions of minute plants cannot adequately dispel the sense of emptiness here. Several small lakes radiate comTHE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

17

pletely distinct hues: some are nearly black; others, jade green; and Gosainkund itself is a mythically poisonous blue. As for the sky, it eludes superlatives. All around you, it is biggest, clearest, brightest, and closest. Here, you touch and breathe not air, but sky. And breathe you do, harder, longer, and louder than you might have thought possible. Altitude, sky, and the simple act of passing foot after foot over rock after rock all precipitate, in me, a transformation: an immediate and constant awareness of the body I otherwise inhabit so blithely. More specifically, I become aware of my heart-and-lungs as the conjoint engine that drives my limbs. The one pounds so that I not only hear it in my ears, but feel it in my larynx, diaphragm, and fingertips; the other pulls and pushes so constantly that there seems not even an instant of pause between in and out. The transformation is corporeal, but it is also spiritual, like the Tamang word concept of sem, or "heart-and-mind," that innermost part of our being where sentiment and structure collude. Or perhaps it is only the altitude. As you begin coming down the mountain, there are a few forests, many only remnants but still redolent of pine. Colonies of Himalayan birches and rhododendrons color the slopes gold and yellow in the fall, red and white in the spring. Unmistakable signs of humanity appear early in the descent. First are the herding shelters, temporary sheds with woven bamboo roofs. They are moved up and down the slopes following the sweetest forage for a motley array of cattle-and-yak crosses. The highest-dwelling bovine species is the yak, with its more numerous female counterpart the nak. The yak and nak tolerate being herded, it seems, only because "herded" here amounts to little more than being driven away in the morning to spend the remainder of the day wandering back. They are kept less for their milk than for their hairwhich is woven tightly into heavy, durable blankets-and for their crossed progeny. Foremost among the crosses is the dzom, as hardy as the yak but more tractable. Its milk is the highest in butterfat of that of all the bovines found in Nepal and is the most voluminous. Still farther down the mountain come the mixed herds of cows and water buffalo, and the outposts of agriculture. Agriculture in the Himalayas is not for the faint of heart with elevations between four thousand and fourteen thousand feet and pitches nearing fortyfive degrees. Although a few communities make their primary living at the highest elevations, and all rely on the mountains for resources like medicines, incense, house timbers, and specialty woods, most western Tamang live well below the snow and forest lines, in a world as dominated by human presence as the higher world is marked by our seeming absence. This Tamang landscape includes rivers, boulders, and cliffs so massive they cannot be altered, but everything else bears the mark of human toil. To begin with, human trails go in all directions. The cardinal directions in Tamang geography are not the abstract north, south, east, and west, but a

18

CHAPTER l

very concrete tor (up), mor (down), and kyor (across). Up and down and across, human and animal tracks have drawn and defined the entire face of the landscape. Trees, too, are of many species, but only two kinds: those which are sacred and therefore permitted to develop into proper specimens of their specie; and those which are not and therefore have become scrawny imitations of trees. Leaves are plucked to make plates and serving dishes; fresh growth and branches are lopped off for fodder; and the highest branches are topped for firewood or to allow more sunlight into the terraced fields. Even the watercourses in the Tamang landscape have been aligned to serve domestic and agrarian function, piped to water platforms for washing or channeled into fields for irrigation. The most telling mark of the land's inhabitants, though, are the terraced fields. Terraces reach up, down, and across so far it takes hours of hard walking to mount the distance between a family's lowest and its highest fields. There are upland terraces dense with dry, durable millet; midland terraces with maize, pulses, gourds, and beans of many hues; and lowland terraces, brilliant green with paddy rice. These terraces are literally carved out of forty-five-degree slopes: you must picture land no one would dream of cultivating in the west, with terraces of crops only five to eight feet deep, and as much as an eight-foot drop to the terrace below. Mid-hill dwellers in Nepal are often blamed for the deforestation and degradation of their land, but for every slide they precipitate with their cutting, they surely prevent another with their terracing.3 In some locales, the Tamang first build the side walls (or bunds) for terraces in the declivities on cliffs, then put weirs in the river to catch runoff mud and silt, carrying sodden basket after sodden basket up to the walled-in cavities until they have created a field. Even under the best of terrace-making circumstances, it takes a farmer almost twenty years to turn a slope into a field. In order to maintain the soil structure, it is plowed annually, each time a little more toward the horizontal, each year adding to its downhill edge in an attempt to plant a more complete crop. Hills are everywhere in the Tamang landscape, sentinels of space, of place, of belonging. According to Tamang legends about the origin of the world: In the beginning of beginnings, in the great void, a light appeared; above and below, sky and the firmament appeared. In the middle of the sky, a first drop of water appeared and fell to the ground. With that drop, another, and another, until a great lake appeared. In its center, on the water, algae and mosses appeared. On the algae in the middle, a grain of sand ap-

3· See Robert Hoffpauir (1978) for a case study of the exploitation and transformation of the environment in another Tamang village on the east side of the Trisuli River.

THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

19

peared. On that grain, another, and another, and another, until a small mound grew up. That mound grew into a hill, and on that hill. The women I came to know in the course of my research consider one particular hill their home. The local song couplet calls out, "Karki, Lambu, khanai gang? Nga-i namsa Mhanegang!"-"Where is [your] hill? Is it Karki? Or Lambu? Mine is the place called Mhanegang!"

A place called Stupahill The women whose stories are recorded here live on a hill called Stupahill. Its name, in Tamang, means "the hill with a stupa," the mounded Buddhist monument that sits prominently near the lower entrance to the village of Stupahill. The hill lies two long days' walk over the northwestern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, up the west bank of the Trisuli River, beyond the town of Trisuli on the way to the Tibetan border. Bottom to top, people know this hill and its stories intimately. Whether in these personal accounts, or in religious recitations, placesand the names that record them in people's memories-are important to the Tamang. For this reason, I, too, must record place names, but I am fearful of intruding on the privacy of the women who worked with me. They worked with me, in the end, more because they wanted a record for their own descendants than because they wanted others to read about their lives. For their children, they want these local places named; for everyone else, the Tamang names have little meaning. They are difficult to spell so that you could pronounce them. They are not the Nepali names-like Nuwakot or Trisuliwhich appear on official maps. Most of all, they lose the semantic resonances except in translation: Sleepyflats, Seven Crossroads, Daughters' Pleasure, Old Brahmintown, Warmwaters. For these reasons, I have translated the Tamang place names in this book into English words based on the Tamang name meanings. Not so long ago, just out of living memory, Stupahill and a neighboring hill, which is today the community of Warmwaters, were one hill and one community. In those days, Tamang people living in the region, in addition to taxes and rents, had to provide between thirty and ninety days of unpaid corvee labor to the ruling families in Kathmandu. Some kept cattle and carried dairy products to the capital; some carried mail; some provided hides to make shoes for the army; some worked in sulfur mines; some made paper to record the deeds of the state; some carried timbers to build palaces; some ran down from the glaciers carrying ice to cool those palaces in the hot months; others carried mangoes. The people of Stupahill and Warmwaters worked at a factory in Nuwakot, without pay, making gunpowder for the government's military campaigns. The extent and onerousness of these obligations varied considerably: work in the sulfur mines was often fatal, while car20

CHAPTER 1

rying mangoes was hard mostly because it occurred during peak agricultural times. Eventually, all these obligations were commuted into cash payments.4 The hill that contained Stupahill and Warmwaters was split by a great landslide, creating the two communities as they are today. It takes about twenty minutes to traverse the still-rocky scar between the two. The spring at the top juncture of the slide still flows, and the ground around it is unstable. Seen from the river below, this hill appears bald; its lower shoulders conceal its full height and the mighty forest and Himalayan vistas at the top. The first few minutes of the climb up the hill are steep, as one clambers up the most recently eroded shelf of the river. Stone platforms under large welcoming pi pal and banyan trees provide resting places at regular intervals on the climb to the post office and school on the southeastern ridge of the village of Stupahill. When David and I lived in Stupahill in 1976, the first contingent of girls ever to attend school-some thirty girls, from age six to sixteenstormed the first grade en masse. The school has been enlarged each time I've seen it since then. Even now, however, it is a luxury to go to school: it is neither compulsory nor free; few students go beyond the fifth or sixth grade. From the schoolyard, many of the dense hamlets that comprise this sprawling community are visible. Homelife Hamlets are family affairs. Each brother, as he matures, builds a new house on his share of the family land; he will live there with his own wife and children. Sisters do not today have rights to land or houses in their fathers' estates5 but receive gifts or portions-called dz~f money, animals, cloth, grain, jewelry, and other valuables. A Tamang woman's dzo is not a dowry in the common sense because it is her absolute property to sell, use, or give away as she pleases. 6 A few women receive gifts of land as their own dzo-property, but since women are expected to live with their husbands' families when they marry, it is more usual to give them moveable wealth. Houses in Stupahill are rectangular constructions built of mud and stone,

4· Many of these obligations are documented in the works of Mahesh Chandra Regmi (1963-68, 1976, and 1979) and in the Regmi Research Collections at both the Nepal National Archives (Ram Shah Path, Kathmandu) and the Nepal Research Center (Naya Baneswar, Kathmandu). All except for the carrying of ice have been corroborated in oral accounts as part of recent research David Holmberg and I have been doing in collaboration with Suryaman Tamang (1999). 5· On July 17, 2001, the Supreme Court of Nepal ruled that discrimination against daughters' inheritance was unconstitutional and ordered the National Parliament to revise the law. It remains to be seen how this ruling will affect local practice not only in these Tamang regions but throughout Nepal. 6. Herein lies one ofmyveryfew proposed amendments to the excellent work of Thomas E. Fricke and colleagues (notably Dilli Ram Dahal and William G. Axinn): they typically refer to women's dzo-property as dowry, which I think is inaccurate (see discussion in chapter 3). THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

21

plastered with red clay. The relative wealth of the inhabitants is roughly correlated to the number of stories-one, two, or three-and the kind of roofthatch, shingle, or tin. In 1977, no houses had locks except under extraordinary circumstances; only one house had an outhouse. By 1998, although no one had plumbing, many families had built outhouses, often with the assistance of a small development organization. 7 Electricity for lighting and radios arrived almost ten years after these life histories were recorded. In 2000, everyone still cooked on wood, although many people had moved from the central open hearths that were universal in 1977 to more efficient and, especially in the hot season, more pleasant mud-enclosed corner hearths with external pipe flues by 1995.8 As recently as 2001, no one had glass or screens in their windows, although one family was using manure to produce methane for cooking. The hearth room is the heart of the house and the family. Some houses are nothing more than this one, all-purpose living, cooking, storing, and sleeping room, with one shuttered window and one door. In the many houses with a second floor, and even in those fewer houses with a third, the entire first floor is still given to the hearth room. Here, intimates and their guests eat and socialize, and many also sleep. Water jugs are lined near the entrance. Hand tools hang from the walls. Since the late 1g8os, there has been a single, bare, low-watt bulb hanging in many of these hearth rooms, but always there is still the small kerosene wick lamp to dispel some of the pervasive darkness of the room. Bronze plates and drinking bowls are stacked unceremoniously in an alcove or small cupboard, which is the only furniture. Peopl~ sit in rows on mats woven from rice straw or on small rounds of braided corn husks like personal placemats. Men sit on one side of the room-with the senior-most man closest to the hearth-and women on the other-similarly, if not quite so rigorously, seated in ranks reflecting age, kin, and guest status. The daily fare of the family is boiled millet (or millet-and-maize) mush, with some sort of spicy accompaniment. The millet is boiled in a large iron wok and stirred constantly with a wooden paddle until it is about the consistency of fresh clay; it is tastier than it sounds, and certainly sustaining, although rudimentary. Rice and lentils are more prestigious foods, and very desirable indeed when served with butter, yogurt, vegetable or meat curries, and liquor. The most important objects in the hearth room are the beer jugs along the back wall, behind the central hearth, where only the senior woman of the house goes, and the hearth itself, with its iron tripod to support the copper or clay cooking pots and its overhead rack to dry the occasional meat 7· Educate the Children, based in Ithaca, New York, and operating only in Nepal, has run a number of projects in the Stupahill region, including a bilingual preprimary school and a women's literacy program. Both are due to be phased out, in hopes that the communities will be able to sustain them, by 2002 or 2003. 8. Whenever the present tense is used in this book, it refers to the original ethnographic present of 1975 to 1977, when these narratives were tape-recorded.

22

CHAPTER 1

or fish. There is almost no movement of air through the room. In the warm season, it can be unbearably hot and insect-ridden, swarms of flies in the day giving way to battalions of cockroaches, fleas, and bedbugs at night. In all seasons, the air in the hearth room is heavy with years of smoke, spice, and sweat. Every house also has a porch facing a work yard outside. Family, friends, and passers-by come and go as their daily tasks converge and diverge. The focal point is the sitting bench on the porch: this bed-sized elevated platform shelters farm tools and brooding chickens underneath, sometimes to the dismay of those who sit and sleep on it, for it is the day sanctuary of large congregations of fleas and bedbugs. Still, the sitting bench is the center of public life. People-mostly men, but not by any means exclusively-play cards, smoke, listen to the radio, examine papers, do small handwork, and, above all, share talk and stories here. From this platform, they can survey the courtyard and the world beyond. I spent much of my time on these platforms and in these yards and hearth rooms. Work took everyone out of these spaces of relative leisure into field, forest, and pasture. Their work days began before dawn and, although full of interaction and interruption, would not end until after dark. Farming and herding involved grueling effort: plowing with oxen and iron-tipped wooden plows; planting, weeding, and harvesting with bent backs and hand tools; cutting and carrying fodder, winnowing, sifting, hulling, and grinding all laboriously done by hand. Firewood for cooking had to be cut and carried from across the river; water had to be carried in narrow-necked copper, brass, or clay jugs from half an hour down the hill; paddy had to be husked in a great eight-toten-foot-long, foot-driven hammer; lentils cracked in a hand mill. Spices were dried, roasted, and ground, or else bartered or bought and carried from the market town a half-day's walk away; likewise salt, if no longer carried all the way from Tibet. Nothing was simple; or, rather, everything was simple, but since the plainest meal represented hour upon hour of painstaking labor, nothing was taken for granted. Everything came only from hard work. Work showed in the very faces, bodies, and hands of the Tamang people, callused, scarred, and wrinkled. The only calluses I had-as was observed many times-were from holding a pen or pencil; their bodies were marked more deeply. Sitting to do the interview that developed into her life history narrative, Phurko picked up my arm, pulled it within the limited range of her vision, and commented without any particular emotion, "You know, I think my skin used to be like this once." Her own was, as she said herself, more like dried fruit. I thought then that Phurko was about the oldest-looking person imaginable. Eighty-four years of hard work under the Himalayan sun had taken a toll not only on her skin; her frame was bent and her eyes cloudy. I couldn't imagine the life that she had led, and was troubled by my own boldness in trying to imagine it. The least I could do was to respect her

THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

23

right not only to choose whether or not to respond to my interest but also how, when, and where.

Recording, transcribing, and translating Tamang women's life histories The original narratives in this book were recorded in 1977, in a setting, at a time, and with (or without) other companions present according to the wishes of each teller. Sometimes there were many people present and the telling took place in the woman's own house, usually on her porch. This was more often the case when the teller was an older woman, confident of her audience and her stories, on her own terrain. Sometimes Tularam Tamang, who was then a young man, came from his nearby village to assist me, especially when the woman being interviewed was his kinswoman. Tularam was a generous listener with a reputation as a thoughtful man respected well beyond his years. Sometimes the teller and I were the only people present, maybe at the teller's house, but more often in the upstairs hayloft that had been converted into a modest house for David and me. This was the venue favored by younger women who had married into the community from outside; they seemed more eager to avail themselves of the privacy, refreshments, and relaxation that I could afford them at my place, away from the demands of their young children and their husbands' families. As I recorded these accounts, I tried to provide food and drink as is common Tamang social practice. I conducted myself as respectfully as I knew how, with proper Tamang gestures and phrases of hospitality. As much as possible, I took my cues for opening the interviews from some of the stock phrases I had heard people use in other contexts to begin unsolicited narratives. For example, I had often heard stories begun, "mine is a tale of sorrow" or "of comfort." So the recorded encounters often begin with my request to hear about "the sorrow you've known, the comfort you've known." In general, my further questions and responses, as well as those ofTularam Tamang (when he was present), were limited to encouragements to keep on talking. In spoken western Tamang, the most common way to keep someone talking consists of repeating the first speaker's verb as if it were a question. For example: I went to see my mother. Went? SPEAKER: She wasn't there. LISTENER: Wasn't? SPEAKER:

LISTENER:

Tularam and I used the same kind of incitement to remind our tellers that they had active listeners. I tried, then, to create contexts familiar to the storytellers and similar to their other storytelling times, and to make a record that would be of interest to them as well as to outside readers. Do not misunderstand; my shadow is

24

CHAPTER 1

very long here. I was the original interviewer; I was the primary translator; I have written this book. It would be a very great conceit to claim I did anything more than be as explicit as I could be, in culturally familiar terms, about my respect, appreciation, and affection for all the Tamang people involved in this book. I hoped that they would feel comfortable speaking with me and that they would enjoy it, and I hoped to produce a book they would want their children to read. In all, fourteen women's narratives were recorded. To keep this book to a reasonable length, extended passages from five of the original interviews were selected. The other nine women, of course, have had a profound influence on this book; it would not have been possible without the patience and generosity of every one of them. Parts of those nine women's stories do appear throughout the book but in shorter references or citations or general input, not as named chapters. Mondzom's story was the first one I taped and it is the core of the first chapter in this collection. Mter Mondzom, I heard from each of the middleaged wives of her husband's three grandsons:Jyomo, Nhanu, and Purngi (see fig. 1). Each of their stories introduced new characters as each woman talked about her mother or brother or daughter-in-law. The remaining ten accounts I recorded came from among the other women these first four women talked about. Their relationships were dense (see fig. 2). The fourteen women's narratives varied considerably in length from just under one hour to over four hours. Each was tape-recorded at the invitation of the teller in a single interaction. Although many other conversations about the original accounts followed, all the translations used in this book come from those first continuous tellings. Transcribing and translating these western Tamang narratives was not a trivial undertaking. Little was known about Tamang language at the time. According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) count, 9 there are 124 living languages and one extinct language in Nepal. The SIL catalogues four distinct Tamang languages (or dialects): (1) eastern Tamang, with, according to their interpretation of the 1991 census, 584,097 to 718,048 speakers in Kathmandu itself and to the immediate east and south of Kathmandu, and another 13,177 in India; (2) northwestern Tamang, with 186,408 to 320,350 speakers north and west of Kathmandu; (3) southwestern Tamang, with some 1oo,ooo speakers south and west of Kathmandu. The last sublanguage (4), which SIL calls eastern Gorkha Tamang, has only 3,ooo to 4,ooo speakers. Altogether, there were some 904,456 Tamang speakers counted in the 1991 Nepali census, or between 873,505 and 1,142,398 according to SIL in-

g. From their on-line resource, "Ethnologue" (http:/ /www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/ Nepa.html). The Summer Institute of Linguistics was active in many parts of Nepal until 1976, when disputes over active proselytizing missionary work resulted in their expulsion from the country. THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

25

r I

0 Mondzom = 6 Rich Grandfather in Stupahill 0

f:).

KEY living woman livingman marriage

I

Jyomo 0 =!'::,.Eldest brother

Fig.

1.

ron whn dm="' yonng

Nhanu 0 = !'::,.Middle brother

I

Purngi 0 =!'::,.Youngest brother

Kinship relations among the four core women

terpretations of the census information, making Tamang the most widely spoken Tibeto-Burman language in Nepal.IO Translating from the western Tamang dialect of Stupahill poses several distinct problems. At the time this work was begun, there were very few sources on (or in) Tamang: only Santa Bir Lama's early collection of ritual songs ( 1959), Martine Mazaudon's ( 1973) phonology, and a few word lists and scattered other materials assembled by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Taylor 1969; Taylor, Everitt, and Tamang 1972); Andras HOfer was also working to translate ritual oral texts (1981). For a variety of reasons, none of these sources was particularly helpful in translating from contemporary colloquial western Tamang. Both Mazaudon's and Lama's works were based on the eastern Tamang dialect, which is very different from the western Tamang spoken in Stupahill. Lama's and Hofer's songs and recitations were in arcane, ancient ritual language. And Taylor, Everitt, and Tamang's SIL work, while taken from contemporary western Tamang speakers, was often erroneous, even with respect to basic phonology. Tamang is related to Tibetan, so some of the Tibetan language source materials were helpful, although I had to be careful not to get too embroiled in the fascinating, but rarely relevant, etymological puzzles they posed. Most of my understanding of Tamang, then, was based on my own fieldwork and the patience of my interlocutors; nothing would have been possible but for their willingness to repeat, restate, explain, and listen to my endless questions. Since Nepal began liberalizing its national language policy in 1993, there has been a fluorescence of new sources on Tamang language. The works of 10. Because of the methods used by the census, which historically have obscured local language and ethnic affiliations, census figures typically underestimate the non-Nepali-speaking peoples. As a general indication of the importance of Tamang in the Nepali context, however, they are instructive.

26

CHAPTER 1

••

2.

.A.

=

.A.

.A.

#

m .6.1::::.1::::.

I

a

lot:::.t:::.et:::.o••

alb

a

ee

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I

1::::.

deadwoman living man dead man

a,b,c marriage order = marriage ::t divorce

1,2,3 birth order

6., .&

e

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KEY living woman

.A..A..A..A.OSetar

!:::.Lambu

I

4 II

.A.=O Hrisang

I 1

'rim

13

•=••=• •=•

4 I

Santu 0=1::::.

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n I

1

Tschirto 0=1::::.

O!:::.!:::.!:::.OO 1::::.=0 Mlangdzom 1::::.=0 Sukumaya

1

0=1::::.

o=• ••••oo ••

4 2

fFhll .... •=• •=• •=•

•=1::::.=0 Jyomo # 1::::.

e JyomoSya

' Lt~k"~f

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Relationships among all fourteen women

1::::. 00

f'..oO f'..--D 0 !'> f'..oO !'>~ Mhojyo

Fig.

e

.-------.---,~,-___._,

1::::.1::::.

I 0I

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.A. Rich Grandfather

l

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=

J

.A.

Amrit Yonjen (Hyonjan), Dupwangel Moktan (1991, 1994), and Bryan K. Varenkamp (1996) have been especially important. There are also new sources produced by Tamang people on their own cultural traditions, notably Pashuram Tamang's Tamangjati (1994) and the publications of emerging ethnic pride associations like the Tamang Ghedung, Nepal Tamang Damphu Samaj, and the Tamang Language and Literature Council. By 1996, Tamang language could be heard on Radio Nepal in a daily news summary and a weekly talk program. Much of this new work, however, still draws more heavily on eastern Tamang traditions than on southern, northern, or western ones. As I struggled to bring the taped interviews into English, then, I called on the assistance of three Tamang individuals from the Stupahill area who had attended high school. School attendance is a stark measure of how excluded western Tamang had been from national opportunities: in 1975, out of aregional Tamang population of approximately 9o,ooo, no one had successfully completed the tenth grade to receive a School Leaving Certificate. Among those who had attended high school were: Suryaman Tamang, who is our longtime host, assistant, and friend; Tularam Tamang, my companion at some of the original interviews; and Sriman Tamang, who was a boy (known then as Birman) when the original stories were recorded, and who later became one of the first successful students to emerge from the community. Tularam guided my first attempts to understand the tapes and to write them down, in summary, while I was still resident in Stupahill in 1977. In 1982 and 1983, Sriman and Suryaman labored many long, sometimes funny, sometimes frantic hours with me in Maligaon and Battisputali as we undertook the full transcriptions, including all interruptions, questions, and side conversations. Together with David Holmberg, the three of us worked out a system for transcribing the spoken Tamang from the tapes, using the Nepali devanagari script. Historically, Tamang was not a written language. Because it is closest to Tibetan, it might have made more sense to transcribe it into Tibetan script, but we did not do this for two reasons: first, no one in the region except religious specialists can read Tibetan script. Second, unlike Tibetan (or English), which is full of orthographic conventions unrelated to pronunciation, Nepali is written phonemically. Using the Nepali devanagari script to transcribe Tamang was less faithful to the language's Tibeto-Tamang roots, but definitely more straightforward. It was difficult to persuade Tamang friends and assistants to try writing Tamang at all. When they wrote, they typically wrote not only in the devanagari script but also in the Nepali language. Nepali was the language of literacy and opportunity that they learned at great personal cost in schools; Tamang was not. Once assistants caught on to the idea, however, it was relatively easy to adapt the devanagari script to incorporate those Tamang phonemes not found in Nepali, such as ts and tsch (where Nepali has only ch 28

CHAPTER 1

and chh). It was harder to decide how to record Tamang tones; except in the case of the lowest breathy tone, which is usually indicated by an h after another consonant, we did not try. The spellings in this book have been romanized based on our efforts to remain faithful to locally spoken Tamang, but without benefit of major linguistic research. There are undoubtedly many errors for which I hope both Tamang readers and future scholars will be forgiving. Although Tamang is not at all related to Nepali, there are many loanwords from Nepali in western Tamang usage. Many Tamang people have at least a superficial understanding of market Nepali. The school and work experiences of Suryaman Tamang, Tularam Tamang, and Sriman Tamang made them bilingual Tamang-Nepali speakers, although none of them spoke any English at the time. I took advantage of their language skills by asking how they would translate the women's accounts into Nepali. Being able to compare my Tamang-to-English translations with my assistants' Tamang-toNepali efforts helped me verify my English version and, even more importantly, gave us opportunities to discuss the problematics of translation itself. These discussions were ultimately the basis of much of my understanding. As Suryaman, Tularam, and Sriman thought out loud about how to say something from Tamang in Nepali, I was treated to fugues in three voices on Tamang language, culture, and life. My resulting English rendition was not funneled through their Nepali, which, like the children's game of Telephone, would have introduced more errors. Rather, their Nepali gave me a third reference point with which to triangulate and strengthen my English translations. The transcriptions we produced in this way had four lines: ( 1) a literal Tamang transcription of the tape, written in devanagari script and done primarily by Suryaman and Sriman; (2) a literal word-by-word translation into Nepali and notes, also done primarily by Suryaman and Sriman; (3) a literal translation into English and notes, done by me; and (4) my final, more expressive translation into English (see fig. 3). It took many subsequent field research trips and the help of these assistants to produce the complete transcription of the original tapes and the translations into Nepali and English. I visited Nepal in 1982 and 1986, and again in 1987 to continue translation and collect additional songs. Trips in 1993 and 1997 allowed me to discuss the translations and emerging editorial decisions. Not surprisingly, the notebooks contain 2,452 pages of transcribed narration alone. Another notebook has been filled with song texts and translations. The voices and the music The more I shared these stories and songs with students and colleagues, the more I discussed them with people in the Stupahill region, the more important it became to me that some of them actually be heard. On the CD associTHE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

29

Fig. 3· The first page of my full interview transcription notebook showing the four different lines of work for Mondzom's first words (see n ext chapter)

ated with this book you will find several examples of the women's narrations and songs from the original tapes in Tamang, with brief introductions by me. At the risk of repeating what is said on that CD, let me briefly describe what you will find there. First on the CD is the opening section of Mondzom's account. I encourage you to listen to it as you begin your reading of the next chapter. In particular, you should note how crowded the aural landscape is: my written account notes the many people who were present and what they said, but it does not adequately convey all the clangs and thumps of domestic life, the groans of nearby animals or crowing of chickens. On one of the tapes, a powerful thunderstorm, as can be found only in these high mountains, where lightning clouds bounce up along cliffs below you, provides such dramatic percussion for the singing of an origin song that it surely should be written into the script. In the recordings reproduced on the CD, you can hear how lively and interactive the dialogue was. As you will hear, it seems to matter how long someone talks without interruption or pauses in between phrases, or that the speaker rephrases a point sharply. Listening to portions of the original tapes also lets you hear how versatile was each woman's voice itself. Whispering or shouting, laughing or crying, mimicking others' speech, women bring their stories to life in ways that can't be adequately conveyed by bracketed comments such as "everyone chuckles" or "crying very softly." It is the difference between a theatrical script and the play itself. The recording of Phurko and Hrisang singing and interpreting both the "Chicken Song" and the "Calf's Lament" allows you to hear how intimately narrative and song are interwoven in these accounts. The remaining selections on the CD include most of the songs in the text of the book, sometimes in the version sung at the time of the original interview, sometimes in aversion recorded later. Please bear in mind that these are field recordings, made in situ with sometimes indifferently charged solar batteries on a small handheld recorder without external microphone. A capella has never been so spare. When students recently asked why I didn't download higher-quality copies of the songs from the Internet, I had to tell them that mine were the only recordings of these songs made for an external audience. I hope this won't long be the case. Now what remains is for you to enjoy: stories, songs, CD, and text.

THE WHO, WHERE, AND HOW OF THIS BOOK

31

II

MONDZOM Narrating a Life, Framing a Life I was never sick, never hurt. It wasn't hard for me. When I was with my father and mother, I never had to worry whether I would eat or not. I never had to worry about needing anything. Mondzom, Stupahill, 1977

Mondzom is Mum, or Grandmother, to almost everyone in Stupahill. Seventythree years old, she could no longer see very well or get around as much as she would like. Because she didn't h ave the eyesigh t or strength to weave anymore, Mondzom wore cheap purchased cloth instead of the traditional handwoven blue-and-red skirts that were the usual women's dress in the region . She remained quite active, though , managing her household independently and supporting two orphaned granddaughters who lived with her. She continued to wear the large, flat, gold nhali-earrings 1 that mark a married woman, and hers were immense-a mark of distinction in the eyes of all. When she talked with me, Mondzom lived in the original homestead of one of the most prominent families in Stupahill. She had moved there when she was thirty-six, some years after her first husband died, to marry the village headman, known locally as Rich Grandfather. He was considerably older than she, so that she found herself the matron in an already well-established extended family. Her husband's son was married and had three sons, although he did not live long enough to become an important local figure himself; indeed, his was a lost generation in this family, lost to the local de-

1.

The large, flat, golden earrin gs worn by a married woman, given by her husband's family.

mographics of early marriage, parenthood, and death. The three grandsons, meanwhile, survive and flourish. All are married: the eldest to Jyomo, the secondborn to Nhanu, and the youngest to Purngi-all three of whom have also contributed their stories to this collection. All of the grandsons have children, many of whom are themselves married and have children oftheir own. Mondzom's house is surrounded by the houses of the three grandsons and their families, with additional houses still being built for the great- and greatgreat-grandsons. Although Mondzom was never far removed from the activities of any of these houses, she was closest to the household of the middle grandson. His wife, Nhanu, is Mondzom's second husband's daughter's daughter; that is, Nhanu was Rich Grandfather's own and Mondzom's step-granddaughter. There is constant visiting between these two houses and Mondzom spends much of her free time sitting on her granddaughter's porch. The interaction with Mondzom translated below was recorded as we sat on that porch. It was warm; the sunlight seemed hotter because of the ocher intensity of the clay with which the house walls and porch were plastered. Rising in the warm air were all the pungencies of the farmyard: urine, manure, compost, smoke, milk, butter, grains, vegetables, stews, and sweat. Several other people were there to see what kinds of questions I would ask, to see what kinds of stories she would tell, and, in some cases, to tell their own stories. The other people who were present were regulars on this porch, too (see fig. 4). There was Nhanu, the wife of Mondzom's middle grandson. Nhanu's firstborn son, Arrowforce, came with one of his own children. Mondzom's two orphaned granddaughters, daughters of sons by her earlier marriage, were also there. Tularam was there that day, too. He is the son of Nhanu's clansister; Nhanu therefore calls him "son," and so, according to Tamang logic, that makes him Mondzom's "grandson," which is what she calls him throughout. David Holmberg was considered a son in the house of the firstborn grandson; so I was, by extension, a kind of granddaughter-in-law. In our various ways, we all figured in Mondzom's daily social landscape. The people present as Mondzom told her story were (in order of appearance): Mondzom Nhanu: Mondzom's step-granddaughter, wife of her middle step-grandson Tularam: Mondzom's "grandson" (kon), Nhanu's classificatory younger brother or son (ale), and a field research assistant (Tularam [Dimdung] Taman g) Middle Granddaughter: Mondzom's twelve-year-old granddaughter, her firstborn son's daughter KSM: Myself (Kathryn S. March), Mondzom's courtesy "granddaughter" (konme) and Nhanu's courtesy "younger sister" (anga) MOND ZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

33

Sleepyflats Rich Headman .A. = 0 Mondzom = Grandfather = e

I

Middleb granddaughter

.t..=ONhanu's mother

living woman dead woman living man dead man

e

•

~ •••= . . •=

KEY

0

f:::.

.&.

1,2,3 birth_order marnage

son who .t..=e drowned

I

0 Youngest granddaughter

IIIII! NhanuO=/::,. I '!::,.:.--(~i~~b~~~h;~)--L n Tularam !::,. /\/\/\6,/\/\!::,. 12 II

I

IT I

!::,. 3

I

e 0=/::,. 0=/::,. 0!::,. 0=/::,. Arrowforce /::,.=0 Mhojyo

!::,.=Ojyomo 1

---------------------'

/::,.=0 Tschirto

KSMO=/::,.DHH

Fig. 4· Orienting Mondzom and her audience

DHH: David H. Holmberg Arrowforce: Mondzom's great-grandson, Nhanu's firstborn son Youngest Granddaughter: Mondzom's three-year-old granddaughter, her lastborn son's daughter Passersby and fieldworkers The story hegins MONDZOM: I've never known the sorrow others have. Without anyone's sayso, I went to this festival or to that, wherever I wanted ... when I was two of the twelve-year lhekhor-cycles old.2

Literally, lhekhor means the circle (khor) of the twelve named animal years, the lhe (or lho). Mondzom's claim of complete freedom until she was two of the cycles old-that is, twenty-four years-is a good example of how I heard people conceptualize the life span. Childhood is roughly equated with the first twelve-year lhekhor-cycle; the full bloom of youthful freedom character-

2. The dialogue text is Mondzom's original narrative and that of her interlocutors. These are all close translations based on exact transcripts of taped conversations. Mondzom's narrative is reproduced here in its original order and includes all additional dialogue, questions, and interruptions as they occurred. Any sections that were omitted to keep the text to a reasonable length are summarized in a footnote. The additional text interspersed throughout represents my efforts to understand the significance of what Mondzom was saying and to share with you those efforts. Please also note that this is where the selection on the CD associated with this book begins.

34

CHAPTER 2

izes the second twelve-year cycle; early married life and parenthood the third; the full weight of maturity the fourth; the beginning of aging the fifth; old age the sixth; and venerable antiquity after that. MONDZOM: Now what should I tell you? Shall I tell you how much sorrow I've known, how much happiness .... As for food-well, whenever I wanted food to eat, I ate. Whenever I wanted clothes to wear, I had them.

As I went about the Tamang community of Stupahill, I followed, as much as my constitution, humor, and tolerance for confusion allowed, Bronislaw Malinowski's much-referenced methodological directive "to wake up every morning to a day presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the native" ([1922] 1984, 7). Malinowski's language, in his instructions to aspiring anthropologists, suffered deeply from the colonialism, racism, and sexism shaping his times as he spoke of "the native [as] not the natural companion for a white man" (6-7). But he was emphatic that the "proper conditions for ethnographic work ... consist mainly in cutting oneself off from the company of other white men." Malinowski advocated "seek[ing] out the natives' society ... as a relief from loneliness, just as you would any other companionship. And by means of this natural intercourse, you learn to know him, and you become familiar with his customs and beliefs far better than when he is a paid, and often bored, informant." Though we are today sensitive to the patronizing construction of the "native" in Malinowski's admonitions, we must credit him with insisting that the anthropologist engage in local relationships as a putative equal. In my work in Stupahill, I endeavored to understand people's lives, but I never imagined it possible to substitute their experience for mine. My hosts gave me a set of clothes they'd woven for me and taught me how to wear them, but when I tried to return to wearing my original clothes the following day, I was jokingly, but firmly, chastised: Had I or had I not come to learn about their ways? Did I mean what I had said about respecting their customs or not? Since to be Tamang in the emerging state of Nepal has often meant being in a degraded position, 3 my acceptance of their dress was apparently something of a litmus test of my sincerity. But they, as much as I, remained appreciative of my separate history. One day I was walking to the nearest market town with a group of Tamang village women when we were accosted by some high-caste Parbatiya4 women on the

3· See Holmberg (1989) and P. Tamang (1994) for further discussion on Tamang identity and the exclusion of Tamang peoples from the more advantageous positions in modern Nepal. 4· Lynn Bennett's book on high-caste Hindu women in Nepal (1983) was among the very first to consider the complexities of gender in the Himalayas. She greatly widened the circulation of the term Parbatiya to refer to the caste-based, Hindu, Nepali-speaking residents of the hill regions of Nepal. Some accounts simply refer to these peoples as Nepali; I prefer Bennett's usage since it acknowledges that all the hill peoples are Nepali, not just the caste-based, Hindu, Nepali-speaking ones. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

35

trail. Why, they asked, using derogatory language, was I wearing Tibetan dress? Both Parbatiya and Tamang are long-term residents of the hills of Nepal and citizens of the state ofNepal. Historically and internally, however, Tamang do not observe the caste rules of purity and impurity, nor do they create hierarchical relations with other groups except blacksmiths, nor are their rituals performed by Brahmins. These characteristics define their Parbatiya neighbors. Tamang society is organized into clans that are linked by marriage, and its most respected religious practitioners are Buddhist lamas, shamans, and sacrificers. Surrounding (and at times in the midst of) the Tamang communities near Stupahilllive many Parbatiya, whose ancestors established the national Kingdom of Nepal and wrote the legal codes that fixed local Tamang as a dependent minority group. In the eyes of some Parbatiya, Tamang non-observance of caste strictures marks them as outcastes. The women who shouted at us on the trail were claiming nothing less than absolute moral superiority. "This is not Tibetan dress; it's Tamang," was my reply, evading the insult to Tamang somewhat at the expense of their northern neighbors. But the Parbatiya women did not give up. Whatever it was, they asked, why was I wearing it? My Tamang companions answered for me: "Because we gave it to her"; "because she respects us"; "because we asked her to." "Why, then," the highcaste women persisted, "does she also wear that foreign hat?" referring to my denim sun hat. "That's her mark," my defenders said. "It's so she won't forget who she is." I could not, of course, directly experience these women's lives, but I could listen carefully to how they told about their lives. In their broadest strokes, Tamang life stories are told as hanging in the balance between dukka and sukha.5 Dukka is suffering: it is the physical hurt of illness, hunger, cold, or injury; it is the weight of knowing the fears, worries, wrongs, and obligations of life; and it is sorrow, sadness, melancholy, or grief at being unable to forget hurt and hardship. Sukha is the opposite: it is the ease and comfort of health, food, warmth, clothing, and companionship; it is the feeling of uncomplicated pleasure; it is purest as a happiness unaware even of its own good fortune. Every woman I interviewed located her life overall, and the events in her own narrative, in relation to dukka and sukha.

5· These are the most commonly used words, pronounced, roughly, doo-kah and suo-khah. These words come ultimately from Sanskrit, which has influenced the religious, intellectual, and moral concepts not only in Tamang but also in Nepali and the Tibetan Buddhist canon. Another Sanskritic/Nepali word, less frequently heard, is haisu(k), meaning a supreme happiness. In certain contexts, Tamang will use Tibetan-origin words, tschitang or gotta, to indicate especially great hardships, burdens, or sorrows. In the colloquial Tamang of the region, all these nouns invoke a more totalizing sense of either suffering or pleasure than do the verbal expressions tschuba (to enjoy, to be enjoyable, or to find pleasant), tangba (to be happy or to be pleased), or chherba (to be/find unpleasant or to dislike). In everyday speech, the verbs are more frequently used than the nouns.

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Translating: Homes, in-laws, and years MONDZOM: Now, well ... I've become like so many tattered old rags, all worn out-wouldn't you say? My strength is all gone; my eyesight is all gone ... NHANU: Me, whenever I was hungry, there was never anything to eat. When I wanted clothes to wear, there weren't any. In my childhood, oh, it was hard. I seem to have known only sorrow. [She laughs.] TULARAM: Grandmother, you're from the village of Sleepyflats originally, aren't you? Your own fathers' birthhome is in Sleepyflats, isn't it? MONDZOM: Right there in Sleepyflats, that's where I'm from. You know, from the village a little farther down the mountain, the one with all the Ghale6 clans people. TULARAM: Your son's father 7 was the first person you went to in marriage, wasn't he? Or had you gone with anyone else before him? MONDZOM: Only with him. When I was only twelve calendar-years old, I reached that one's house in marriage; I became a sister- and daughter-inlaw there.

I ask you here to attend to at least some of the most important Tamang words and the worlds they reveal. The first I have translated as "own fathers' birthhome." In ordinary Tamang speech, three synonym expressionsphamyung, apa maiti, and apa maiti ja---are used to refer to a married woman's natal home. 8 The house where a woman was born and raised is conceptually her father's, and his father's, as far back as the patriline can be imagined. After a woman is married and has moved to live with her husband (and his patriline), she eventually comes to call her husband's home by the word she previously used to refer to her natal home (dim). Her natal home then becomes called her phamyungor apa maiti (ja). In her own fathers' birthhome, of course, a woman is a daughter and a sister-a clansister. When she marries, she becomes a tschang, which means both daughter-in-law and sister-in-law. After all, Tamang women often marry into extended households in which sets of brothers and their wives, as well as their unmarried sisters, all continue to live with the parents. The same term is used both to refer to the wife and to address her directly, revealing a composite tschang-ness-she is neither just daughter-in-law nor sister-in-law, but kinswoman-not-of-our-house-who-has-married-in. Her intimate outsiderness

6. The Ghale are a distinctive Tamang clan, associated with the local kings prior to the late eighteenth century, when this entire region was conquered by the present Gurkha rulers. 7· A polite way to refer to Mondzom's husband. 8. Phamyungappears to be the more classical Tamang term. As for the other expressions: apa means "father" in Tamang; maiti is a loanword from Nepali meaning "a married woman's original home"; and ja means "place/location" in Tamang. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

37

is globalized; she is welcome, but as a particular kind of conjoined stranger, a (as I gloss it throughout this book) sister-and-daughter-in-law. The third concept of importance from this passage is the distinction between "calendar-year," or the Nepali loanword barsha, and the Tamang lho, or "birth-year" or "cycle-year." Lho are cyclical by twelves; barsha are linear9 and can be counted in the absolute sequence of years. Bikram Sambat (B.s.) calendar years can be converted into years of the Christian Era (A.D.) by subtracting fifty-six iflater in the A.D. year, or fifty-seven if earlier. The original fieldwork and recording of these life histories were done in the calendar-years B.s. 2033 :::!:: 1, which were primarily the cycle-years of the sky-dragon and the snake. I used to spend a lot of time figuring out, or asking people to figure out, when, in calendar B.s. years, things happened. Initially, I liked it better when people used the calendar-years. I understood calendar-years; they came one after the other in an evenly spaced calibration. The twelve-year cycles and cycle-years required conscious multiplication and resonated of the stereotypically oriental. I was missing an important point: there is something more interesting to be learned by noticing how people switch between cycle-years and calendaryears. For example, Mondzom began her account by saying that she was a free spirit until she was two lhekhor, or twelve-year cycles, old; at other times, she says she was married when she was twelve barsha, or calendar-years, old. Both statements could be translated into absolute numbers: free until twenty-four, married at twelve. Both, however, reveal the underlying logic of the Tamang duodecimal calendrical system. The twelve-year cycle was the dominant and familiar form in Tamang speech, with the women in these accounts regularly parsing their lives into phases of twelve. To speak of calendar-years was perhaps more modern or perhaps, here, done for my benefit. The cycle of twelve remained prominent, however, indicating that the construction of the Tamang idea of a life might be different from ours. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: MONDZOM:

What's that you say, Grandmother?

What?

You have to speak more clearly. The tape recorder is lying there with its mouth open.l 0 MONDZOM: My own fathers' birthhome, it's that one, below ... well, in the village a little lower down. NHANU: [To Middle Granddaughter, laughing] You should tell her:ll I'm going to run off with whatever husband pleases me. You ... well ... MONDZOM: [Still to Middle Granddaughter-everyone laughs] You should say, "Where will I find a husband to run off with?" MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER:

g. Until you reach the monumental yugas and kalpas of South Asian epochal tradition. 10. That is, it is turned on. 11. Me, KSM.

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[To everyone present] For me, when it came time for me to marry, everything happened easily: it's like the proverb [Loudly, chanting over the laughter]: Hens open and close their beaks, just like that; just like that, without any ceremony, I went to my husband.

Echo-rhymes and song This was my first introduction to the way these Tamang women drew on shared song and proverbial material to punctuate and enrich their accounts. It occurred fewer than ten minutes into the first narrative. It was striking in several ways. The first thing I noticed was that Mondzom changed her whole demeanor when chanting. Even though I couldn't understand the poetic language she was using very well at first, it was clear from her presentation that this was something different. A wonderful rhyme structure emerged in many of the proverbs and songs cited by women in their life stories. Instead of emphasizing the sound of each line's end, Tamang rhyme appears to work more like a palindrome. The ends of the lines fold in on themselves in a rhyming (or, as in this case, a repeated) middle point. Instead of matching an abcx rhyme scheme with prsx, Tamang songs will match abcx with xprs or, in an even more valued form, with xcba. I call this echo-rhyming or mirror-rhyming. The more I took rhymes like these apart, the more they intrigued me. I was reminded of one of the first sounds I heard entering Tamang country: an old man singing into the valley, sitting alone on a boulder on the walk in front of his house. He sang one line, then waited almost as long as he had sung, then sang again. It wasn't until I was almost next to him that I heard the faint but faithfully clear echo singing each line back to him. Since then I have puzzled often about the hanging lines and long, apparently unanswered pauses in many styles of traditional Tamang song. I have tried on many occasions to lure an ethnomusicologist to the study of Tamang song. I am too musically unschooled to be able to describe the precise workings of these echo-silences. In my more audacious musings, I have drawn comparisons to Steven Feld's (1ggo) theory that bird song and waterfall sounds infuse Kaluli music. Could it be that Tamang song is responding to the music in the natural environment, too, in calling to the other sides of valleys and cliffs? In the call-and-response courtship songs, of course, singers are calling to potential lovers. But in the other styles of song, and in snippets and proverbs like the one cited in Mondzom's account, there are whisperings of a more ample aesthetic, producing a cognitive response to complex logics of rhyme at the same time as an emotive response to echoes. Mondzom's chanted proverb also captured the attention of her audience, MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

39

who had begun to drift off into separate conversations and not just a little lack of reverence for their aging grandmother. By turning to this distinctive and widely known piece, Mondzom reclaimed the conversational floor. She took control of the direction of the interview, but continued to acknowledge her audience rather than just override us. Now I'm a blind grandmother. I've become a burdensome old woman. Now I say: let whatever happens happen; whatever will be, will be. How many troubles I've seen ... isn't that what I should tell? [To Nhanu and KSM] Is this what you want me to talk about? KSM: How many calendar-years old were you when you first married, Grandmother? MONDZOM: When I was first married? Who knows how old I was? In those days we hadn't discovered counting. We didn't keep track by counting the calendar-years the way they do nowadays .... Maybe I was about twelve calendar-years old or so ... 12 TULARAM: Before you were married, Grandmother, were things hard for you? MONDZOM: No, not hard. NHANU: Not hard? Then they were easy for you? MONDZOM: Not hard. I was never sick, never hurt. It wasn't hard for me. When I was with my father and mother, I never had to worry whether I would eat or not. I never had to worry about needing anything. MONDZOM:

In conversations like this, I learned how Tamang women, by representing life as easy or hard, organize their narratives, give meaning to life transformations, and weigh the overall balance. Most women recreated the temporal movement through life by contrasting the moments of comfort with those of difficulty. These shifts between hardship and happiness are the metal from which the chain of events each woman tells as her life is forged. For some, like Nhanu, childhood is remembered as a happier time: 'Things were easier when I was a child. I got to go walking around as I pleased; I was free to eat whatever I could find." Many of the women, like Mhojyo, spoke of childhood as a time when things were simpler. "What do children know?" she asked. "As children, what? If you find enough to eat, enough to wear, things are easy.... All you want is to have nice things to wear, to eat." For many of these tellers, wisdom arose in adulthood when marriage into someone else's house constituted the prototypic loss of comfort and freedom. Sukumaya's story is clearest: "I don't want to go to someone else's house. If only I could stay on in Father and Mother's place, I'd like that." In stories like Sukumaya's this sorrow-or-joy contrastive framework is used relatively simply: life was good first, 12. Although I asked the question (and Mondzom answered) in terms of calendar-years, the twelve-year blocks of the cycle-years clearly underlie her reply. To be married at twelve is rather young for Tamang, but she was not expected to go live with her husband immediately.

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as a child, with one's own parents; it was hard after marriage, with the obligation to move into one's husband's parents' house. Did the girls where you came from sing songs the same way they do today? Did they, well, you know, go about to festivals and all? NHANU: Songs?! Well, I'd guess that they sang then, too! MONDZOM: I didn't sing. [Everyone laughs.] MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: [Giggling] Speak up, Grandmother. NHANU: Maybe her voice will break if she speaks too loudly, you know, like a rope that is stretched too far. [Laughing with Middle Granddaughter] DHH: Grandfather has passed away, hasn't he, Grandmother? Grandfather is dead? MONDZOM: [Very quietly] Sometimes, well ... yes, I've cried.l3 KSM: Here, Grandmother, sit on this mat and be comfortable.

TULARAM:

The change in Mondzom's demeanor unsettled me a little. She had been so upbeat and even brave throughout her telling that I, like her other listeners, had begun to forget how old she was and how difficult her life had become. My gesture-to offer her a more comfortable seat-was not nearly as graceful as Nhanu's, whose soft singing transformed the mood of the group completely: NHANU:

[Singing and laughing in the background] 14

Popcorn, popped, oh! Hey-hoP 5 Memories linger in my mind of the affection we two shared; Echoes ring here in my ears of the affection we two shared. Love happily chosen is sweet like wild red-vine berries; Love courteously given is gentle like acacia-tree seeds.l6 The echoes ring here in my ears ... oh! my very own love! Popcorn, popping, eating! Hey-ho! Let the memories stay in our minds of the affection we two shared! 13. Note that Mondzom has here chosen to refer to her husband's death obliquely. 14. The local song name was not recorded and this full text comes from several later recording sessions with Mondzom and Nhanu, since Nhanu's humming at the time ofMondzom's interview is too difficult to transcribe. 15. When people go off to festivals or on pilgrimage, they must take food with them. Popped corn is a particularly popular snack food. Although popcorn is also eaten as a snack in more mundane contexts, like village work parties, it is associated in the imagery of this song with the more festive courtship songfests. 16. This simile is somewhat unclear. Perhaps the song is referring to the reported Tibetan women's practice of making their faces up with a powder made from the acacia tree when going courting, but this is not, to my knowledge, a common Tamang practice. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

41

Let the echoes ring in our ears of the affection we two shared! Remember! Listen! Let's enjoy what our minds would recall. Beer fills the drinking bowl the way love is gathered in our minds and hearts. Lo! Hey-ho! Let's make love, the way love is gathered by our hearts and minds. Beer fills the drinking bqwl the way love is gathered in our minds and hearts. We made love where none had been made before; we found love where none had been found before. \'\'here will I find such a love again? V\'here will I find such kindness again? The mustard field on the hillside is barren,l7 But I won't relinquish even a handful of our bygone love. Love once made can't depart just like this; love once found can't be lost just like this. Let us remember! We, too, let us enjoy our love! Just as my father spoke, I, too, will speak out; just as my mother spoke, I, too, will speak out. Just as my father went roving, I, too, will roam; just as my mother went roving, I, too, will roam. Just as the machete is girded on at the waistband, just as a father enjoys his sons and daughters, in our hearts and minds, we will seem to have enjoyed! Let the memories linger on! ... milk-sweet love! Let the echoes ring on! ... milk-sweet love! This the way they sang. Long ago, there were songs about corn, about popping corn, about husking ... old-time songs.

This was the first of many songs women quite literally burst into, in the midst of their talking. In part, it seemed to me that Nhanu wanted to hold the group's attention. There was a definite poignancy to her selection of a song about lost loves and old memories in the context of Mondzom's story here. There was also a long pause after she stopped singing before anyone spoke. When Mondzom finally did speak, her comments reclaimed her primacy in the conversation definitively, so much so that Nhanu almost took back her song. MONDZOM: Songs! Oh, my children! But you're not even the friends I didn't go singing with! I, well ... actually, I never sang songs, my children.

17. Metaphor uncertain.

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You were only twelve calendar-years old! What would you have found out about even if you had gone around singing festival songs anyway? NHANU:

Tularam broke the tension.

Early married life, children, and herds When you were twelve, after your wedding was done, did you stay up there 18 or in your own fathers' birthhome? MONDZOM: I didn't stay up there. TULARAM: You stayed in your own fathers' birthhome, then? MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: Keep on telling US more, Grandmother. NHANU: Tell us if you stayed in your own fathers' birthhome ... MONDZOM: My own fathers' birthhome ... What can I say? Whatever happened, I guess I must have stayed there, oh, say, one year, maybe two. The two places are very close to one another-the one is just up the mountain a little ways, the other downhill a ways-they were so nearby one another that they were practically in the same place. So I, well, I lived uphill a ways. Uphill there, with my husband, our babies were born. Five of them, you know. I seem to have dropped kids, one right after the other. In that way, staying there, six calendar-years passed, one year ... no, three of the twelve-year cycles passed. TULARAM: How many children did you have up there? MONDZOM: Five. TULARAM: Five children. Mter having three sons and two daughters, then, you lost Grandfather?

TULARAM:

The additional information Tularam has volunteered about the sexes of Mondzom's children highlights something that recurs frequently in these narratives: people generally know a great deal about each other's lives. These tellings are punctuated throughout by cross-references, agreements, and disagreements in which tellers and listeners toy with their knowledge about the events of the others' lives. Yes. How many calendar-years after your marriage was done was it that you lost Grandfather? MONDZOM: Mter five children had happened. NHANU: And how far apart might those children's lho-birthyears be? MONDZOM: TULARAM:

The persistence of the other listeners in asking who, where, when, and how often interrupted what I perceived as the emotional flow of the story. It took

18. Oblique reference to her husband's house.

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me some time to appreciate why everyone wanted to make sure that all these details were properly recorded, clearly and exactly. For me, many of the people mentioned in this first life history were simply characters-a daughter-in-law, a husband, a young wife. To the Tamang listeners, however, each and every person mentioned was someone's daughter-in-law, or husband, or wife. To understand the events in the stories requires understanding the relationships among all the people involved. How far apart were my first husband's children? My first was born at the same time as you [Nhanu]. In one twelve-year cycle after marrying him ... no, in six or seven calendar-years after marrying him, all my sons and daughters were born. Then, well, four calendar-years after the last child, I lost him. My secondborn child was born five calendar-years after my firstborn, who recently passed away. And then, well, the others were four calendaryears ... each four calendar-years apart. And after that, you see, I lost my lastbom in the cycle-year of the rat ... no, it was in the cycle-year of the ox. MONDZOM:

The lho-birthyears or cycle-years are mostly named after animals, as is also found in Tibet and China. In order, according to local Tamang informants, the twelve lho are: mouse or rat (jz), ox (lang), tiger (ta), goat (he),I9 skydragon ( brup), snake or serpent ( brul), horse ( tak), sheep ( lhuk), monkey (pre), bird or chicken (jya), dog (khyi), and pig or boar (pha). Cycle-years are used by Tamang for most religious and astrological purposes, while calendaryears link Tamang events to national and international events. You know, me, I had a girl child only after eight calendar-years of marriage. MONDZOM: The daughter born in the cycle-year of the boar? KSM: When you were living up there in your own fathers' birthhome, how was it? The same as today? All around the village, in all the houses, were things the same as they are today, or ... were they different? MONDZOM: I never had any sorrows in my own fathers' birthhome. There was never any shortage of food to eat, nor of drink. KSM: Is it pleasant in one's own fathers' birthhome? MONDZOM: I'll say! It's very pleasant in your own fathers' birthhome. KSM: How much did you stay in the high mountain herding stations before, before you did your first marriage? MONDZOM: All during my youth. TULARAM: With your father, or with Grandfather?20 NHANU:

19. Note that the traditional Tibetan list calls this year the hare, and ra, not he, is the colloquial Tamang word for "goat." 20. That is, Mondzom's husband.

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With Father. If you stayed in the high mountain herding stations throughout your childhood, did you herd cattle then? MONDZOM:

TULARAM:

All Stupahill households aspire to possess herds of goats, cattle, and water buffalo, but managing herds places special demands on family labor. If there are not too many animals, even a relatively young child can follow after them during local daily pasturing. If herds grow, however, they have to be set up in separate herding stations, often at some distance from the homestead. These herding stations consist of rough shelters for both herders and animals. These shelters are moved up and down the mountainsides following the seasonal availability of pasturage. Herding stations may sometimes be located in or below the village proper (in the cold season) and sometimes far above on the high mountain ridges (in the warm monsoon months). Herders are responsible for feeding, milking, and caring for all the animals, as well as for the dairying operations which produce yogurt, dried cheeses, and clarified butter for sale or household consumption. Station herders have to porter these dairy products to the homestead and bring their own food and salt supplies back. The largest herding stations are often run by older children for their parents. They are frequently the first quasi-independent dwellings inhabited by young married couples. Purngi described the first years of her marriage saying, "Mter doing my wedding, oh, I went back and forth like that for some thirteen or fourteen years. This so-called father would always only stay with the herds in the herding sheds. Even though his wedding had been done, he'd only ever stay with the herds. All he was was a herder." Mondzom, Nhanu, and Phurko, too, all spent large portions of their youth in herding stations. "If it didn't rain," said Mondzom, "then I'd go following ... following the cattle. I'd carry my woven bamboo rain shield over my shoulder, with my scythe and tumpline, and herd and herd and herd and herd and herd. Thunder would crash all around me." Local opinion about life in these herding stations is divided. In general, herders like their freedom from agricultural field labor. Food is "milk-sweet" when there is lots of milk, yogurt, cheese, buttermilk, and butter, which everyone values. But life in herding stations is more rustic, solitary, and vulnerable to the elements. There is plenty of peace and quiet but only a limited social life. Many young people can wax quite poetic about the landscapes and tranquility, but they find the isolation hard and regret missing out on important social, agricultural, and domestic events. Oh, I'd go after the cows, among the junipers, among the cedars .... I remember getting so tired going after that constantly moving stream of cows-all over the hill places in Gongar, in Whitemouthflats, up above Bradar, oh, and on Richforest Mountain there, in Jyabuta, and Lhamta.

MONDZOM:

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45

Those who live to the south, down the mountains-those Marpas-they would call our mountains "places where wild boars rolled and tumbled"; those of us from up the mountains, we so-called Baldens,2 1 we said these mountains were the "places where the wild boars had come to rest. "22 TULARAM: So you used to live in a high mountain herding station, then? MONDZOM: That's where I lived. Up there in the junipers ... When it rained and our syama-skirts23 got wet, we'd change into dry ones, and then wring the wet ones out and dry them over a fire of juniper branches. Over and over again ... That was the trouble with living up there, I can tell you. KSM: To keep dry ... MONDZOM: To dry things out, well ... Quickly, quickly, after wringing the clothes out, you know, we held them over the red-hot coals where the flames danced, just so .... Steam rose up in clouds. Then we'd do it all again. Mter wringing them out, so quickly ... You know, fire doesn't scorch clothes if they're still damp. TULARAM: You lived in the mountains all the time, then? MONDZOM: Lived there, well, yes, Grandson, there on that mountain. Mter I went to live in someone else's place, I no longer stayed in the mountains.

Home(s) and happiness(es) Mondzom says her life was never hard and these descriptions of her childhood herding are wistful and romantic. Her language is sensuous, with dampness and smoke and clouds saturating her narrative. Her fondness for those times is evident not only in the lushness of her language but in her referring to the house where she went in marriage as hro-i ja, "someone else's place." Hro-i ja is one of the most common expressions young women used to refer to their husbands' and in-laws' homes.2 4 It conveys a sense of non-identification with the place and its people, locating them outside one's own personal circle.

21. These are the (somewhat derogatory) names given to people living below (who were called Marpas) or higher up (called Baldens) than oneself in the mountains. 22. The expression "come to rest" is used in mythological and religious accounts describing the proper order of the world; it contrasts with the imagery of tumbling, unrest, and chaos used by lowlanders to describe the mountains. 23. The traditional blue-and-red skirts woven and worn by Tamang women of north-central Nepal. See also March (1983). 24. Literally,ja means "place" in both the sense of "locale" and "house." The -iindicates possession; it is the postposition (a preposition that comes after the word it modifies) "of." The word hro has two tonally distinct meanings: "someone else" and "friend."' In romanized writing, there may appear to be some confusion about its meaning here (as opposed to in the expression tschame hro, or "girlhood friends"). The tones of the two pronunciations are different, however, so that they are usually phonemically distinct in spoken Tamang.

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Unlike Mondzom, other women describe life as harder in childhood, before, as they say, "wisdom arose." Tasyi tells how things were difficult for her even when she lived with her father: "The years before, Father found things hard. He found it a little hard. I even had to go work for others, I did. Working for others, I went to repay his loans.25 And so doing that, I had gone to live with others. And so it seems that when we were all bigger, we bought some unirrigated fields; we bought some irrigated fields. And then we became rich." For Tasyi, life went from hard to easier; indeed, for some of the women, the whole point of the story was to tell how they managed to turn their early sorrows into lives of relative comfort. In her own way, then, each woman imparted relative sukha and dukka to the sequenced segments of her life. The relatively simple before-and-after narrative framework was common, but the potential for greater elaboration was implicit. Jyomo, for example, divided her life into three time periods: girlhood before marriage, first marriage (in a community named Firestone), and present marriage. "Hardship," she says, "well, how can one even speak of it now? My hardship, even more so, more in the house of those Firestone people, then even more here. In Father's and Mother's house, I was carefree." Mlangdzom, however, tells a tale of unremitting hardship, according to which she was orphaned and impoverished in childhood, married young into more hard work, abandoned by her husband when she still had small children. But Mondzom, in spite of the deaths of all her children and her husband, tells a tale of continuous comfort. As the life narratives were told to me, each teller progressed through the details of her personal events to a general statement about her overall happiness or sorrow. Tikiri said, "I found sorrow. Wherever I came to be. No matter where I would go." Her daughter, Tschirto, described herself as "walking adrift ... with nothing. It's been hard. When I recall it all ... so much, so much hardship for me." "I never got to stay in good comfort," claimsJyomo, like Nhanu, who asserted, "All I've ever encountered in my life is suffering and hardship." "I have a hundred sorrows," said Hrisang, counting her hardship out, like Tikiri, who said hers was "nine days in twelve." Others balanced the scales of their lives differently. Purngi and Tasyi, for example, both declare they've known only limited sorrow. Tasyi's tale of her first son's death ends with a description of his mortuary service and her continued obligations toward his surviving younger sister: "Then, doing like that [the service], I would take care of the little one I still had left. Joy and sor-

2.'). Tasyi and Mlangdzom, like the children of many poor Tamang, worked as indentured (or bonded) servants for one of their fathers' creditors. According to the national legal codes, Tamang could be enslaved legally until slavery was officially abolished in 1924; some Tamang in the 1970s-although not in Stupahill-were still so subject to their landlords that certain families had to provide the labor of one family member without compensation.

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row." Or again, when she summarized her full childbearing, "Well, I've found sorrow. And I've found joy. However I tell it, though, I've never known the sorrow of not having enough to eat." In these accounts, there was often a subtle movement from one source of pain or joy, drawn from the specifics of the teller's life, to an evocation of more generally shared metaphoric statements about suffering and happiness in all life. Jyomo, for example, tells of her first marriage, which ended in divorce, saying, "When I was twelve calendar-years old, I had been carried off to Firestone. Mter the wedding was done to one who was only twelve, I stayed for eight calendar-years. Then he brought in another wife. He would be contemptuous of me; I'd be beaten. I wouldn't be given food to eat or clothes to wear. In order to endure, after enduring, I didn't stay. I came here. "26 In such accounts, it is not always clear, nor probably is it important, which hardships were historically factual and which were metaphorically extended. InJyomo's case, for example, it was well known that her husband indeed took a second wife; it was unlikely, but not impossible, that he beat her up physically; and it was inconceivable that she would not be fed or clothed. The facticity of her statements here is less important than the way she portrays her unhappiness by stringing these images together, from personally miserable, in stages, to universally grievous. Oh, then, after you were married, you didn't live in the high mountains? MONDZOM: No, I didn't live there any more then. KSM: Were there any other sister-daughters-in-law up there? Up there where you went in marriage? MONDZOM: There was an elder sister-daughter-in-law. KSM: Did you get along well together? MONDZOM: Who's to say? We hardly knew what it meant to say that we didn't get along. KSM: And with your mother-in-law? MONDZOM: Oh, now, with my mother-in-law it was very good. Even now, whenever she comes down here, you know, and if she sees me, she goes on crying for me, "Where's my sister-daughter-in-law? Where's my sisterdaughter-in-law?" KSM:

To me, the Tamang kinship universe was dizzying, with uncles who were like fathers, aunts like mothers, cousins who were brothers or sisters, and even special kin who were named potential husbands or wives from the day you were born. When I first arrived in Stupahill and wanted to figure out who everyone was, I tried to make a giant chart of all the people in the village and their relationships. I knew that everyone had lived their whole lives there, 26. Multiple marriages, divorces, and the complexity of marital and domestic relationships are discussed in chapter 4·

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and that their mothers and fathers had, too, as would their children, through all conceivable time both past and future. Still, I was overwhelmed by how much each knew about all. You had had six children when you lost Grandfather? No, five. TULARAM: You had five children, then Grandfather passed away. MONDZOM: Yes. Mter my lastborn was born in the cycle-year of the rat .. . TULARAM: What calendar-year did you lose Grandfather in? And then .. . you came down here to marry this Grandfather here, didn't you, Grandmother? MONDZOM: For five full years, with a sixth just beginning, I lived up the mountain, Grandson. TULARAM: Mter Grandfather passed away, you stayed five full years? MONDZOM: I was three of the twelve-year cycles old at the beginning of the month of Magh27 when I first arrived here. Now, this child here, Middle Granddaughter, my secondborn granddaughter, lived with her own father and mother, up the mountain there, for just three years.28 In Magh of last year, her fourth year living here with me began. TULARAM: Was your marriage with the Grandfather here prearranged or did he talk you into it? NHANU: They talked her into it. Mter persuading her, they brought her here without any ceremony. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: Tell US what happened, Grandmother. TULARAM:

MONDZOM:

Marriage and remarriage The Tamang in this region typically say that there are three kinds of marriage: marriage by arrangement, marriage by mutual consent, and marriage by capture. Marriages like Mondzom's first marriage are arranged by the couple's parents and involve large community celebrations or weddings. Such marriages can involve even very young children since they are arranged to strengthen relations between those children's parents. There is no expectation that the new couple will actually live together until the girl is old

27. The months referred to throughout most of this book are those of the Nepali national year; they are lunar so they cannot simply be translated into the solar months we know. The Nepali national year begins with the month of Baisakh, which usually falls from mid-April to mid-May. Following this come (in order): Jeth, from mid-May to mid:June; Asar, from midJune to mid:July; Saun or Sawan, from mid:July to mid-August; Bhadau, from mid-August to mid-September; Asoj, from mid-September to mid-October; Kartik or Kattik, from mid-October to mid-November; Mangshir, from mid-November to mid-December; Paush or Push, from mid-December to mid:January; Magh, from mid:January to mid-February; Phagun, from midFebruary to mid-March; and Chait, from mid-March to mid-April. 28. That is, her parents died when she was three. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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enough to decide to leave her parents and move in with her husband. Indeed, in many cases, she runs off with someone else when she gets a little older, or her husband runs off with someone else first, or one of them dies. A whole host of events can keep these arranged marriages from being permanently binding. Marriages by mutual consent are the most common kind among the Tamang. Couples who marry this way often meet and court in song competitions at festivals and elope to the man's parents' house. Their marriages are recognized after the fact, by the offering of ritual jugs ofliquor to at least the important members of both the man's and the woman's families. Men and women who marry by mutual consent are adults, usually over eighteen. Marriage by capture is the most elusive conceptually and it is the most evocative. People in Stupahill talk about the idea of capture marriage a lot. Stylized enactments of the capture and smuggling of brides figure in the rituals both of arranged weddings-where brides are literally carried away from their home villages-and of consent marriages-where the bride is hidden under cloth in her husband's home during the ritual drinking that recognizes their marriage. But it is clear that actual abduction by force occurs extremely rarely, if at all. Stupahill Tamang do not think that women are, qua women, physically weaker than men. Moreover, women have as many kin and friend allies as men, and they all live and work in dense social worlds. It would be difficult indeed for a man to overpower a woman, especially if she called out for help. It might be interesting to think of all three kinds of Tamang marriage as marriages by arrangement: before the fact, after the fact, and when not everyone is satisfied with the facts. Early arranged weddings turn into marriages by mutual consent if the couple stays together long enough, but they don't have to. Over half of all Tamang marriages end in divorce or break up without a formal divorce. Moreover, people who are less than happy about any particular marriage, even though they may not want to break it up, have recourse to the idiom of capture to help them explain its shortcomings. For example, a woman who has misgivings about having run off with her husband can begin to claim that he and his friends abducted her; her parents can accuse an unsatisfactory son-in-law with having stolen their daughter; even a man might blame his friends for having brought him a wife about whom he hadn't known enough. MONDZOM: When I came down here he walked out in front of me; I came walking behind. Well, perhaps we came together .. . Mter the lama and bombo2 9 had set things up .. . TULARAM: Did Grandfather court you to persuade you to come, Grandmother? Or were you taken to him by some other people?

29. Two

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m~or

religious specialists among the Tamang.

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MONDZOM: There was the bombo called Crayfish and the one they call the Scribe from Mountainmeadow, and then the father of the bombo they call Prechya-the one from Hill Hamlet ... They're all sorcerers of a sort, aren't they? Well ... who can say really whether they are or not, or what they are? ... Some say their kind has spells and charms to persuade women .... Who can say for sure? They were they ones who brought me down here. KSM: Did they use charms on you, Grandmother? MONDZOM: Who knows? Who can see what they do?! [Everyone laughs.]

Lama are the keepers of the Tibetan Buddhist texts; they preside over the memorial feasts for the dead. Bombo are ecstatic curers, expert in chants and rituals to protect the living. In some ways, these two religious specialists complement one another, and in other ways they are rivals, as David Holmberg ( 1983) so amply depicts. As competitors, bombo and lama accuse each other of being not religious practitioners but witches, sorcerers, and deceivers. In Stupahill, neither is a full-time religious figure; all are married and have everyday lives. In Mondzom's account of her second arranged elopement by capture, all these facets of the bombo and lama come into play. As her kinsmen (and those of the groom), they are implicated in the marital intrigues. As men of some social and religious stature, they hold a decisive influence. Even so, their motives-like those of Mondzom herself-are not unambiguous. MONDZOM: I certainly came tumbling along after them willingly enough! But who can see what they do? They herded me down the mountain, bringing me down in secret; following alongside the little streambeds we went. Saying to myself, "I want to turn around and go back," I would tell them that I was going to go pee. But one of them stayed behind me and one stayed in front every time-all of this in the middle of the night, too, by moonlight. They got angry with me, saying, "What kind of a person is it who needs to pee three times just in the short time it takes to go from there to here?!" They asked me why I kept having to go. Mter passing the crest of the hill on our way down here, there was a mango sapling ... long ago-perhaps you know?-there on the little rise in your3o field, I sat, at the foot of that mango, almost dozing off. They had said, "Why don't you rest a little here," to me. After they said that, I pretended to sleep. But neither the one they call the Scribe from Mountainmeadow nor my old man would leave my side for a minute. And anyway, the others, the bombo and the rest, were coming up just behind.

30. Tularam's. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

51

Apparently Mondzom was having some second thoughts about her new marriage, or so she wants us to believe in this telling. She implies that she might have used the opportunities to pee or sleep to evade her escort, but quickly dismisses such ruses, ostensibly because there were too many people around. If she had truly not wanted to marry Grandfather in Stupahill, she could not have been forced. Grandfather clearly had allies in pursuing his intended, but Mondzom would have had kin and allies of her own all along the trail, and she did not call on them. It is interesting to consider how her options must have looked to her then, and to see how she has chosen to portray them here. One of the great differences between Parbatiya women's lives and those of Tamang women is that Tamang women can remarry, whether they are widowed or divorced; high-caste Parbatiya women are expected to marry only once. A Parbatiya woman who is widowed or abandoned is supposed to live on in her husband's place, raising their children and working what land she is allotted; if there are sons, she should be able to live with them throughout her life, but she will not usually get much help from her birth kin, nor will she be much respected if she leaves to make another life for herself elsewhere. The dilemma for some Parbatiya brides is acute: traditionally married before puberty to men much older than themselves, they often face many years of widowhood. Honor accrues to the faithful wife and mother, but often at considerable personal expense. Tamang women marry and remarry without suffering a loss of prestige. Whether for companionship, or help with domestic and farmwork, or love, few Tamang women or men remain single as adults. Much to the horror of their Parbatiya neighbors, Tamang couples marry even as they move into old age. At thirty-six, Mondzom was still a relatively young woman and not likely to stay unmarried. Tamang women in Stupahill routinely remarry, especially after being widowed, well into their fifties, probably for at least two major reasons. The first pressure comes from the organization of household and field labor; common expectations about what is men's and women's work (as well as the expertise associated with both) mean that it is hard to run a Tamang farm without the contributions of both sexes. Many Stupahill Tamang also commented on the comfort, ease, and happiness-in short, the sukha-found in marital companionship. They undoubtedly found life less pleasurable without the everyday exchanges between husband and wife. The main pull that restrains Tamang women from contemplating remarriage is their children. Like Parbatiya children, Tamang children belong to their father's line and are considered no part of their mother's. They inherit from their fathers. Children, especially girls, may receive gifts from their mothers, but by the time they are grown enough to inherit, the mother's property has been joined with the father's to create a joint endowment for their children. If women remarry, then, they must leave their children behind. A temporary reprieve is granted for very small, especially nursing, chil52

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dren, who are allowed to accompany their mothers for a few years. But by the time they are seven or so, children must return to their fathers' birthhome. All of Mondzom's children remained "up there" in her deceased first husband's community, cared for by his brothers, their uncle-fathers. Mondzom, according to Tamang logic, had done well by her children: she had waited to remarry until her youngest was four and the oldest old enough to claim his patrimony. And you were three twelve-year cycles old at that time, didn't you say, Grandmother? MONDZOM: Three of the twelve-year cycles had passed and another was just beginning. NHANU: Grandmother, you and my mother are the same age; how many twelve-year cycles have passed for the two of you? MONDZOM: My seventh twelve-year cycle is just beginning right now. NHANU: You mean that you've seen six, going on seven, twelve-year cycles? MONDZOM: Six have passed, and now, you know, my seventh began last year in the month of Mag h. TULARAM: And how much older was this Grandfather 31 here than you are, Grandmother? MONDZOM: He was a year older than my own father. Father was born in the cycle-year ox. The Grandfather here was born in the cycle-year of the rat. I was twenty-four years younger than he was. NHANU: What?! Our grandfather here was older than Grandfather-your father-who lived up the mountain? Our grandfather down here was older?! ... And the grandfather up the mountain was younger?! MONDZOM: You see, my father had been very sick. Mter his illness, he couldn't see anymore; he just stayed on there, old before his time. This one down here was of the cycle-year of the rat. KSM: Mter you came here, well, did you live here all the time? Or did you also go back home up the mountain sometimes? MONDZOM: I, no, I didn't go back. TULARAM: If you did go back up there, did you go to your own fathers' birthhome or to your sons' places? MONDZOM: They're basically one and the same place. I'd go to one, and then I'd go right to the other. It's all the same village, you know. TULARAM: No, it's not. How much did Grandfather here put your mind to ease? MONDZOM: In every way. Listen-! never had to go do fieldwork. I never had to leave the house. Whatever food I had a mind to eat, I ate. Whatever I had a mind to wear, I wore. Now, I do what I can. TULARAM:

31. Her new husband, as he was known in Stupahill. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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TULARAM: Grandmother, how many years after you came here did you lose Grandfather here? NHANU: [Interrupting] You never had to go out to do any day labor? 32 MONDZOM: No, I never had to do any day labor. Cooking, cooking ... only cooking-in the daytime, at night-all I ever had to do was that. And milking the buffalo. But others kept bringing us jugs of yogurt, butter by the gallon, bunches of bananas, weirs full of fish .... There were always so many people coming and going. You know how, in the villages, there's meat to eat after people worship the divinities and sacrifice animals to them ... well, one share of the meat, like the backbone, that was never enough for us. Even a whole quarter of a goat ... well, there were always so many people coming and going at our house, all bringing something, all wanting something ... so many people to feed all the time. NHANU: You know the song:

If you go in marriage with a northern man, all that you'll spend your time doing is spinning at the spinning wheel. If you go in marriage with a southern man, all that you'll spend your time doing is winnowing and culling through frayed gossip. If you go in marriage with a village headman, all that your many guests will ever leave for you to eat are the bones and gristle.

That's the way the song goes-it's as you said, you must have had to cook day and night for all those guests. [She chuckles.] Death

When I asked Suryaman Tamang what he thought might make a good title for this collection oflife histories, he suggested A Tale oJOtphans, since, as he said, "Everyone has lost someone-a father, a mother, children, husband." 32. Most Tamang work in their fields daily; some do day labor for others. That Mondzom did not work outside, but stayed at the house, cooking for guests and fieldworkers, indicates that her husband's house was wealthy.

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The loss of loved ones is a notable feature in all these women's accounts, forming the emotive backdrop to these tales. MONDZOM: The only real tale of sorrow, of course, is that of death. While I'm still alive, this body of mine will continue to pursue various goods and comforts .... Well, I've never had to get my measure33 of rice or my measure of millet by doing any kind of day labor. TULARAM: What do you mean-the sorrow of death? Mter whose death have you known sorrow? MONDZOM: With everyone I knew now dead, how could I not have sorrowed? You, your mother died after you were all grown up-that's not a tale of sorrow. TULARAM: Oh, but even so, there is still sorrow in my mind. For you, at whose death ... I mean, how was it for you? How was it for you? MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: Grandmother, tell US your tale, please. MONDZOM: How was it? How is it? As long as your own breath doesn't stop, you keep on going. That's all. Oh, when my husband up the mountain died and I left behind my flock of children, I said to myself, "Oh, my. What will happen? How will it be?" It was especially hard because there was no question of staying up there; my karma34 workings wouldn't let me stay there. As the tiger snatches away the water buffalo, in the same way, I was snatched away, without even time to cry out, "Papa!" or "Mama!" That bombo and all those other would-be sorcerers set it all up and together carried me away ... those so-called sorcerers from nine villages combined! TULARAM: Grandmother, didn't your children try to follow you then? MONDZOM: Oh, they followed a little. The lastborn one especially, the one born in the cycle-year of the rat, whose father died in the cycle-year of the ox, he tried to follow me. TULARAM: He was exactly a year old, then, your lastborn, when he lost his father? MONDZOM: [Softly] Who knows? How old? How old? Who can say if it was exactly a year or not? Who can say? And who would listen? If the father and mother are rich, OK, but even if they don't have enough themselves, people would join together to help an orphan out. My own fathers' birthhome and the other's-my husband's-place were virtually one and the same.

33· Two measures of volume are commonly found. A pathi is the larger measure, equal to about a gallon; a mana is the smaller. There are eight mana in one pathi; thus, a mana is about a pint. 34· Karma is another widespread concept in South Asia (like dharma); here, it means, roughly, "preordained fate" or "future" (see discussion in Nhanu's chapter).

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[Loudly] Other wives might have gone constantly running about at festivals searching for a new husband right after their first husband died .... Not I. Who knows what happened to me? They just came, suddenly, and what? I was carried away, just like that. They came-the one called the Scribe of Mountainmeadow and the-what?-that braggart and sorcerer from Middle Hamlet and another braggart sorcerer from Stupahill. Who knows exactly how it all happened? But they came and took me away. And then ... Mondzom's points may appear to run on strangely here, but she is actually being extremely logical. She says she was effectively persuaded or coerced into remarriage even though she did not go about looking for a new husband the way some widows do. She knew that her children would be well cared for if she were to remarry because her own parents and her husbands' parents lived close enough to each other that together they would oversee their grandchildren's futures. Around and behind this logic is her first husband's death, which precipitated the dislocation in her life and the lives of their children. Talking about parents' or children's deaths, even remembered across many years, brought tellers to tears. They spoke openly and freely about a sense of disruption caused by deaths out of sequence and about the potential disruption of all order by death. "Children-my own birth children-have died," said Jyomo, adding after a considerable pause, "Father and Mother died. Younger Brother died. Younger Sister died. Whatever I had is gone. I'm all alone by myself. I have four of my birth children left-those four children. Such bad fortune: I should die first; but myself, it seems like I've been left behind. How can I know that the same won't happen to those four?" "They say that a son is an orphan when his mother dies," said Mondzom; "Me, I'm an orphaned mother: all my sons and daughters have died and left me behind." Clearly, it was not only the loss through death that pained them but also the poignant awareness that death both disrupts the presumed order and is itself the ultimate order. The pain of death, even distantly remembered, made the conversation stumble. Mondzom had been claiming throughout her telling that hers was a good life, without hardship, without even day labor. The abrupt turn to the deaths in her life-and those in the lives of her listeners-changed the atmosphere on her porch dramatically. Up to this point in Mondzom's story, her audience had directed most of their attention and comments to her. Now, it seemed they took advantage of whatever distraction offered itself. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: [About a child present who has been crying and fussing for some time] What's wrong with this child's ear? His ear is all red. ARROWFORCE: He seems to have something in his eye, too.

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NHANU:

He looks like he's about to sneeze .... Maybe something got into

his eye? [Ignoring the child's situation] In the month ofBaisakh it happened that I came down here ... NHANU: [To the child] What's gotten into your eye? ARROWFORCE: Nothing's in his eye. He's just fussing, that's all. MONDZOM:

Children wander in and out of the houses of their kin with great freedom; adults in those houses supervise, admonish, play with, and show affection for the children with equally great ease. During Mondzom's interview, several children came and went, and there were always a few present. Once or twice, Mondzom's granddaughter went and got some snacks from the hearthroom for them-roasted corn, a bit of leftover porridge. Several times, children were told to be quiet with gestures or even pushed away from the main activity. I loved having all these children around while I was working but would get frustrated as they played with things, fussed, and generally distracted me and the people with whom I was working. Although Tamang children are never in doubt as to who their actual parents are, responsibility for children is more widely held, both on a day-to-day basis and in the more permanent fosterage common when parents die, as in the case ofMondzom's two young granddaughters. [Ignoring the interruption still] When I came down, I left behind two storage bins full of unhusked millet and another of dried corn still on the cob. Well, you know, I came down here empty-handed, bringing nothing. TULARAM: You say you came down in the month of Bhadau? MONDZOM: No, in Magh. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: [To child] Did you get some chili pepper in your eyes or what? ARROWFORCE: Maybe you've got some smoke or something in your eye. Let me see, little one. Let me see. MONDZOM: [Still ignoring the interruption] Only after I'd come here did I ever go to Yembur35 with my father. We two, oh, we went everywhere. We saw all the sights. Now, well, I've encountered some troubles and sorrow. NHANU: [To child] Slowly, carefully ... let me look! TULARAM: [To Mondzom] Say, Grandmother, was it easier for you while you lived up the mountain there in your own fathers' birthhome or were you happy with the grandfather, your husband up there in Sleepyflats, too? MONDZOM:

35· The local Tamang name for Kathmandu.

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Who can say? I didn't lack anything in either place. As long as there's plenty to eat, that's enough ... KSM: And so you also found just as much happiness and ease while you were in Sleepyflats as here too? How different was it for you up there ... or down here? MONDZOM: The only sorrow I've known has been when someone has died. As for having food to eat, well, that's always been just fine. KSM: So your mind is at ease, then? MONDZOM: Completely at ease. Mter leaving my children behind up there, well, too, I also left-a lot, oh, lots-two full storage bins ofunhusked millet, another full of dried corn-husked, but still on the cob-and another one and a half of those storage bins full of paddy ... all left behind. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: [To a bystander] Are you going to work after you take the snack to the fieldworkers? MONDZOM: [Ignoring the question] My big wooden storage box is up there even now.36 MONDZOM:

Personal bomsang laments as life history These colloquially told life narratives are like bomsang in the ways they work to create notjust a chronology of a life but a tale, crafted within frameworks for portraying and interpreting the overall meaning of life. Bomsang are a particular kind of Tamang song; they are personallaments.37 Each is composed by a specific person about her or his life. These songs are thought, in some sense, to belong to their composers and should, properly, be sung by them. Each bomsang begins with highly stylized invocations, appealing to listeners to pay heed to the singer, then continues through a (sometimes very long) series of stanzas about different moments or topics in the singer's life, such as birth, youth, travels, marriage, illness, and children. In this regard, bomsang are arguably the most elaborated indigenous life history narratives found among western Tamang. But bomsang do not sound like life histories to us. The ratio of unique stanzas to conventional ones is low; stock expressions substantially outnumber original ones. Refrains regularly pick up phrases from the overture and sometimes quote long sections from other, primarily religious, songs. Moreover, all bomsang have the same tune and manner of singing. For these reasons, it is difficult for us to think of them as being genuinely individual life 36. Up to this point, Mondzom's narrative has been reproduced in full, exactly as it was recorded. Here, however, the following sections have been omitted: a discussion of the weaving she has done, the history of local weaving, and, in particular, a lengthy description of a local dispute over a village headmanship in which her son was involved. 37· These laments differ from tserlu and tschi tet-chim kraaba (crying-after songs), which for Tamang in Stupahill were the much rawer keening of moumers at death and death rituals. For a look at tserlu from Sherpa/Tamang of the Helambu region, see Desjarlais ( 1992).

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stories. Nor do bomsang reflect the full range ofTamang lives, since they are composed only by very old people looking back on their lives as they look forward primarily to death. No young people have bomsang and not all older people have them; and those who do may piece theirs together primarily from others' stanzas. Even though each bomsang pertains to its composer and is said to be about his or her life, it is less about the uniqueness of that person and what happened to her or him than it is a call for empathy. Bomsang do not chronicle the distinctiveness of a single life; rather, they bring each life into the larger fold, the Tamang vision of the shared human condition of singerI composer and listeners. Foremost among the criteria of excellence in bomsang is that they should make the listener cry about the suffering that is life, then move the listener beyond tears to a deeper appreciation of the meaning of life as suffering. Personal bomsang laments are highly valued aesthetic constructions. The Sixthborn Lama's Older Brother sang the following from his bomsang:38 Hey, hai! Gather round, boys and girls, sons and daughters. Hey, hai! It seems that supreme happiness was born; the burden of sorrow was born. Once the thought of the burden of sorrow came to consciousness, might I have chosen not to be born in my honorable mother's body?39 Like the horse that broke its hooffalling into a hole, humans, without the dawning eye, cannot know the reason for their birth.4° For what purpose was I born? ...

The first claims of any bomsang are inevitably about the age and suffering of the singer. Thus Setar sings, "If I were not such an old woman, how could I know what I know?" Similarly, this Sixth born Lama's Older Brother declares in his opening lines, "The orphaned bird hears the crying of the world. But is anyone aware when I, an orphan too, cry?" In the main stanzas of bomsang that follow, novel verses are intermingled with stock ones as the particularities of an individual life are embedded within generalities about a shared Tamang life. The following example is from the Sixthborn Lama's Older Brother about-as he interpreted for his listeners even as he sang-his marriage. The bomsang's points of originality lie primarily in the verses telling of the singer's youth and courtship. He displays his own metaphorical inventions in his self-portrait as a hunter of wild

38. Recorded by David Holmberg in 1976. 39· These opening lines are quite conventional and appear, in more or less this form, in all bomsang. 40. This line, with its imagery of stumbling horses and dawning eyes (i.e., eyes that are beginning to see, wisdom that is emerging), is pieced from phrases common in the Buddhist texts, which would have been quite familiar to this man, who had been a respected lama. This precise phrasing, however, is original. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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goat-sheep4I and his description of his wanderings as the "longing of circling, circling around, the longing of looking, looking around." Other expressions are far more conventional: some phrases, like "frequented the highlands, frequented the lowlands" or "meet in the fallow meadows" are taken from other popular songs; references such as the turning of the wheel are clear allusions to other Buddhist songs and texts. The mix found in his stanzas is typical, although his composition overall is uniquely personal. Oh! to find a marriage partner! I am a man: I frequented the mountain heights; I frequented the lowland valleys, over and over.42 What was I doing? Let me tell you: Oh! I sought a woman with whom to exchange in marriage. What would your woman's heart-and-mind say if we two, you and I, were to meet in the fallow meadows?43 The longing of circling, circling around; the longing of looking, looking around. 44 Why [was I] looking? I'll tell you: this idea arose in my heart-and-mind. As thoughts arise and depart, I recall the sorrow of one's own heart-and-mind alone. Recalling the heart-and-mind's sorrow, I tell you, alone, one's own heart-and-mind spins like a wheel. To spin or not to spin, the thoughts of one's own heart-and-mind, alone, straightforwardly or not, one must do as one's own thoughts dictate. 45 In the ultimate forest, on an immense rocky slope, the hunter46 went to pursue the female wild goat-sheep.

The poetic representation of life found in personal bomsang laments like this one is profoundly moving to Tamang listeners. Singers sing from a particular vantage on life-as suffering and from the perspective of the very old-to form an equally particular meaning for life-as ordered within the perennially sorrowful cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. The following is

41. Wild goat-sheep are the famous bharal of the Himalayas, animals apparently neither quite sheep nor entirely goat. For an animal behaviorist's account, see Schaller (1977, 1g8o). 42. The juxtaposition of high and low is common in much Tamang song, but the claim "I am a man" marks this as a very personalized verse. 43· If we were to tryst. The shift from the remembered narrative of seeking a wife to this more direct, present-tense query is dramatic. 44· This verse appears quite original, and is a beautiful example of Tamang echo-rhyming (only partially captured in translation). 45· These last verses combine very standard phrases (thoughts arising, recalling sorrow, and spinning like a wheel) with original uses of the image of being alone and following one's own thoughts. The circling, spinning imagery is repeatedly drawn upon in very skillful echorhymes. 46. The hunter motif is common in song but rarely applied by a man to himself in his courtship efforts.

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from the overture (although not the very first opening lines) to Setar's bornsang: Beautiful, oh beautiful, the tall palm tree is beautiful Ho, le!because its branches emerge in an order that is not an order.47 Ho, le!Just so, will the coming year be said to have happened the same as this year, in the same order that is not an order?

Laws of rebirth and accountability mean that each lifetime reaps what was sown in the ones before. As long as one is caught in these cycles, suffering is both inevitable and earned. But, as with any theodicy, this provides an inadequate explanation of why certain people suffer specific hardships at particular moments.

Life as suffering The order within which these Tamang women located themselves and their stories clearly differs from the contemporary American one. But the difference is not simply quantitative. It is not, or not only, that their lives have more suffering than ours. Tamang subscribe to the fundamental Buddhist tenet that life is suffering. More precisely, their accounts display the intense colors of a Buddhist construction of life as suffering that will be reexperienced many times in the course of birth, death, and rebirth. It has become fashionable in what might loosely be called the west to view joy as a human birthright, with suffering intruding as digression, delay, or deficit. Not so the Tamang view of life. Tamang Buddhist views of suffering do not yield narratives quantifying one person's hardship vis-a-vis another's. The suffering of life, in these Tamang accounts, is absolute. It comes to royalty as to commoner, to rich as to poor, to young as to old. Now, how many twelve-year cycles have you lived, Grandmother? How many calendar-years old are you? NHANU: Her seventh twelve-year cycle has begun .... Since it began, how many calendar-years have gone by? MONDZOM: You count them for me: twelve times six calendar-years have passed. Now my seventh twelve-year cycle is beginning. TULARAM: How many calendar-years have gone by since your sixth twelveyear cycle ended? MONDZOM: It ended in the month of Magh last. TULARAM: You mean your seventh twelve-year cycle began last Magh? TULARAM:

47· That is, a palmate or spiral order, not the branching order more typical of trees.

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No, wait a minute. The cycle-year of the sky-dragon has passed, hasn't it? And this calendar-year48 is the cycle-year of the serpent, isn't it? TULARAM: So that makes you seventy-three calendar-years old. MONDZOM: [Softly] If you say so. You all are the ones who know such things .... You understand such things. [Sharply] Even now, I don't suffer for lack of food to eat. Now, though, my eyes don't see anymore. My strength is all gone. Only now has mine become a tale of troubles. But, even now, it's still not a story of "Will I have enough to eat?" [To someone else] He went up the hill. He's not here anymore. Mter my husband died, the Dasain festival came and went ... but I was never short even one pint-measure of paddy for my children. I never have to wonder, "What shall I give these orphans here?"49 Long ago, in the time of the Royal Herding Stations, between all the houses-those that had enough for their own needs and those that didn't-by combining what everyone had and sharing, there was always enough for all. From one house that had more mustard, for example,just when those in another house needed it, they'd send some mustard, to those others who needed it. Or, other times, they'd come with two or three gallon-measures of rice. Having enough to eat was never a problem. It's been that way since my parents' time. Only now are troubles beginning for me. I've become just a worn out old rag now. MONDZOM:

Here, Mondzom's account links her life events specifically with events of Nepali national significance, although she does so very casually. Dasain, for example, is a major Nepalese festival celebrated by a large number of groups and peoples, marked primarily by the paying of respects to superiors and elders, feasting, and the giving of gifts, especially new clothes. At root, it is a festival of popular Hindu sacrifice to the goddess Durga. Because she is also a special patron divinity to the royal shah family, Durga came to have political connotations. The kings of Nepal required everyone in royal, government, or military service to pay tribute to their superiors at the time of Dasain in order to be reappointed for the coming year. For Stupahill Tamang in the 1970s and 1g8os, Dasain was an important time for visiting extended kin, especially one's in-laws, with feasting and singing well into the night, and for endorsing traditional local village heads. Mondzom also refers to the Royal Herding Stations. The people of the community where Mondzom was born were obligated to perform corvee labor for the Royal Herds. Water buffalo, cattle, and cattle-crosses belonging

48. The year this was recorded. 1977. 49· Her two granddaughters. 62

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to the royal families were kept in a herding station by the villagers as part of the obligations they had to perform in order to secure their land rights. Both this and the reference to Dasain bespeak Mondzom's ties to the state, especially as a headman's wife, but both are also somewhat dated. They are the memories of a woman who wants us to know she is old. How's that now? Even ifl say, "Let's go somewhere!" I'm not able to. Or, I might say, "Let's carry something somewhere!" but I can't do it anymore. Ifl say, "Let's wear this or that!" or, "Let's eat something tasty!" I can't anymore. So much trouble can't suddenly have come my way, can it now? MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: She can't see anymore. MONDZOM: My eyes don't see. You know-then, too, you all seem to be here now, but I can't see you. I have to feel my way around even to find a place to pee. [Everyone laughs.] The other day, after going to a memorial death feast in Smithy's Place, while the dances were being performed, I told my friend here,5° "You go on and see the dancing; I'll catch up with you in a minute," intending to stop and pee. Well, it seems that some Brahmins were in the process of digging up some red clay thereabouts ... NHANU: [Laughing] I had gone on ahead, then right then, while those Brahmins were right there, after I had gone on ahead, she went off to pee. MONDZOM: [Loudly] I didn't even squat down conspicuously or anything, but while I was just peeing there, there was all this laughter ... I mean! What could they have seen anyway, those men?! All I did was hold my skirt out a little and pee. Those men, well, there were five of them it seems. So what?! Well, all I did was stand there; they can't have seen anything. My skirt wasn't all pulled up or anything. They didn't see anything. "What are you laughing at?!" I cried out to them. I had gone off privately there by that small stream-you know the one, right as you're about to reach that other hamlet in Smithy's Place, there's a small stream there .... So there I was, back in a pocket of that little stream's canyon. So what was the fuss? So what can they say that they saw? So I said to them, ''What do you think you're hanging around to watch, you?!" KSM: Grandmother, tell me more seriously-what it is that you hope for now? MONDZOM: Hope for? My hopes? All I ask myself anymore is ''When will I die?" As for my hopes, well-hey!-now all I wonder is why I'm still here. ''Why," I wonder, "is my life so long?" Those thoughts come to me now, such ones as those ...

TULARAM:

MONDZOM:

50. Nhanu. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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It's my dharma. This much is my dharma? Now, well, my eyes don't see. This one here, after I die, she can make it the rest of the way down the hill on her own, I'd guess. But this one,s 1 now, if she remains behind, she'll be nothing but garbage for the Buddhas. She'll be left sleeping at the crossroads. My dharma's a tale of taking care of others .... But they've never had a father or mother. NHANU: [To Middle Granddaughter, working at the hearth] Are you toasting some wheat too, or only corn? Old age can be hard for Tamang without responsible living sons. The expectation that sons will care for their parents can be disappointed by the sons' deaths, parental remarriages, out migrations, or, among the Tamang as anywhere, simple incompatibility, especially if the older person is totally dependent due to disability or poverty. Nhanu's attempt to change the topic here is both a response to other activities going on inside the house and areflection of some discomfort at Mondzom's focus on the troubles old age has brought her. In general, Tamang elderly are well taken care of and remain-insofar as health and inclination allow-active members of households where hard physical labor is done by younger members (in more modest families) or by hired labor (where wealth permits). Mondzom still controls enough of her second husband's land that she can afford to hire field labor. With the domestic help of her young granddaughters, she thus maintains a separate household in spite of her age and blindness. Her house is immediately adjacent to Nhanu's and not far from the houses ofjyomo and Purngi, so she is surrounded by children and grandchildren. Regardless of their physical situation, many elderly Tamang begin to prepare for death once their children are grown and married. Partly, no doubt, this is because the lives of even the wealthiest Tamang are plagued by sickness and marked by hard work, which anyone might desire to leave behind. Beyond this, too, Tamang Buddhism specifically encourages people to think of death not as an ending but as a release from suffering. Now when will I die? Oh, my-where will my mind finally come to rest? They say that a son is an orphan when his mother dies. Me, I'm an orphaned mother: all my sons and daughters have died and left me behind. That's what must be called my dharma. · MONDZOM:

51. Konme Parung, Mondzom's secondborn granddaughter, called Middle Granddaughter in these translations, who will be old enough to make her own way. And Konme Tshyungpa, Mondzom's lastborn (or youngest) granddaughter, here called Youngest Granddaughter.

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Both your daughters are dead? Dead, Grandson. TULARAM: Both of them? MONDZOM: All together, including those by this grandfather here, I had three daughters. One went way down there to Dondar to be someone else's wife. Another to someone else in Mangofragrance ... Well, for me it will be the same-next year ... or this year ... the same as they ... all dead and gone. All of them the same thing. All dead, what can I do? Not even one on either father's side is left. Now, my dharma, oh, my! Now all I ask is that my dharma let me go by way of sleep to death. That trail would be an easy one. Now, though, I survive, and while I'm living, I'll work, and after working, I'll eat. TULARAM:

MONDZOM:

According to the Buddhist beliefs Mondzom knows, the root of her suffering is attachment. This concept takes its most succinct form in the core precept of the Four Noble Truths: that life is suffering, that suffering comes from attachment, that only detachment brings peace, and that the way to peace is to follow the Buddhist path. The historical Gautama Buddha's allegorical life story is illustrative: born into a princely family with all the comforts that wealth, health, and position could offer, he nevertheless witnessed human suffering, decided that worldly pleasures were empty since age and death came to all, and, after several trials, defined the Buddhist pathway to quietude. When Mondzom speaks here, we must understand that the death she seeks is not just an easy one-that is, one in her sleepbut one that would bring her closer to the ending of all lifetimes and rebirths. Most Tamang, although devout Buddhists, do not put too fine a philosophical or theological point on these ideas of suffering, attachment, and detachment. When I interviewed Santu she was a young, healthy, and relatively wealthy woman with a living son and a husband earning money in the Indian army. Her views on the matter were clear, if prosaic: If I've worn as many nice things as possible now, then when I'm an old woman, who might feed me? If I wear them all now, after wearing them now, who will give me clothes to wear when I'm an old woman? That's all that comes to mind. I, well, I'm not so attached to what I wear. Even if I get something nice, I don't wear it. How will it be when I'm an old woman? Who will keep me when I'm an old woman? Now when I'm a young woman, I can earn and wear things. When I'm an old woman, who will give them to me? Now I'd like to set aside some of my earnings so that I could wear things easily when I'm an old woman. If I finish everything off wearing it all now, who will give me things to wear when I'm an old woman? That's what comes to my heart-and-mind.

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As for a house, too, build it grandly and, after building it grandly, what difference how you build it? Whether it happens that you build small like this52 or big, what kind of work is it? If a big wind comes up, it would carry the roof right off.

For the Tamang women telling these life stories, it is notable that everyone has encountered some amount of illness, has encountered some amount of pain in the labor of childbirth or everyday hard work, has been hungry or known of someone who has been hungry. "No matter where you look," said Santu, "all you see is the suffering these Nepalese people find." Suffering in these accounts is a presumed shared reference point; suffering comes first ontologically but not necessarily chronologically. With luck, effort, and awareness, some happiness may follow. Phurko says she found '1ust suffering, you know. They say you have to cry day and night. They say that it will only be a tale of some happiness after you've cried and cried." Those whose lives have been easier search for commonalities in this shared acceptance suffering, if only in the most abstract references to deaths. Those whose lives have been harder do not (or try not to) revel in the retelling of their litanies. Suffering, whether more or less, is the presumed state to which all the speakers refer and to which Mondzom was referring when she said she'd continue to survive, to work, to eat. KSM: Why, Grandmother! It's good to eat. It's good to have clothes to wear. As long as you find things good, you should continue to enjoy them. Why do you let such thoughts plague you, Grandmother? MONDZOM: I can't go roaming around anymore. KSM: That is hard. MONDZOM: Hard. I can't go carry water to my house anymore. They tell me to drink milk then, but there isn't enough for my grandsons and granddaughters; there isn't enough to go around to the others in my family. Besides, I can't even see if the milk is white or black anymore-not that there's any such thing as black milk! But there's not enough to give to others in this family I keep. How can I find enough for myself? In fact, I'd like to give up keeping cattle entirely. I have to feel my way to milk them. I have to feel my way.... If it makes this one particular sound when I'm milking, then I know the milk is splashing on the ground. I only know if the milk lands in the milking pail by the sound it makes. It's hard to milk that way, wouldn't you say? NHANU: She has to eat her corn-on-the-cob sideways now, because of all the teeth she's lost.

52. Indicating the converted upper floor of an animal shed in which David Holmberg and I lived and which was among the more modest domiciles to be found in Stupahill.

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Whenever I churn butter, my arms ache so much that in the evening I can't hang up my clothes. My side aches so much that I can't turn over when I sleep. Ahhh, but milk and butter still taste so sweet to me .... 53 NHANU: You know how it happens, especially at night.... If I sleep this way, on my arm, then soon I can't even lift it up. Oh, oh my! And it tingles even more when you wake up and try to move it! What do you think is going on with my arm? MONDZOM: Nowadays, more and more all the time, it seems that all I want to eat is milk. Meat, well, somehow the desire isn't there anymore. Even those times when I have meat, I don't seem to want it. Oh, when I get it, I'll still eat it ... of course. So now, even though it's a constant source of trouble, I still curry and care for my water buffalo cow. Is this all there is to my dharma? Oh, when will I die? I just keep on in this way, without finding release. If only I could lie down some day, some afternoon, and go quietly down the path of sleep to death. My only thoughts now are that I hope to be given to death while just sitting somewhere, letting my eyes drift closed. [Mter a pause] Now, though, I have to feel my way around, even to put salt and pepper in my food-like this-by feeling around. In the same way, I have to grope around to find the pots I cook in. Always having to feel my way around. Is this my sorrow or isn't it? I can't carry my own water to the house. My knees are wrecked ... NHANU: You, well, that's how it is, but you've never suffered for lack of food. Now, my own mother, on the other hand ... MONDZOM: Oh! You don't say so! Your mother, you say. You know what they used to say long ago. "Some people always say they're poor, but even as they're talking about being so poor, we others just become poorer and poorer in fact!" So you shouldn't talk like that so much. I, well ... oh, well, whatever we say, I'm little more than a corpse now; your mother-she's a corpse now too, maybe even more so than I am. Just the other day, my older brother came here and kept remarking all the time about the way children of the same mother always fight. We are just like children of the same mother, but even so, why should we fight about who's poorer? Even as we argue about who's poorer, we're both becoming corpses. That's all there is to it. Oh, it's true, I don't have to wonder, "What will I eat tomorrow? Tomorrow what will I eat?"54 MONDZOM:

53· This, of course, is the same "sweet" as the "milk-sweet love" about which Nhanu sang. 54· Descriptions of old styles of jewelry are omitted here. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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Fate and valor A local ritual specialist recorded during Nhanu's life history said the future is "written from the beginning on your forehead: 'This is what will happen to you.' What is written has to be played out until it's finished. Written: 'This or that will happen to you.' " This is the Stupahill idea of karma; it is linked to birth and foreordains the distribution of good and bad fortune. The Tamang share this view with many other populations in Nepal. Although my discussion here focuses more on pan-South Asian similarities in the idea of karma, Tamang women's use of this term is somewhat distinctive. Tschirto, for example, telling how her brothers and sister raised her after her father died and her mother, Tikiri, remarried, said, "It's no more than a tale of Father's giving us our karma and Mother's giving us our birth [here also the Nepali loanword, modified to rhyme,jarma]." All the Tamang people of whom I inquired about her meaning were unequivocal: the karma coming from the father referred to marriage. In the colloquial Tamang of the region, karma chal tipameans "marriage can/does occur," as between two appropriately exchanging clans. So Tschirto's expression may reveal something new about Tamang women's perspective on marriage: your mother gives you birth; your father gives you in marriage. 55 Suffering does not just happen ( tajz): it is found (yangjz) or encountered (shepji); it hits or applies itself to you (lag tijz). It is often described, as here by Tikiri, literally using the loanword karma from Nepali: "I had no father, no mother. Crying like that, I suffered, Daughter. 56 No matter where I went. [In Nepali] Wherever you go, your karma precedes you. No matter where I went, there was never enough. However much sorrow there was in my heart-andmind, I couldn't stop and rest. That's how I found ... [in Tamang again] great suffering. 57 Saying to myself, 'When will I die?' I've stayed on. But I didn't ever die; I simply didn't ever die. 'When will I die? I've suffered so much. When will I die?' I said." Or again, "It's never been at all easy for me. When my mother was giving birth to me, I hadn't been given a life of good fortune.5 8 Only sorrow. My fortune wasn't for ease; it was for suffering, for suffering." Although Tamang would agree that suffering begins with birth and ends with death, they are not, as some interpretations of karma might suggest,

55· In a related, but somewhat different vein, Lynn Bennett ( 1983, 174-75, 285) describes Parbatiya women's persistent reference to marriage itself as women's dharma. 56. Referring to me, KSM. 57· Here she does not use the more commonly heard Nepali loanword (derived from Sanskrit) dukka but, rather, the Tibeto-origin, more archaic tschitang, which gives her expression more force. 58. Literally, "I hadn't found pha~" another Sanskritic term, also found in Nepali. Note the opposition to kal, earlier in her narrative. The latter implies a fulfillment of this life's duties and a closure; the former, an opening up toward the fruition of the coming life.

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passive before it. Both the Buddhist injunctions to accept the illusory nature of worldly pleasure and the poetic admonitions of bomsang provide a way to interpret hardship; they do not prevent people from working to make themselves happier. The material comforts, adventure, and love that these women's life histories recount may, like their sorrows, be "written" at their births, but the women do not simply wait for those scripts to be read off. Their life accounts reveal an active attitude toward their individual balance of joy and pain. This active orientation is decidedly self-conscious and selfconstructive. "For me," says Hrisang, "what was it? Was it hardship? Was it ease? It was always a tale of finding enough to eat. I have my valor. I have that much for myself. Working on and on, I'll keep on eating." The valor with which Tamang women work to make their lives better is extraordinary. Each woman's tale records her efforts in painstaking detail. Tikiri, for instance, tells how she turned her brother's gift of a coin into enough land to support an entire family: After buying one anna's 59 worth skein of thread, and with that after weaving a turban, after selling it for five half-rupees, then after leaving one halfrupee with Mother, then after taking the other two rupees, I went to Goldendrink. Going to Goldendrink, I found and carried corn costing one half-rupee for three gallon-measures. I carried that corn at three gallon-measures for one half-rupee. Then, well, in nine days and nights I came back down to my home. I reached my home within nine days!60 Then, after going carrying and bringing grain like that, I loaned out nine gallon-measures in grain loans. Called badiya, this kind ofloan is common among Tamang women, although I had seen no reports of it in the literature. Grain is loaned out with both the principal and the interest payable in grain. It is a form of loan often sought by poorer households when harvests have been too meager to allow them to set aside seed for the coming year. Seed is thus borrowed and the loan repaid in grain, with interest, upon harvest. The same households may prefer to make loans of small surpluses (rather than selling the grain and doing something else with the money) since those loans, when recalled, directly feed the family. Then after collecting on those loans, I went to sell three loads of flour61 in Yembur. Oh, my! It seems I got twenty rupees real money! ... After making it my own dzo-property, then, down below there, I

TIKIRI:

59· A now-defunct coin worth one-sixteenth of a rupee. 6o. All of which is to say that she carried what would be considered a heavy load a long way very quickly. 61. Made from the grain loans she collected. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

6g

bought some land. I bought the unirrigated land my secondborn son is living on for twenty-five rupees. For twenty-five rupees. KSM: Twenty-five rupees?! TIKIRI: Twenty-five rupees! For twenty-five rupees I bought those dry fields, the very dry fields where my secondborn son is living today. It takes two ox-team days to work those dry fields for planting the corn. Those twenty-five rupees ... first the five half-rupees, no ... first, I bought the one-anna skein of thread. Buying that, then, selling the turban for five half-rupees, now today, to plant corn, it takes two ox-team days to plow the land I bought for twenty-five rupees. Now that's my secondborn son's. In 1977, that land, with its yield of approximately twenty loads of corn annually, would have been worth about 5,000 rupees. Without accurate cadastral surveys, and with such great variation in soil, exposure, water, and other factors contributing to productivity, land is typically measured in one or more of three ways: by the amount ofwork (in ox-team days) required to prepare it for corn planting, by the amount of seed required to plant it, or by the yields. However the land she bought is measured, Tikiri clearly did well by her family. Among the tales that gave me the most difficulty, not to translate, but to interpret, were these stories of the Tamang women's valor. They describe coin by coin, grain by grain, chick by chick, cow by calf exactly how each woman had helped to build up her fortunes and, in Tasyi's words, "cut down on my hardship." It was, at first, boring to me to hear these accounts, full of meticulous attention to market prices, interest rates, and trading values over many years; not so for the women themselves. They prized these accounts of strength and accumulation. All the women were adamant that these were important records of a woman's life; I had to include them, they said, and I have. A time for song, a time for dance

Are any of your girlhood friends left now, Grandmother? Who knows? Even recently, my friend-the senior wife of that rich man in Gunsa-was still around. But then I went to her memorial death feast the other day .... When I was there, some of my other friends showed up, too .... TULARAM: How many friends did you go about with in those days, Grandmother? MONDZOM: Who keeps track of how many there were in your own village?! TULARAM: Were there many of you then who went around together, with you? MONDZOM: With me, lots of us went around together all the time! Only just the other day I lost my friend, the rich one's wife .... TULARAM: Were they all from Sleepyflats, too? TULARAM:

MONDZOM:

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NHANU: Sleepyflats-they were all from Sleepyflats. Mhamba-clanswomen, Dimdung-clanswomen ... You know, below the trail, down there where the Sacred Songsingers62 live, there in Pruma Gyabki .... She has a friend there, too-the old man who lives there-his younger sister? MONDZOM: The Songsinger's secondborn sister. TULARAM: In those days, did you go to festivals the same way people do now, going one day and coming back the next, or did you stay two days? Or maybe three days? MONDZOM: We would stay at festivals two days. KSM: In those days, what kinds of tokens would you trade with the young men? MONDZOM: Combs and hairbands, the same as now. And some basketry, I don't know ... MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: Combs and hairbands? What kind ofhairbands? NHANU: Hairbands woven from the little bits of thread left on the loom after a syama-skirt was woven. MONDZOM: And we used to weave narrow woolen strips called gyalep for hairbands too. MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: Did you sing "Sai-Sai Khola"63 the same as we do now? TULARAM: Songs-what kinds of songs did you sing then?

Young people go to festivals primarily to sing. When young men and women court, they engage in night-long competitive songfests. Marriages and trysts are arranged as elaborate poetic repartee is sung back and forth. Early in the evening, young men parade displaying the tokens they've made-bamboo boxes coveted by women for storing personal valuables and long bamboo combs used by women as beaters in their upright looms. The young women show off their textile crafts. In 1975, no one except the very youngest and most inexperienced girls wove the narrow straps that used to be young women's stock-in-trade at such song festivals. All the rest wove finely decorated turbans, and the most modern of young Tamang women crocheted intricate white sashes. By the end of the night of singing, the young men's boxes and combs have been secreted inside the robes and satchels of the best women singers, while the women's textiles have come to hang like trophies from the umbrellas of successful male singers. [Loudly-laughing] In those times ... slowly ... we sang properly ... slowly.

MONDZOM:

62. Among the keepers of local Tamang tradition were the sye bombo. They were specialists in song who could lead groups of singers throughout entire nights of singing without repeating a verse. 63. See Sukumaya's chapter for an example of "Sai Khola" singing. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

71

Please, Grandmother, sing one now, just once ... My voice is all gnarled and withered. [Everyone laughs.] I don't have any teeth. I don't have any hair. No teeth, no voice! That being the case, how can I sing? In those days, though, they always seemed to be singing: KSM:

MONDZOM:

Mo! Mi! Will I find ... Hoi!

My strength, my voice, isn't what it used to be! At that time, though, we'd walk around on all the small hills, singing: Le! Le! Hoi! Le! Le! Hoi!

Now, however, I don't have anything that you could call a singing voice left! I didn't go around singing the "Soi! Soi!" shaman's pilgrimage song much myself. We used to amuse ourselves singing wherever we went, wherever we went, wherever there was a resting place, there we'd sing: Le! Le! Hoi! Le! Le! Hoi!

Then the young men would sing verses like: "We'll cradle you in our arms lovingly, anything to please you ... " And then we'd all dance in step together, mmmmmm ... KSM: Long ago, what songs did you sing? How did they go? NHANU: Long ago, they weren't the same as the ones they call "Sai Khola" these days. MONDZOM: That song only came into being recently. Long ago, well, we didn't sing "Sai Khola." In those times, we sang the way you're supposed to-slowly ... with verses like "Cradled in my arms lovingly, I'll carry you cradled in my arms." Or, sometimes we sang songs like ''Wara Wara Hwai." The leaves of the juniper growing by the spring are all flat, matted and palmate. The young men's hair growing out matted is cut to look just like the juniper leaves. Why does that man with the juniper hair carry gifts of a special wood? Oh! To call on the Golden Queen!64

64. She sang only a fragment; neither she nor anyone else I consulted could remember any more of this long-ago courtship song.

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And singing like that, we all danced in step, and, dancing, songs came forth! Well, in the times of "Wara Wara" songs, how we danced! NHANU: Once I went with my fathers 65 to see the way they sang songs at the Red Powder Festival. My father and his lastborn brother bundled combs up in a scarf and went off, clutching those bundles, to sing songs. I said to my father, "Can't I have a little money?" "Be quiet and sit still. Don't say such things to your father. We are going to sing songs with the young women," my lastborn uncle said to me. TULARAM: What did you take along as snacks in those days? MONDZOM: The same as today-boiled dumplings.66 TULARAM: Wheat dumplings? MONDZOM: When wheat was available, we took wheat dumplings. When millet was available, we took millet dumplings. Whatever there was, that's what we took along with us. TULARAM: If you went to see a festival for two days, did you take your own foodstuffs and actually cook, or did you only take precooked snacks along? MONDZOM: No, we took rice along to cook. TULARAM: Rice. MONDZOM: We'd buy cheap clay pots there, cook, and eat. Sometimes, like that, we'd all get diarrhea-who knows, maybe it was from the dumplings? Whatever anyone had brought, that's what we'd all eat. Whatever we found along the way, too, we'd eat. In those days, you could get a full pint-measure of beaten rice for six paisa-look what it is now!67 MIDDLE GRANDDAUGHTER: What could you get for one anna? MONDZOM: For one anna, oh! you could say, "Let's go, my friends! Let's go buy a syama-skirt and wear it!" NHANU: You could take one anna out of your pocket and with that one anna-there!-you could buy a whole skein of silk thread. You knew it was silk because of the way a thread would pucker up when you burnt a little to test it-just like the way your mouth puckers up when you eat timur. 68

65. She probably doesn't include her own father (with whom she would have been too shy to go off singing), but rather any number of older men from her own lineage or clan who were her classificatory fathers (and affectionate protectors). 66. Actually, the most common snacks taken along to festivals are popped corn, other roasted grains, fried breads, and distilled raksi-whiskey. Dumplings are today, and probably were then, a somewhat special snack food. 67. A paisa is a cent, or one-hundredth of a rupee, the primary unit of Nepali money. At the old prices Mondzom has cited, a gallon-measure of beaten rice-called in Nepali chiura (sometimes also called flattened, pounded, or parched rice )-would have cost one half-rupee; in the late 1970s that same measure cost six or seven rupees. 68. Timur is a distinctive peppery spice-xanthoxylum, or true Szechuan pepper-that is popular in the hills of Nepal.

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73

KSM: Did Little Headman's Father69 bring you to be his wife by doing a wedding ceremony, or by courting you with songs?70 MONDZOM: What would a twelve-year-old know about courtship songs? How could I have gone to marriage by way of song then? KSM: How old were you when you first started going to festivals? MONDZOM: To festivals? KSM: To your very first festival ... NHANU: As a child? A child's first festival? Why my lastborn daughter follows me even now whenever she pleases. But she won't remember later. MONDZOM: Oh, we went up to Kissmeadow to the festival there before we even wore a woman's syama-skirt! So how old would we have been then? On the way to herding our cattle, the same as kids do today, we would slip off to go see the festivals.

Traditionally, girls were given their first syama-skirt when they were seven. Some girls refused to wear it regularly until they were in their mid- or even late teens. In the 1970s, these syama-skirts were worn by all women and woven by most. Beginning in the early 198os, local textile merchants began to inflate the price of thread while selling cloth at or below cost. Their aim was to dismantle the market in thread (which they found less profitable) in favor of that in woven cloth. At the same time, agricultural development efforts were introducing new crops, most notably wheat; the cultivation of these new crops cut substantially into what had previously been the slack farmwork period, which is when most women wove. Together, these forces successfully drove women away from weaving and toward commercial cloth. By 1993, almost no women in the immediate region wove or wore the traditional syama-skirt. When I did my original research between 1975 and 1977, these syama-skirts were ubiquitous and weaving was so integral to a woman's identity that, if you had asked me then, I could never have anticipated that Stupahill women would stop weaving and wearing their own cloth so quickly. Through my research on weaving, I knew that the syama-skirt designs I saw the women wearing in the mid-1970s had changed considerably as new dyes had come into the region. The women also had ceased spinning their own thread-both these changes had happened within living memory. I was sure that many of the reasons the women wove as much as they did were historically rooted as much in their poverty and their exclusion from the market as in tradition. Weaving was time-consuming and demanding work: I'd estimated that it took a typical woman four to six months, depending on the size of her family, to fulfill their annual cloth needs. As agricultural production 6g. A polite way to refer to Mondzom's husband: it is generally considered improper to address adults by their personal names. Instead, they are referred to obliquely, as "Father-of-soand-so." 70. So that they eloped together after a song festival-probably the most common form of marriage among the Tamang in this region today.

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intensified and the women-or, often, their sons-began to penetrate the wage economy, the merchants' manipulation of thread and cloth pricing was only a part of the transformations overtaking their lives. I knew, too, from my classroom training in anthropology to be chary of the term tradition for its capacity to mask other forces. Still, the abandonment of weaving was a striking lesson in culture change. As much as I knew that change was intrinsic to human life, and as much as I had ranted, in classrooms, against the anthropologist's tendency to portray traditional peoples as more fixed than ourselves, I was shocked to witness such profound change take place so rapidly. It destabilized many of my assertions about what Tamang is, and qualified Tamang-ness both temporally and geographically. When I write, for example, that Tamang young people marry their cross cousins, or that they sing and court at night-long festivals, or that there are song specialists who preserve vast reservoirs of Tamang song I wonder: Do they still sing at festivals?7I The nearby ones, you mean ... Sure-nearby ... KSM: And the far away ones, too? MONDZOM: The distant ones, too. The festivals far away, well, like Cedarforest Festival, and Red Powder Festival ... But then, myself, I stayed in the mountains a lot during my own childhood. There, then, men would come to dig up that herbal tuber that is said to destroy the very fruit on the trees. There we also had those things, what do you call them today ... mouth harps? Where did those music makers come from? High up on the cliffs, they cut fine bamboo strips. Carefully, peeling the strips off carefully-it was a difficult task. But then, if you put it between your teeth just right, it gave out music enough! TULARAM: You made mouth harps out of bamboo? MONDZOM: From the strips peeled from fine high-altitude bamboo. TULARAM: They work made from bamboo too?72 MONDZOM: Sure they work. TULARAM:

MONDZOM:

71. As I was making the final revisions on this chapter, I received an e-mail message from Suryaman Tamang, transmitted though Bhim Tamang, who owns and operates a printing press in Kathmandu. I don't know exactly how this message was produced, since it came to me in Nepali in Roman script: Yas paali, Buddhajayanti ko din I2 baje Trishuli Hospital ma hamro mring bombo Setar Tamang ko nidhan ( mrityu) bhayo. Yo thulo Tamang samaaj ko puraano geet haruko itihaasik maanis gumayeko chha. Aaja waha ko gral bhai raheko chha. (This time/year, at 12 o'clock

on the day of Buddha's birth, in the Trisuli Hospital, our woman shaman, Setar Tamang, passed away. A person with the history of the old songs of this our whole Tamang society has gone away. Today her memorial death feast took place.) I share Suryaman's sense ofloss at the death of Setar-whose songs and singing enrich this book-and of foreboding at the probable concomitant loss of something desirably and centrally Tamang. 72. The mouth harps common in the 1970s were generally made of iron. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

75

Then you take another strip of that bamboo and work it nicely to make a handle so that the harp has something to hang from. You can't use the whole bamboo, just the outside strips. On one side, the tongue of the harp sticks out, the tongue sticks out from between another piece that has been split, but not severed. Those who knew how to could harmonize with each other's music. One half of the group would play something and the other half would harmonize by singing. Those who really knew how to play the harp could make such beautiful music. TULARAM: How many calendar-years did you stay in the herding station, Grandmother? MONDZOM: Mter I went to live in someone else's place, you mean? How long? How long? Who knows? Who can tell? I know that I stayed there a lot. Cows whose calves had died wouldn't let themselves be milked by any hand but mine, so I stayed there a lot. A great many years ... so many years, about two of them with difficulty, that I stayed in the herding station. We would come down to take a look around from those hills over there, from above that Natanghar Hill over there and from above ]yabuta Hill, at the times when we brought the herds down the mountainsides somewhat. Looking down at the villages from up over there across the valley, we could see that the sun always shines in the month of Bhadau. And then, from the peak ofjyabuta Hill across the valley, on a clear day, we could see the sun rise-right there .... [Pointing] And then, well, we'd see the crowds of women, wrapped in guniya-overcloths and jhuna -overcloths, harvesting corn in the field-all this we could see from afar. ... We could see all the way down to the bottom of the village, to the fields by the river. She looked, and so did we all, down into the valley where groups of people were working in the fields. Many times, following people's gaze or their words, I experienced a kind of time travel back through their thoughts into their earlier lives. Here, specifically, Mondzom was recalling two kinds of traditional cloth worn wrapped over the basic clothing. Most of the time they were folded and wrapped around the waist, but they could be opened up and worn as a shawl if the weather turned cooler. Both seemed to be more often purchased than woven in the village at the time of this research. Guniya were considered more modern, typically bright colored and often floral in design; jhuna were the much older fashion, a cotton red-dotted swiss only worn regularly by older women in 1977, but still important in marriage ritual exchanges. You could see what was going on in the villages? MONDZOM: Yes, we could see everyone in the village go off to their fields to work. KSM:

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NHANU: [To KSM] You know, if you took this tape recorder to the festivals, people would sing the "Sai-Sai Khola" song as they danced. If you took this tape recorder, it would still spin around even there, wouldn't it? KSM: You wouldn't be able to hear well enough to understand anything, what with all the noise everyone makes at festivals!73 MONDZOM: Even if you couldn't hear to understand there, this machine would still work-it would still spin around there, wouldn't it? TULARAM: During the time that you spent in the mountain herding station, was it good, Grandmother? How much ease did you find there? MONDZOM: There was hardship enough when it rained! If it didn't rain, then I'd go following ... following the cattle. I'd carry my woven bamboo rain cape over my shoulder, with my scythe and tumpline, and herd and herd and herd and herd and herd. Thunder would crash all around me. In the mornings, I broke branches off the trees and left the leaves as fodder, there, where I'd hobbled my cattle. TULARAM: Before your wedding was done, in your childhood, had you hoped to stay in your own village always? Or were you of a mind to go to someplace farther away, where things might be better for you for a change? MONDZOM: I never had the chance to get around much: they'd call you a whore if you sought too much. For the same reason, I never got to go around at festivals very much either. Lo! What might have happened?! My family didn't give very careful thought to where they were sending me in marriage. Now I sit wondering when I will die. Even, then, as I went about herding my cattle, I cried ... TULARAM: You mean, then, before your wedding was done, too? MONDZOM: Yes. When someone else74 planned to give me to a husband, saying, in such a careless way, "Take her away!"-or so they seemed to have said-I wandered about in the corners of the terraced fields, crying in the shelter of one terrace wall after another. NHANU: While they were talking about giving me to a husband, my father's lastborn brother came staggering up, drunk on beer. MONDZOM: I was like a fugitive bird, fleeing from the shelter of one terrace

73· In the 1970s I was reluctant to encourage people to use my tape recorder for such pleasurable recordings since I was dependent upon the store of batteries I'd brought from the United States. In subsequent trips to the region, when I had added solar recharging batteries to my field equipment, I could record some of the all-night songfests and even loan the recorder out for others to record and listen to their own singing. This was undoubtedly the most popular use to which any of my field equipment was put, even more desirable in most people's eyes than using a lantern or having a photograph taken. 74· It is interesting that Mondzom has chosen to refer to her own parents as someone else, since that term usually referred to one's husband and his parents and underscored their nonconnection to oneself. MONDZOM: NARRATING A LIFE, FRAMING A LIFE

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wall to the next, with my father and mother constantly chasing after me ... after I'd said, "I'm not going to someone else's house!"75 Life in the balance

The central tension in these Tamang women's life accounts is between suf~ fering and ease. ''Whether in hardship or in comfort," said Tschirto, "each person has to pass the time of their own life." Lives and suffering are represented so that, ultimately, the drama is one of narrative suspension, of not knowing. "I've cut down on our hardship, Daughter-in-law,"76 said Tasyi. Saying, "''ll make my own happiness," even now, [hardship] is following me closely. Now, though, what? Whatever will become of my karma, Daughter-in-law? Ah, in my own heart-and-mind, that's what I've been aiming for, but what had karma in store for me? How will it be? ... Now, what, Daughter-in-law? I forget. I've told how I've known this much hardship. This much comfort. Now I don't know. Each account declares a net balance between dukka and sukha in a reading of the life ledger that is supposed to be have been written for each. But the tellings also bespeak a subtext in which these valuations are provisional and only partially knowable. "Now," said Nhanu, "sometimes it seems they were good times, and sometimes they seem to have been hard. Sometimes, when I remember how things were, it all makes sense .... Other times-oh! the things that come to mind! Sometimes nothing comes to mind; sometimes so much comes to mind!" Making final sense of the· scales of Tamang life eludes not only us as listeners-translators-readers, but apparently also the tellers; it is the central topic being negotiated in all these life stories. MONDZOM: There is no more to my story. You all go away and leave me alone now. The workers have come to husk my corn now.

75· In the sections omitted here, Mondzom and Nhanu both explain how their marriages were negotiated. Mondzom describes at great length some status irregularities between herself and her new in-laws and tells how they were resolved. 76. Meaning me, KSM, because I am married to DHH, who had come to be reckoned a son of one of her husband's classificatory brothers.

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III NHANU Parsing a Life, Naming What Matters Word had come to me: "Go see to your mother!" That was the word being passed around, it seems. At the time I heard the news-oh , my!-I had gone to the spring, saying I would wash some wool. Saying I would wash some clothes, I had gone to the spring. Oh, I thought, only after I've finished washing some clothes will I go. This one time, whatever, whatever has happened, let it be! That's what I thought to myself for a moment, and so I dawdled and stayed there by the spring for a moment. Then, suddenlyMother! Oh! Mother! Crying out "Mother!" after coming back up from the spring, I ran off to her! Nhanu, Stupahill, 1977

Nhanu is a substantial looking, outspoken woman who laughs easily. She is quick to make jokes and is seldom silent. She is outgoing and cheerful and has a reputation for outbursts, ofjoviality as well as anger. She does not affect flashy clothes. Her heartiness gives her the appearance of great strength, both physical and social. In spite of this, she often worries about her health and is visibly distressed in some social situations. Overall, though, Nhanu gives the impression of a woman who knows what she wants and has largely taken the matter of her own life in hand. She says she feels her age (54 at the time), although she does not show it. She complains about the noise and confusion in her house. Nhanu is the middle mother: she is the wife of the secondborn grandson of Stupahill's Rich Grandfather and the mother of that middle son's children. She and her husband have one of Stupahill's more voluble marriages, frequently making jocular remarks about one another. In particular, Nhanu likes to emphasize that her husband is younger than she is, thereby implying that he is her junior in other respects as well. Some ofNhanu's confidence undoubtedly comes from her own birth family and situation. She was the eldest and only daughter in her family in Warmwaters, followed by eight younger brothers. Tales of caring for these brothers and of the many adventures she had with them on trading expedi-

tions or going to festivals dominate her narrative, along with stories about her own mother. Nhanu's mother was Rich Grandfather's daughter, which makes Nhanu his own granddaughter, and Nhanu's husband her first cousin. Raised with so many younger brothers and then married to her own mother's father's grandson, Nhanu has been surrounded by supportive kin throughout her life. All Tamang marry someone they call the child of either their mother's brother or their father's sister's son. Some marry their actual first cousin (as Nhanu did), some a more distant cousin, and some marry a person who is called cousin even though the connection is so distant that no one really remembers it. This is what anthropologists term cross-cousin marriage: it involves marriage between the children of opposite sex siblings, that is, a brother's child with a sister's child (who are cross cousins), but not a brother's child with another brother's child, or the children of two sisters (who are parallel cousins).l This form of marriage is very common throughout the world. Tamang do not consider cross-cousin marriage to be incest; they do consider parallel cousin marriage to be incestuous and abhorrent. Tamang cross-cousin marriage does not appear to have the kind of deleterious effect that you may imagine. For that to happen, two things would have to be truer than they apparently are. First, the gene pool recirculated by cross-cousin marriage would have to be more perfectly bounded than is the case among Stupahill Tamang, since they also permit marriage with distant and unknown people as long as they cannot be reckoned as lineal kin or parallel cousins. Second, there would have to be clearly deleterious genes in the pool that had not been eliminated by selective forces. Some might even argue that this level of "inbreeding" ultimately strengthens populations by weeding out weaker traits (as they get expressed and eliminated through some degree of inbreeding) at the same time as importing new traits (through some degree of outbreeding). Certainly, I saw nothing degenerate, either physically or mentally, about this community of vigorous, hardworking, resourceful, and creative people. The easy familiarity between Nhanu and her cross-cousin husband was particularly striking; it taught me that an arranged marriage does not mean an unhappy one. Theirs was one of the most companionate marriages I have encountered anywhere. Nhanu's relationship with Mondzom-who was effectively her mother-in-law-was instructive, too. It was close, with overt shows of affection for the elder woman more common than those of submission to her authority.

1. The further complexities of cross-cousin marriage will be explored in other chapters. It should be remembered that the requirement to marry a cross cousin may mean either a literal cousin or a classificatory cousin (the child of the clanbrother of your mother's clansister, for example).

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The main trail through the village goes right by Nhanu's house and divides to the west, toward the houses of her own mother and her brothers, across the Old Landslide that separated Stupahill from Warmwaters. Her porch was frequently a resting place for those who passed through. This access to people quite suited Nhanu. She knew, at any given moment in the day, exactly where most of the people in the village were, what they were doing, with whom, and, probably, why. She liked to keep track of goings-on throughout the village and would swap information with anyone who had anything to add. As Mondzom had, Nhanu told her story sitting on the veranda of her house, where she lived with her husband, their two unmarried children, and their two married sons and their wives and children. At the beginning of our conversation, only Nhanu, Tularam, and I were present. Tularam is from her natal village and clan, which is what she considers me to be, too, so the initial audience for her story was familiar and intimate. Later, we were joined by a couple of older men who had been passing. One of these men was a Lambu, a religious specialist or priest with responsibility for propitiating the divinities of the earth through sacrificial rituals. Although older than the rest of us, and a respected elder in the village, he, too, was of Nhanu's own clan,2 and hence was Elder Brother to all of us. As the afternoon wore on, others from Nhanu's family began to return home for their midafternoon snack. Beloved's-Wife, the relatively new bride of Nhanu's secondborn son, by whose name she is known, came back to deposit the load of fodder she'd cut. Then Arrowforce, Nhanu's firstborn son, came home, bringing his firstborn daughter, Dusky. Finally, Arrowforce's wife, Mhojyo-or Dusky's Mother, as she is more commonly known-arrived with her then-lastborn daughter as well as Nhanu's lastborn son and daughter (see fig. s). Present on her porch for Nhanu's account were: Nhanu: The wife of the secondborn or middle brother, step-granddaughter of the surviving grandmother-in-law (Mondzom) KSM: Kathryn S. March, courtesy younger clansister to Nhanu Tularam: Nhanu's younger clanbrother Arrowforce: Nhanu's firstborn son Beloved's-Wife: the wife of Nhanu's secondborn son (whose name is Beloved) The Lambu: The village priest responsible to the earth divinities and a classificatory elder brother to Nhanu, Tularam, and me Mhojyo: Nhanu's firstborn son's wife, mother of Dusky Dusky: Nhanu's firstborn grandchild Other grandchildren and passersby

2.

Tamang woman do not assume their husband's clan identity when they marry.

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81

:.--(~l~b~~ct;~;))lllllll Nhanu0=.6 I

• .6 Tularam

II I

e 0=.6 0=.6 0 living woman edeadwoman ~living man

,6 /\/\/\/\/\/\/\

II

.

12

I

0 .6 Beloved 0=.6 wife 1 ,2,3 birth order =marriage

Fig. 5· Orienting Nhanu and her audience

Life is in the details Nhanu's full narrative began with an extended discussion of flood and disease in her parents' herding station. It seems that she and her younger brother had been living with the herd of four water buffalo and eleven cattle when a great flood washed everything away; two buffalo and three cows, along with all the stored butter and all the dairying equipment, were never recovered. When their mother came to look for them, Nhanu said, "Our own cows, well, just like that! they were gone. Mter crying out in dismay, 'Papa!' 3 I mean we two siblings put our arms around each other and clung to one another." Their mother was at first concerned about her own children and her brother's son, who had been on the mountain in another herding station. According to Nhanu, "She came running down, saying, 'Oh! My nephew has been carried away by the river! ... Did the stream carry our nephew off from the other bank?'" Nhanu said she replied, "[Loudly] 'What are you worried about your nephew for?' I cried! 'Our own herding station is completely gone, carried away! Our cows are gone! Buffalo, too! Oh, Mother!' I cried to her! [Laughing at the memory] Then Mother cried even more." "Then, another time," described Nhanu, still at the beginning of her story, "one year before I arrived here in marriage, that year we had even more trouble. In Wild Shaman's Hole, we two phepe 4 had gone to stay in the herd3· The two most common cries of shock, fear, or even disbelief among Tamang are "Apa-i!" and "Ama-i!" These are literally translatable as "Papa!" and "Mama!" In many ways, however, they function as simpler, less denotative exclamations of surprise, pain, or dismay, without specific reference to parents. 4· Within what we would think of as the immediate or nuclear family, Tamang reckon two intimate overlapping families or, as they are often called, family circles: ( 1) the mMme, which is the mother and her children; and (2) the phepe, the father and his children. Here, the term phepe is the collective noun through which Nhanu identifies herself and her father. (This is discussed in more detail in later chapters.)

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ing station. We had taken twelve cows with us. One day, one cow died, shitring out her intestines. The next day, another one died. The day after that, another one died. And so it went on until three days later, to the very day, not even one of our twelve cows was left. Only one old bull survived the epidemic. Mter all that happened," she said, "I had no desire to go and stay inside my own fathers' birthhome.Just like that, they had all died, just like that. Even after doing my wedding, even after coming down here, what? What happened? How was it? Only a lot of sorrow and suffering! A lot!" Nhanu's account is, at its most abstract level, organized like all the other accounts I heard: that is, in terms of hardship and sorrow, happiness and comfort. Unlike Mondzom, who announces her story repeatedly and explicitly as one of comfort, however, Nhanu says hers is one of sorrow and suffering. There are two different points at stake here: the first, which I hope the consideration of Mondzom's life history has made clear, is that Tamang life stories all take form within this general framework of suffering versus comfort. The second, to which I now turn, is an appreciation of the detailed stuff from which Tamang constructions of suffering or comfort are made. At one level, of course, in these stories, you are invited into the pan-human world we share with Mondzom, Nhanu, and all the others. Like you and me, they have suffered and they have danced. But the specific people, the exact forces, the physical minutiae of their metaphysical measurement oflife are different. Nhanu's account begins by telling us how she and her mother suffered from the loss of their animals. Nhanu was pained so deeply by their deaths that she didn't even want to go home again. Her mother allegedly wept harder at the thought of losing all her cattle than at the possible loss of her nephew. This is not because they empathize with the plight of dumb beasts more than that of nephews; rather, it is because animals in many ways constitute a Tamang woman's special wealth. Tamang men inherit land and houses from their parents while women are given moveable goods-water jugs, cauldrons, pots, jewelry, grain, money, and, above all, animals. To lose those animals was a very specific assault on a woman's security. Because personal narratives have more potential to follow the wanderings of another person's thoughts than do census data or questionnaire responses, they have long stood as a humanistic complement, if not corrective, to other anthropological work. As readers, we like life histories because they are stories told to us by someone else about their own experiences. We read these tales most eagerly for the windows onto the meaning(s) of life they offer. They are also full of detail: cows, goats, water buffalo, chickens, plows, sickles, hoes, illnesses, earrings, nose ornaments, necklaces, marriages, divorces, trysts, births, deaths, sisters, fathers, cousins, children, grandchildren, friends, drinking bowls, plates, pots, beer jugs, looms, skirts, overcloth shawls, turbans, shrouds, shamans, lamas, singers, courtship songs, mourning songs, religious songs, festivals, dancing, haircombs, carrying baskets, tumplines, water jugs, butter churns, grain pounders, millet, rice, lentils, NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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beans, salt, coins, prices, markets, bargains, cheats, travels, trails .... It is to the understanding of more of those details that I now turn.

Trade

The portions of Nhanu's account that I will explore began with a question from Tularam about trading in Tibet. In many ways, Nepal came into existence out of the trade among Tibet, China, and India. Kathmandu's markets, goldsmiths and silversmiths, merchants, and lending houses all trafficked in a lively international trade, primarily in profitable luxuries. Communities like Stupahill literally fed this trade through their agricultural energies. When the people of Stupahill themselves engaged in trade with Tibet, it was primarily to get salt for their rice. There is no salt in the mid-hills of Nepal and few food grains on the Tibetan plateau, so the trade was active, profitable, and necessary on both sides of the border. Subsidiary trades in butter, dried meat and fish, basketry, spices, cloth, dyestuffs, medicinals, religious artifacts, and jewelry were also common. Customs duties, as well as nation-defining trade monopolies on gold and coinage, were a major source of income for the Nepali government in Kathmandu. The people ofStupahill, however, in return for their work in a national gunpowder factory, were allowed by the government to make a certain number of trips to trade for salt in Tibet without having to pay the usual customs duties. Households in Stupahill used to send family members to trade food grains and other products for salt in Tibetan border towns at least once a year. People from Stupahill often avoided the main trail along the Trisuli River bottom, even though it was better maintained and a prominent national thoroughfare. Instead they went along the more precipitous route that clung to the sides of the valley. In their judgment, the topography of the lower trail was flawed; it became impassable with the monsoon rains and it did not transit every Tamang village and hamlet en route. Young women and men from Stupahill put their vigor to good use carrying the heavy loads of grain and salt. They might carry loads for their own households or for someone else. The ratio of capital and labor to profit varied, but in any case, it was an opportunity for at least some personal profit as well as great adventure. And-something else. 5 Have you ever gone to Kyirong? NHANU: To Kyirong? Only after I arrived here in marriage did I ever go. Mter I came down here, three calendar-years after the one when I really

TULARAM:

5· Nhanu's account began, as we have already glimpsed, with a long discussion of her early life in her family's herding station, omitted here.

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began living here, I went. We had to wait in Kyirong for five days before we found anyone who would trade for salt. KSM: Did you go in order to build up your own dzo-property or as part of the work that you did for your husband's house? NHANU: Well, no, not exactly.... I had taken a mind to go along the upper trails to Kyirong, so, saying, ''I'm going, too," I followed my mother into Tibet. But when we reached Kyirong, there wasn't any salt to be found. So, we had to stay there waiting for five days. Mter waiting five days, then on the fifth day that we were there, it seems that they made a mistake measuring out the salt we traded for. They made a mistake measuring. I was given an entire gallon-measure of salt more than I should have been. My secondborn brother-now Mangoday's Father-and I, we two siblings, came back with the mistaken additional gallon-measure of salt. "Give the mistaken extra gallon-measure of salt to Elder Sister," said my secondborn brother, now Mangoday's Father. So saying, then, they gave me my gallon-measur~ full of salt. Then, later, when we had gone to Kathmandu in order to sell a little of that salt ... my secondborn brother walked around without saying a word. He just walked around in a daze, impressed by all there was to see in the city. "For one anna-coin you can get fried bread to eat," my father's younger brother said. "This much bread for only one anna-coin." So we ate one anna-coin's worth of bread. "Elder Sister! More!" said my younger brother, "May I have more bread to eat?" I got more for him and then, after eating that, we came back up to the village. You could get one and a half rupees for a gallon-measure of salt then! As I listened to Nhanu's story, my mind drifted to old pictures of the Kathmandu valley, the trail through Trisuli Bazaar and the Tibetan market towns like Kyirong. Without motor traffic, the towns still bustled with activityshops, shopkeepers, shoppers, peasants with baskets full of farm produce, animals and birds, traders from both north and south carrying all manner of commodities and oddities, pilgrims and priests, lamas, shamans, temples and monasteries. These places were dusty and direct, with all the work of life undertaken out in the open, from drying grains to defecation. The bread that Nhanu bought her brother would have been fried in great woks blackened by years of use. No doubt, Trisuli and Kathmandu, and surely Kyirong too, have changed greatly since the time Nhanu describes. Distances that it took her many days to cross, trucks and buses traverse in one day, carrying goods in quantities inconceivable in times when everything moved on people's backs. Still, I am struck by the sense of familiarity in her telling.

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Sisters and brothers I am moved, too, by the obvious affection between Nhanu and her brothers. Over and over, she tells about doing this or that with one or another of her eight younger brothers-of going here, or seeing that, or carrying things from the northern reaches of the Stupahill region to Kathmandu. Nhanu's account of the good times and good profit she found with her brothers is revealing of just how deep and enduring Tamang women's ties with their brothers are, both emotionally and economically. Long after parents relinquish familial authority or die, a brother's love can have great consequences for women. Brothers inherit the family farm and can extend material comfort to orphaned, divorced, widowed, or abandoned sisters. Tschirto describes the death of her father and three siblings: "then right after all that dying, Mother, too, left me behind.6 Father died! I was an orphan, and [in Nepali] orphan, [in Tamang again] even more so, I was made truly [in Nepali] an orphan." Mter this abandonment, she was raised by her elder sister and brothers: "Elder sister and elder brothers were my father and mother. ... What comfort I knew was from the tale of my elder brothers' caring for me." Sisters and brothers have a very special relationship among Tamang. Tamang women have lifelong rights and obligations in their lineage; they do not change clan affiliation after marriage. 7 Clansisters have personal and ritual obligations to each other, to their brothers, and to their siblings' children throughout their lives. They levy special contributions of money, grain, butter, and beer or liquor for the exchanges that mark the major life cycle events of their siblings, nieces, and nephews-first rice-eating, first haircutting, marriage, and death. Above all, because Tamang practice cross-cousin marriage, a sister can expect her children to marry her brother's children. This means that brothers and sisters become parents-in-law to each other's children. The continuing identification between sisters and brothers is very strong, whether based in full siblinghood or extended clan membership. Although Tamang women are named in many ways-by their given birth names, by nicknames, and by maternal or wifely teknonyms-they themselves are quickest to identify their clan and lineage affiliations. Thus, although a woman may be called This One's Mother, or That One's Wife, she will first and foremost identify herself as a daughter and sister in her own clan lineage. This identification shows how meaningful to her are the experiences of childhood and early adult-

6. That is, she remarried. 7· See, for example, Margery Wolf's ( 1972) work on Taiwanese women. Patrilineal societies vary greatly in the extent to which women-as daughters and sisters-continue to play important roles in their natal patrilines. See also Holmberg (1983) and March ( 1979).

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hood in her own natal family, working for her own future, building up her own personal relations and her own wealth. You carried stuff from Kyirong all the way to Kathmandu just to sell? Yes. For just three half-rupee coins! Even at that, I had to think carefully, "What shall I do with my money? What shall I do with my three half-rupee coins?" So saying, I bought one medium-sized bronze drinking bowl. 8 From my three half-rupee coins, I had taken home a drinking bowl. I bought one bronze drinking bowl. Taking that drinking bowl home with me, on the trail, we two siblings, we drank one anna-coin's worth of-you know, right there at Queenspause on the pass from Kathmandu-we bought one anna-coin's worth of beer, but we couldn't even drink it all, just we two siblings, so we gave some to Father's Younger Brother. All I took back home was that one-and-a-half-rupee drinking bowlnothing else. We two siblings, well ... in that way from the three gallonmeasures of salt that he carried, he got nine half-rupee coins. The gallonmeasureful that I carried got me three half-rupee coins. [She chuckles.] Then, too, we had also carried three gallon-measures of corn to sell. We sold them for five half-rupee coins. That was the sum total of everything we had taken to sell, the time we two siblings went to Kathmandu. KSM: To Kathmandu ... NHANU: In Kathmandu, after selling that much and coming back up home, I just put that bronze drinking bowl in my father and mother's house and left it there .... Then, in the month of Baisakh much later, when my brothers were dividing the joint household and its property to set up their own households, each taking their separate shares of the family property, I just sat there quietly, without saying a word, just sitting and watching as they each took their separate shares of the family property. [Whispering] The bronze drinking bowl that I had bought that time in Kathmandu was given out in my younger brother's-Infanta's Father'sshare. Well! While they were dividing the shares, I thought to myself, "Oh, dear! My bronze drinking bowl, the one I bought from the efforts of my trips to Kyirong and Kathmandu, has been given out in Infanta's Father's share!" But I continued to sit there quietly. KSM:

NHANU:

8. Stupahill Tamang serve beer, liquor, lentils, or curries in bowls (called khori) measuring from four to six inches in diameter and about one to two inches deep. The most valuable of these were made of bronze; the bowl Nhanu bought as a young woman for one and a half rupees would have cost approximately sixty to ninety rupees in 1977. These bowls constitute the core of a woman's domestic wealth along with large copper or brass water~arrying jugs, gold or silver jewelry, and larger bronze rice plates.

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A daughter's portion: Rights, gifts, wealth, and prosperity As Nhanu told this part of her story, she called on all her skills as a storyteller: she modulated her voice to reflect the different speakers, moved her body in and out of confidences with her characters and her audience, and gestured grand and small. Describing the division of her parents' estate among the children, Nhanu revealed important family relationships and strong sentiments about brothers and inheritance. There is much at stake in who got which field, house, cow, plow, and water jug. Tamang people's lives depend directly on their land and animals and the means to make them yield an adequate living. There is nothing to waste, nothing to spare. Partition of the family property is a public event. When brothers are grown and the joint household has become unmanageable, they call for a division of the property. Respected elders witness the allocation of every item in the family inventory, from the largest fields and oxen to the smallest chick or cup. Trying to learn to speak Tamang, I was at times overwhelmed by the sheer number of new words I had to acquire. Every kind of basket had a different name; grains had different names depending on whether they were still standing in the fields, husked, or cooked. And animals were not just cattle or even the cows, bulls, oxen, and heifers of my distant Wisconsin dairy-farming ties. There were also names for barren cows, for cows that had only borne one calf, and for all manner of bovine specificity that bespeaks the material differences between their lives and mine. As I wondered how many words I was going to have to learn before I could understand daily conversation, I also realized how comparatively few things there were in Tamang houses and barns and fields, and how much alike each house and its contents was to the next. Even as a complete outsider, I stood a far better chance of learning the names of their material worlds than they of mine. I was able to compile a complete inventory of everything--everythingin a house in just a few hours. There were only so many kinds of baskets, field implements, animals, foods, clothing, jewelry, and house parts. Considering all the named parts of an automobile, a refrigerator, a television, and a kitchen, and all the different kinds of houses, schools, buildings, and lives, even in a small town like Ithaca, Nhanu's was a much more finite material universe. Just to focus on the material constraints of Nhanu's world, to enumerate and weigh its tangible contents, is not enough. As surely as survival is at stake in Tamang negotiations about inherited property, survival is not solely grounded in goods but in social wealth as well. Embedded in the rules, assumptions, and disputes about inheritance are fundamental principles of Tamang interdependence. According to contemporary western Tamang inheritance practices, sons, for example, have primary rights to land and houses; daughters are given, but do not have absolute rights to, moveable wealth like gold, silver, animals, grain, money, and household furnishings.

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There are matters of both profound symmetry and equally profound asymmetry here. In our surveys of household property, for instance, David Holmberg and I found that the market values of men's and women's wealth in most households were roughly equivalent; that is, if husbands and wives sold what each inherited or owned, each would end up with just about the same amount of money. This equivalency is surprising and rarely reported in anthropological sources. It would have been foolish, though, to assert that their property were equal, since value was based less in the market than in the subsistence economy of Stupahill in the mid-1g7os. There and then, land reigned absolutely: with land, people eat; without land, people starve. There is some evidence that Tamang women have more access to land than their Parbatiya counterparts, and may have had even more in the past. But at least since the mid-1g7os, and probably much longer, western Tamang women have not had systematic rights to land. 9 Tamang women do not, in fact, have rights to much of anything, but neither are they without any resources or recourse. The complexity of a Tamang woman's security is hard to convey. On the one hand, she is born into her father's family line, and she remains a member of that line throughout her life. This means that she has significant roles in many family rituals. When someone dies in her own family-especially a parent or brother-she is the one who must wash the face and prepare the body for cremation. She is the one who demarcates the cremation ground and she is one of the most important mourners wailing the death keenings at the funeral. Her only rightful inheritance from her father's house is related to these roles. Every Tamang girl gets from her family: a hand hoe to trace a circle in the ground around the place of cremation, a hand sickle to cut the grass away from the cremation site, and a bronze drinking bowl to hold the water for washing the faces of her dead kinspeople. Everything else a Tamang woman receives is either a gift or it is consolidated through her own energy. The two most important of these are dzo--what I call a woman's own property-and khala phyapa, the share of the harvest due a daughter or sister who returns to work on the family farm even after she is married elsewhere. Even when they are young and still living in their own parents' house, Tamang girls begin to be given gifts of property. In 1977, this property was not an inheritance, as such, for a daughter could not demand it in the same way her brothers could demand that the paternal estate be portioned among them. Nonetheless, gifts given to daughters and sisters are not without their own rules. The term dzo refers to the hoe, sickle, and bowl a woman receives by right (to perform death rituals for her kin) as well as any personal gifts from her parents. Once given, these gifts cannot be taken away without the woman's public consent. Although women typically use their dzo-property to

g. See Bina Agarwal's ( 1994) extensive study of South Asian women's lack of land rights. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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enrich their marital households and, especially, to endow their children, it is the woman's absolute prerogative to decide what she will do with her dzo. Fathers, brothers, or husbands who use a woman's dzo-property are expected to repay it fully or suffer considerable social censure. Similarly hers are a woman's khala phyapa-shares. Khala phyapa refers to what Tamang women consider their due for continued work on their parents' fields. Mter a woman is grown, and even after she is married and also working in her husband's family's fields, she will typically still return to work at her own birthhome during peak agricultural periods. Thus, she may come home during the rice or millet transplantation, or, especially, when the rice, maize, millet, or wheat is being harvested. She works in the family fields and represents the family in its communal or rotating labor obligations. As a daughter of the house, she may also play an important role preparing food and drink for other fieldworkers. Although the work is hard, women speak with great pleasure of these return trips home to visit, sing, and dance with family and friends once again. Women are compensated for this work with a portion of the harvest, usually the fullest load of grain they can carry, or more, if the family is able to give it. Depending on the wealth of her original household, then, a young woman ofNhanu's era could reasonably expect to be given-at least-some fine clothing, jewelry, money, grains, and poultry or small livestock. Stupahill Tamang were quick to differentiate this dzo-property and khala phyapa from the dowry given at Parbatiya marriages. Dowry, or daijo, is the Parbatiya practice whereby a bride's parents endow the new couple with furniture, linens, pots, plates, and other requirements for their eventual domicile, along with as much gold jewelry as they can. Daijo is distinguished from another Nepali word for property given to daughters-pewa--both in terms of when it is given and who controls it. Daijo is negotiated and mostly given at the time of marriage, while pewa can be given to daughters or sisters at any time. Daijo can result in dispute and abuse since it is less clear who is to control it-the woman, her husband, their children, or the husband's familybut pewa belongs unequivocally to the woman. Daijo and its abuses are on the rise in caste communities in Nepal, 10 but it has probably always been less significant than pewa. Stupahill Tamang are clear that they do not have, and do not want to have, daijo. When they need to translate their practice of dzo into Nepali, they prefer to use the term pewa. Among Tamang, it is the woman's responsibility to make her dzo-property and khala phyapa-shares even more profitable through wise investment or other management. With luck, time, and good care, livestock and poultry

10. The giving of extravagant dowry did not exist even among Parbatiya in Nepal when this work began, although it became common, especially among the urban middle classes, by 2000. As of 2002, the worst abuses of dowry seen in North India-where brides are murdered in dowry disputes-had not yet been documented in Nepal.

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given as dzo become substantial herds and flocks. Additional income is generated through the sale of their by-products or judicious sale of the animals themselves. Grain given as khala phyapa is eaten only in times of great scarcity; otherwise, it is sold or invested, or it might be fermented and distilled and sold as liquor. Some women acquire additional market skills buying and selling small commodities like spices, thread, or cigarettes. These women's enterprises were (and are) common in Tamang villages in the Stupahill region. Although people, including the women themselves, tended to disparage these "little businesses," they are actually quite profitable. One of the most astounding findings of my research was the vast networks ofloans women maintained. Women regularly negotiated complex loans not just of money but also of their animals and grains, too. I found many women who controlled quite substantial estates, with animals not only at their own houses but loaned throughout the community, with interest payable in fertilizer and offspring. They also might have many large storage bins' worth of grain, capable of feeding entire households for years, on loan throughout the region. As with all loans in marginal subsistence farming communities, repayment was rarely forthcoming in full and never quickly, but the security provided by these investments was real: many women told how it was their investments that got their family through a famine, or paid for a medical treatment, or made it possible to support ever-increasing numbers of children. Tasyi-whose very name means "prosperity"-was able to parlay her father's gift of a water buffalo calf when she was a young girl into enough land to double her husband's inheritance from his own family and thereby create an adequate endowment for their second son. Families try hard not only to endow each son with a house and enough land to support a family but also to contribute meaningfully to each daughter's personal wealth. Women who do not bring anything into their marriages are belittled for their empty-handedness. There are strong material, cultural, and ritual associations between the economic success of a house and the entrepreneurial acumen of the senior woman in it. Pivotal to the amount of familial property a daughter will receive is her relationship with her brothers. When Suryaman Tamang's eldest sister was asked by her family to honor their kin obligations and marry a much poorer man, Suryaman promised to (and did) give his sister land. According to Tamang rules, Suryaman stood to inherit all their father's land since he was the only surviving son. He did not have to share any of this land with her, but under the provisions of dzo-gifting, he did. The tie between Tamang brothers and sisters begins in childhood, when each is the special caretaker and companion of the other; as adults, sisters turn to brothers for help in many ways. They may return home if they are mistreated in their husbands' homes. They may ask for gifts of grain, money, or even land if their marital families fall on hard times. When Nhanu talks, then, about her interest in the partition of her family's property, a great deal is at stake. She sits quietly because NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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she cannot demand shares of the property without compromising the very nature of her relation with her brothers. The outcome in the negotiations is a literal measure of her ties with her natal family. It is emblematic that the main item she discusses is a bronze bowl, one of the three items in her rightful dzo-property, although this particular bowl was purchased through her own work. [Loudly] Then, well! my second born brother came up to get his shares. He said, "That bronze drinking bowl must be given to Elder Sister! That's the one she bought with the gallon-measure of salt she was given after going to Kyirong! The only thing that she bought from that salt was that bronze drinking bowl; that bowl's hers! She didn't waste even one paisa on that trip ... " And then, right then! he reached out and in a single sweep of his arm, lo! he grabbed that bronze drinking bowl back and set it in a separate pile for me. Since he spoke up, they gave it to me and I took that bronze drinking bowl away with me. [Laughing] That one belonged to me quite independently of any that Father and Mother gave me as part of my dzo-property share. Another time, that Lendring 11 went to sell timber crossbeams, I joined him saying "Let's go!" and went off carrying five of those timbers. Each of the five timber crossbeams cost one quarter of a rupee. I had gone off carrying the five crossbeams when we came to that place-what's it called? There between the pass to Kathmandu and the bottom of the grade before you reach the pass? On that uphill climb the trail is in such a deep rut-a trench made by all the traffic it's seen-that the crossbeams wouldn't fit if we walked straight; we had to walk ... like so! sideways! ... to make the beams fit in the trench where the trail went. It made your whole neck stiff. Mter I had set my load down to rest, well ... [Laughing] I couldn't straighten my neck out, it was so stifl from having to walk all that way carrying my load sideways. [Still laughing at the memory] TULARAM: What was your profit? How much money did you make? NHANU: The beams I'd carried had cost one-quarter of a rupee each; I got one-half a rupee for each one when I sold them! Well! ... TULARAM: So you doubled your investment, it would seem. If that were the case, I guess it would have been worth your while to carry them all that way ... to double your investment. NHANU: [Sharply] Nowadays no one would carry that much for so little! Who'd ever carry a load like that for only one and a quarter rupees anymore, even if it did double their money?! [General laughter]

NHANU:

11.

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A classificatory elder brother ofNhanu's.

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People nowadays would never carry so much ... for so little! Even then, after our joint household was split up, you know ... I was the only one who went off doing so much! The father of my housei2 stayed in the herding station all the time. We had tried hiring herders four or five times, but, no matter what, they just didn't seem to work out. All I've encountered in my life is suffering and hardship.

Knowing what lives (and life stories) mean As we listen to Nhanu, of course, we want to understand the deceits, promises, obligations, desires, and fears that pattem the fabric of her life, as she clearly wants to tell them to us. But the immediacy of her experience is expressed in the small memories-the five day's wait at the Tibetan border, the anna's worth of beer that she and her brother couldn't consume, the oneand-a-half-rupee drinking bowl that she eamed and almost lost. She remembers the five timber crossbeams (not four) that cost one quarter of a rupee each, the secondbom younger brother (not third) who recognized her rights at the partition of the family estate. In writing this down for you, I cannot convey her larger meanings except, at least in part, through the specificity of her inventories. Several reviews of anthropological life history work do an excellent job of surveying the appeal and value of this work (Geiger 1986; Langness and Frank 1981; Watson and Watson-Franke 1985). The earliest pursuit oflives as cultural exemplar reached a peculiar extreme in the creating of fictive people with imagined life histories, as in, for example, George Bird Grinnell's (1920) tale of the Cheyenne apocalypse and Frank Bird Linderman's ( [1930] 1962, 1932) Crow stories. The use oflives to portray culture and history continues today in many highly politicized examples of heroicism, leadership, and martyrdom (Barrios de Chungara 1978; Brand 1978; Lee, Barnett, and Sterling 1975; Kuper 1978). In many ways, anthropological life history work takes form at the boundary between person and society. Some authors have turned to life histories to explore the psychosocial interface. These authors span a wide range of approaches. Some of them look at the exceptional individual, at deviance and conformity, or at culture and personality (Crapanzano 1984; Erikson 1969; Freeman 1979; Hughes 1974; Radin 1926; Talayesva 1942). Some focus particularly on leaming and socialization (Blacking 1964). Others look to life accounts as records of history and change (Elmendorf 1976; Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon 1977; Qoyawayma 1964). Some juxtapose several personal histories as a way to portray the multiplicity of perspectives that any community comprises (Kelley 1978; Leighton and Leighton 1944; Luborsky 1987; Plath 12. One ofthe common ways in which a woman might refer to her husband is as the father of the children in her house.

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1980). All these efforts record and read individual lives in order to illuminate society, times, and traditions. At the other end of the spectrum of life history work are more explicit inquiries into personhood and the culturally constructed self (Beattie 198o; Dieterlen 1973; Gilligan 1982; Mauss 1985; Patai 1988; Read 1955; Shweder and Bourne 1984; Singer 1980). From this perspective, life histories evidence others' ways of thinking and feeling (Levy 1984; March 1987; Myers 1986; Rosaldo 1983). Personal accounts, never accessible as direct evidence of course, are attractive for the window they seem to offer into the inner experience of another life. Explored for these purposes, life history work informs other contemporary concerns about esthetics and narrative, through which we can see how others imagine the very ideas of life or a life or my life or me (Kendall 1988; Rosaldo 1976). The critical vantage perennially interjected by first-person accounts has itself become part of an increasingly self-conscious ethnology and ethnographic description (Blackril.an 1989a; Brandes 1982; Bruner 198$ Clifford 1988; Crapanzano 1977; Frank 1979; Kluckhohn 1945; Lubarsky 1987; Tedlock 1983, 1987). Among the enduring anthropological motivations to solicit life history materials has been the desire to include women's voices. Women's personal narratives were collected long before the inception of any formal feminist anthropological critique. Many of the earlier sources stood as if they needed no other justification than to be about the forgotten half. Of course, even the earliest women's life histories were shaped by history and theory, but they did not announce themselves that way. Instead, their production was justified primarily by the fact that the voices they recorded were excluded from mainstream academic writing-like the fieldwork experiences recorded in another professionally excluded genre, the ethnographic novel. Some women anthropologists working with personal narrative were pioneers forging new ways to work with life history (Blackman 1982, 1989b; Kelley 1978; Kuper 1978; Mountain WolfWoman 1961). With the increased feminist acuity of the last twenty or so years in anthropology, women's life histories have received considerable critical attention (Chevigny 198$ Geiger 1986; Jahner 1985; Minnich 1985; Patai 1988; Personal Narratives Group 1989). As we move toward a fuller inclusion of women's realities in our professional representations, the early life stories are our only archival sources; those we collect today inform our readings of past ones at the same time that they build a better record of the present for the future. We begin our readings of women's life histories, then, not only to find out, in a general way, what life means to them but also to learn, more concretely, about the specific things that matter to them. We learn about who they are through what they call themselves. We learn what they make of their lives through what they say they do in their lives, what matters to them through the things that they name important. Tamang women, as we have seen, structured their representations oflife around suffering and pleasure (dukka and 94

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sukha). But what-specifically-gave them joy or pain? By looking at the particular things, events, and relationships that women named in these ways, we flesh out the skeletal structure of their lives. Everyday details are, editorially, the most challenging aspect of these stories: how much should be included? How should they be interpreted? "There seems," says Lila Abu-Lughod, to be no way to convey to outsiders the significance of many of the details contained in the stories. Indeed, the specification of detail is always abundant: not just the people present on a certain occasion, but the color of the dress, the food eaten, the time of day, and the exact amount of money paid find their way into these stories. Even when the events are fifty years old and such details might be thought surely to have vanished, they remain fixed in the narratives, which are told time and again. Every detail carries meaning in a world that is so largely shared. When a woman curious to know about another asks, "What does she have?" she means "How many children?" From the answer she can grasp immediately an enormous amount about the contours of the woman's life and her prospects. There is all the world of difference between the answers "Two daughters" and "Five sons and two daughters." To the outside reader, however, they are just facts. ( 1992, 35) I quite agree with Abu-Lughod that, in working with details like these, "one is confronted with the most basic problems of translatability" (1992, 35). Abu-Lughod chooses to delete, simplify, and recast much of the Bedouin women's detail in what she calls a tactical humanism ( 25-36): she leaves traces of herself in the text and tries to "make the stories flow smoothly" in a "familiar and satisfying" narrative form ( 29-31). There is no doubt that she succeeds in her goal "to make these women and their stories accessible to the educated, mostly Western, readers of [her] book" (35), but I like to think that readers are willing to work a little harder than AbuLughod supposes in order to learn the Bedouin difference between having two daughters and having five sons and two daughters. The challenge, of course, lies in doing justice to the facts. Much of my understanding of what mattered to these women came from attending precisely to the details they cataloged. I may not be able to offer you the full feast, with all its smells, flavors, talk, and tension, but I can at least try to offer you more than a menu and a report. Over and over, the women conveyed the significance of their life events by naming specific kin, specific places, and specific things. How could I know the difference between a trivial detail and a significant one? These nameable things were important in ways of which I can never be absolutely certain. To leave them out of my retellings would be unfaithful to the women as subjects and would be to disregard the lessons I was being taught. Although each woman's experience is unique, what the Tamang women NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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talk about in these accounts is often similar. They name many of the same sources of both trial and joy. Some of these are things we share with them and recognize; some are things we may not share but have come to know through other anthropological accounts; and some are part of neither our euro-western experience nor received anthropological wisdom. These accounts are doubly interesting because they make other women's realities manifest for us and because they have been neglected in anthropological theorizing about men's worlds.

Husbands and lovers, friends and festivals The near-universal allure of the song about popcorn, in the following passages from Nhanu, arises from nostalgia for "a love to call our own." Whether we are Tamang, American, Bedouin, or otherwise, love is an umbrella under whose shade we all are happy to sit. The pleasure we take from listening to such songs is not too deeply troubled by questions of cross-cultural understanding: we do not ask how exactly the love Nhanu sought is or is not like our own; we enjoy. Similarly, it is not an impossible stretch of the cross-cultural imagination to laugh, then shudder, at a patriarchal father-in-law who would, but couldn't, deny the young women married into his house the pleasures of dancing and singing at festivals. Although few readers of this book live in households headed by their husband's father or in families traced only through the male line, men's concern for the sexual propriety of their women relatives is hardly unknowable to us. For those who have read other anthropological accounts of patrilineal, patrilocal patriarchy, the behavior ofNhanu's father-inlaw is familiar from those accounts as well. By following all the detailed twists and turnings ofNhanu's words, we learn things about her life that we don't share with her and that haven't been highlighted in other volumes-that are, in short, uniquely hers. Her relationship with her husband, for example, appears differently textured than either our own experience of marriage or that found in anthropology books. He was substantially younger than she was when they were married: she had been brought into the house to work. Both Nhanu and her child-groom lived equally under Mondzom's direction during the early years of their marriage. He was in no position to give her orders or show contempt then-and it has shaped their marriage. TULARAM:

But our brother-in-law didn't ever treat you with contempt, did

he? NHANU: Heavens, no! He was just a child, still playing around. Where would he have learned to show contempt when he was so young?! He had to just sit there ... oh, so quietly! [Everyone laughs.] KSM: When you were a child at play yourself, who were your friends?

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Me? Or him? When he was a child? He was so young that, well, he had to carry up his load of fodder and show it to Grandmother first, before he'd be given anything to eat! [She laughs.] In that way, dependent as he was on others, he could hardly show me any contempt. NHANU:

One of the first-and most enduring-memories I have ofNhanu was her relationship with her husband. Theirs was far from the authoritative relation likely between older grooms and their young brides. Nhanu and her husband seemed relaxed and companionate, even jocular, with one another. Moreover, it was clear that even after she was married Nhanu was not forgotten in her natal home. While there was some tension as to the outcome of her story about the bronze bowl, her brothers did remember her rights and acknowledge her as their sister. Nhanu's affectionate stories about her adventures with her brothers and their protection of her dzo-property mark her ties to her birth home. Her natal family endows her with more than just a bowl; they recognize her as a daughter and a sister whose history is shared with them even after her marriage, after her move to establish a new home and through the years. By attending to the apparent trivia ofNhanu's tale, we learn how she, when she was a girl, built up and retained control of a bit of her own dzo-property and about the special friends of her girlhood. In much of the American and European literature on South Asia, women are portrayed as having had truncated childhoods. Girls in this literature are the victims of hard work, selfish or poor parents, child marriage, and early childbearing.13 Nhanu describes a personal life rich with trading trips and friendship well into adulthood. The facts of her trading expeditions and festival exploits are interwoven with those of her early married life; the freedom to travel about, eat fried breads and drink beer in the bazaar, and sing and dance is contrasted with the demands of in-laws. Like all the women, Nhanu spoke with special fondness of her girlhood friends, or tschame hro, many of whom were also clansisters. These friends (hro) made as young women ( tschame) went to festivals together to sing and dance. They also worked in exchange field labor together. They gave each other nicknames, called wai. Wai have two parts. The first is entirely personal and sometimes humorous: Urtsa for "yellow" or "light-skinned," Mendo for "flower." The second half of a nickname identifies the person's clan: women from the Himdung, Tschoten, Tokara, and Phyuba clans, for example, all 13. Early missionary accounts of "girlless" villages in South A~ia puzzled Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1982) until she realized that it was not a problem of demography but of perception. There were plenty of females between the ages of five and twenty, but they were not girls, according to Brumberg, because they enjoyed none of the freedoms associated with adolescence as it was coming to be defined in the west. NHANU: PARSING A LU'E, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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have Lhamo as the second part of their nickname; Dim dung, Waiba (or Yema), and Mukten women, like the friends in Nhanu's account, all have Wati as their second name. One of the names by which I was known locally was Urtsa Wati, recognizing my paler hair and skin and my courtesy position as a Dimdung clandaughter. Girlhood friends teach each other all the many tricks of youth and courtship: how to sing songs, how to dance, how to plait hair, how to dress, how to respond to young men's advances. They are also each other's confidants, helping and standing by one another whether in work, hardship, or play. They can be seen arm in arm, whispering or shouting, singing or sulking, throughout every village. They may be part of the same patriline, or one may have married into another's family, or they may have had no structural tie except affection. Whatever their formal connection, these friends together enjoy the finer moments ofleisure, youth, and pleasure. Girlhood friends and clansisters remain friends for life. As they move apart, become increasingly involved with their own children, and grow older, they may spend less time together. But they will rendezvous whenever they can. They can be seen revisiting their youth with one another, squatting and laughing or leaning on one another and walking. They meet on the outskirts of festivals dominated by another generation of friends, on each other's porches, or in the shade of trees at resting spots on trails. When I asked eighty-one-year-old Hrisang, after she had chronicled a long life of hardships, what was hardest for her now, she replied, "for the last four years, I haven't gotten to my own village. Once I felt like going to visit my younger sister married in Earth's Hole. I thought that if I left early in the morning I could get there by evening. Her left arm and leg are paralyzed now. She had sent word asking me to come." She and Nhanu, like all the women who shared a life story with me, spoke of their girlhood friends, sisters, and clansisters as a source oflifelong pleasure. TULARAM: Yes, but, say, when you were still living in Warmwaters, who were your girlhood friends? Who were the ones you went around with the most? NHANU: Oh, there were lots of them that I hung out with. I went around with Tsendza Wati a lot. And with the daughter of the Urba Lambu from Midmound. Those were the ones I went with most. KSM: Did you go with them to festivals then, too? NHANU: What? KSM: Were they the friends you went with to festivals? TULARAM: When you went to festivals, did you exchange tokens with one another? Or, what was it like? Tell us your tale .... NHANU: You mean, whom did we exchange with? Why with the young men, of course! [Everyone laughs.] We sang songs with all the young men! [Everyone laughs uproariously.]

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[Singing] Will we find love or not? Will we find nice sweet love? Will we find kindness or not? Whether or not we eat popped corn, whether or not we find love, they say that when masked dancers perform in the middle of the bazaar, it brings twelve years of good fortune and providence. Hoi! a love to call our own! Kindness to call our own! As fancy beer bubbles and foams, as long as we survive in this human form, as millet and corn are spread in the sun to dry, will we find love, we two? Playful men in the purity of youth, playful women laugh and play! If we declared our loves, if we spoke of our kindnesses, don't turn the basket over emptying it out on the hilltop! Don't mock us! Listen, oh, listen! We are thinking of love! Come! Come like this, like this! We would share a love of our own. If someone's love awaits you over there on the other side, will you go? Will you go? Will you eat our popped corn?

What do you mean, you sang with the young men?! [Still laughing] I'll say we did! Songs! Oh, my! We would sing so many songs with the young men! And then, oh, we'd exchange our tokens with those young men. I mean! Young women would hardly just exchange tokens among themselves! TULARAM: Were the things you exchanged in those days different from the tokens people exchange nowadays? NHANU: Very different! Nowadays, people bring tumpbands, and looms for weaving, and they bring combs. In those days, if you gave two little-this small [gesturing]-hairbands, why, you'd get a comb in exchange. Things came cheap in those days. Now they exchange fancy crocheted scarves and sashes and even woven bags, they say. That kind of woven bag hadn't even been invented in our time. We two went around together then, the one who's a wife now and I ... you know, Sircha Wati from Earth's Hole. And a little with Tsendza Wati, too. KSM:

NHANU:

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Tsendza Wati and Sircha Wati ... Sircha Wati, yes, I would go around with her. We'd go around together and sing songs, well! You know, that uncle-father-in-law from here? 14 KSM: Here in Stupahill? NHANU: Yes. He was going to beat us. He wanted to beat us. The two of us went off singing songs, and after singing-well, we'd gone off singing with some people from Old Town, and then, well, we two had been singing songs there, innocently enough ... and then ... oh, my, we kept well away from the main crowds of singers, and standing apart demurely enough like that, we, too, sang a little. But that elder uncle-father-in-law said, "I saw you! You danced so· much that your nhali-earrings slapped up and down against your temples! If you go around singing like that anymore while my sons-your husbands!-are off in the herding stations, well, I'll draw blood from your tongues! "15 Then he said, "I won't let you back inside the house again until I've drawn blood from your tongues!" That's what he said! [Everyone laughs.] That's how it happened then. Well, you know ... who knows? We, well ... how many times! Oh, how many times that happened to us! [Speaking very softly] Then, after the joint family household was divided up, on our own we bought irrigated fields and we bought dry fields-but even so, it never seems to be enough .... KSM: What's become of your former friends now? One is in Earth's Hole, you said .... NHANU: There's only the one in Earth's Hole. The other has died. TULARAM: She died after she was married into Midmound? NHANU: [Very softly] Mter she arrived in Midmound in marriage, she died. That one-what can anyone do?-she died. What then? KSM:

NHANU:

Knowing what makes a woman's particular suffering and comfort Tracing the sources of hardship and comfort that the women discuss, in all their specificity, is vital to a nuanced understanding of their lives. In this chapter, and those that follow, I want to explore some of the specific sources the women name to try to understand how and why they matter. I begin the

14- From Nhanu's perspective, this would have been either Rich Grandfather (her own grandfather) or his son who drowned young. From other things she says, however, it seems that she is referring to the eldest grandson (Jyomo's husband), identifying him by his relation to me, KSM-just as one might tell a child, "Take that to Daddy," meaning the child's daddy, not the speaker's. 15. Referring to the practice of drawing blood from one's tongue after coming in contact with a witch; he is implying that their behavior was so unacceptable that they were, in effect, like witches.

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list where they do: hunger and plenty, ragged and nice clothing, illness and health, poverty and wealth, dead children and living parents. Most women discussed, somewhere in their accounts, the most commonly identified features of Tamang women's sukha: food, clothing, and health. Purngi declared, "I would always find enough food to eat and clothing to wear! I wouldn't ever go hungry! And I wouldn't ever go naked!" In effect she was saying, in terms understood by all the other Tamang women, as well as by you and me, "What's the hardship?"

Hunger Since only about half the households in Stupahill were endowed with enough land to feed themselves adequately, and since everyone was almost exclusively dependent on agriculture for subsistence, many of the people in these accounts had known real hunger. Hunger was an enduring feature of life in the poorest families; drought, landslides, and other disasters made it an occasional event in all houses. Said Hrisang of her early months of marriage: "Oh my! As for eating! ... For twenty-two days, I lived in this house without having put anything in my mouth. I'd say, 'So, let's eat!' but still there wasn't anything to eat." Many families in Stupahill are chronically short of food. Within the village, people try to cope with poverty and hunger through work and other exchange relations. People were vocal about the importance of the ties that bound them to help one another; they liked to say that no one starved in the village. While a great many mechanisms-including cross-cousin marriage, exchange labor groups, and even village-based daywork-helped to counter the inequities in local landholdings and household prosperity, sharp differences remained between those who had more than enough and those who did not. These differences were painfully evident in children's growth patterns, which pointed to chronic malnutrition in many of the children.l 6 True famine, too, hit Stupahill with relentless regularity. The fourteen women of these narratives told about three distinct times of serious shortage, when poorer households were pushed beyond the limits of locally tolerable scarcity into starvation. If the causes of crop failure were local, ties to other villages became avenues for obtaining food. The most important of these were ties, first, along a person's "milk trail"-to kin on the mother's sideand then along the trails of other marriages-to the marital homes of daughters and sisters. When women faced starvation in their husbands' houses, they

16. See also Panter-Brick ( 1989, 1990, 1992) for work begun in the village site of a substantial research program on Tamang run through the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques by Toffin, Meyer,Jest, and de Garine ( 1986).

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returned to their natal homes and usually could expect to receive gifts of food grains to tide their own families over. Similarly, brothers might go to ask food of their sisters, married into other communities. The other major avenue for emergency assistance was what are usually called ritual friendships. Ritual friends (leng [male] and leng sya [female]) are not, in western terms, very friendly; in fact they are expected to be quite reserved in each other's presence. But they are also expected to be exceptionally generous to one another. For this reason, people often try to choose leng who are influential in any number of domains. They also try to make leng across considerable geographical distances. These distant bonds provide important assistance on trading expeditions, when parties of traders know they can find lodging along the trail with leng and leng sya. These ties become vitally important, too, when a localized hail or landslide destroys a family's crop. Leng-like relationships occasionally extend to entire villages, which become like the sister cities of modern diplomacy, but with a fundamental life-saving twist. Hunger was so much a shared possibility for Tamang women that Hrisang made it the measure of hardship in her account, saying, "I've been sunk in hot water; and I've been sunk in cold. If I were to say we had it hard, well, if each and every mealtime, we'd have taken a whole handful out and set it aside, it would provide one more meal. If each and every mealtime, we had added a full handful, it would be one more mealtime squandered. Those are the things I call our hardship." Hrisang's reflection here underscores a simple fact about the management of food grains in marginal subsistence households: handful by handful, it adds up either to sufficiency (if even little bits can be set aside and not cooked each meal) or to starvation (if similarly little bits are repeatedly wasted). Clothing

Another basic measure of relative comfort and difficulty for Tamang women is clothing. Mlangdzom is pained by the poverty of her clothing: "My heartand-mind hurts. I don't get anything to eat. I don't get beautiful clothes to wear. ... Myself, well, even doing so much work this way, I still don't have enough to wear and I think about that." Nhanu, although she tells about being critically ill with cholera, about losing all her herds to disaster and disease, about caring for her mother through many illnesses, and although she must have known at least the one major famine that came through the com- · munity during her lifetime, says of her childhood, "My only hardship then was not having enough to wear. I didn't have nice clothes; that was my one hardship." The idea in all the women's accounts of having not enough to wear, or having only tatters, imparts the older women's repeated assertions that they have become "worn out rags" with an additional metaphoric richness. 102

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fllness

Alongside tales of suffering caused by hunger and a lack of clothing were tales of illness. Purngi suffered from asthma, although in the other basic respects-food and clothing-she said her life had been easy. Nhanu describes her own cholera: "It had been nine days since I fell sick, so all I could eat was a little bit of gruel, but after drinking that effusion I survived. Everyone had cut off all affection for me; I, too, had given up. All this had happened, to me even!" The women's accounts appear to differentiate between usual illnesses-fevers, flu, colds, worms, boils-and extraordinary ones-like the periodic cholera epidemics that, asJyomo describes it, emptied whole houses so that "no one could even be found to carry and dispose of the corpses."

Childbirlh and the din-birlhdebt Nhanu tells us, in the following passages, about her mother and her mother's illnesses. Embedded in Tamang society, although not cited in most anthropological accounts of similar societies, is the primacy of a girl's relationship with her mother. Nhanu's construction of her own suffering as linked with her mother's demonstrates this primacy, and perhaps implies that it is distinctive to women. NHANU: [Loudly] I, me, after I was born came eight younger brothers, only brothers! Not one elder sister, not one younger sister was born; I only have younger brothers. One right after the other, eight were born. When those last two were born ... well, it turned out that the last two were twins, and .... you know, right after the one who is now Shorty's Father was born, then, in the month of Poush, these two were born. Those two are of the cycle-year of the serpent, born in the month of Poush. Then, in the month of Sawan, Mother almost died. For one whole night through, Mother was so sick she almost died. Mter that, for three months, Mother remained deathly ill and so, all night long, afraid that those two little babies would roll into the hearth fire, I would sit up, protecting them, taking care of them. In the night, those two babies would eat three little dippersful of gruel. All night long, I would sit there with them, one strapped to my back, and the other, like this ... like a small drum I'd put him on my lap and pat him ... all night long. Through all this hardship I endured, though, and now, now that those younger brothers have grown big, they've gone and turned their backs on me. I'd be lying ifl didn't say that their heads have gotten a little swollen. I'll say that even into the tape recorderP 7 [Everyone laughs.]

17. That is, she doesn't care if they hear that she's said such things. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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Oh, you know, we can all laugh at them, and I guess they'd probably laugh to hear me say such things, too! [She laughs and then pauses.] But, still, it's a little strange how things come out, isn't it? After all that I did, now their heads have swollen and they've turned their backs on me ... KSM: How much was your mother able to care for them? NHANU: Oh, well! The care my mother was able to give! ... I did so much of their caretaking that it's to me that the mother's din-birthdebt is really owed!

Din is the debt all Tamang owe the women who gave them birth. It arises from Tamang ideas of a mother's suffering in pregnancy, labor, and child caretaking. A woman who has given birth should be exempted from all work for at least a few days-and ideally, but rarely, twenty-two days. She should not be expected to engage in hard physical work for as long as the household can spare her. She should also be offered the finest foods the family can afford, especially cooling and healing foods to help her regain her strength. But the idea of a mother's birthdebt is most commonly used in a wider sense, to refer to the many sacrifices-emotional as well as physical-that a mother makes for her children. Although the physical trauma of giving birth is thought' to be lessened by the extra foods and services rendered to a new mother, the Tamang say that the birthdebt owed to one's mother can never be fully repaid. The death of children Children and the bearing of children are complex sources of both joy and suffering for the women of these narratives. In giving birth, in caring for children, in losing children, and in children's neglect of aging parents, women found many sorrows to discuss. Mhojyo and a number of the others had themselves known very difficult labors; all the women knew of women who had suffered or died in childbirth. Of the fourteen women who told me their stories, many had also lost children, especially young children and infants. Jyomo, like the other women, spoke of great pain at her children's deaths "Sometimes the sorrow I felt, I'd say it was more than the sorrow of my Father's and Mother's deaths, a lot more." Even Tschirto, whose children had been born relatively easily and survived to this telling, said, "It won't do if you don't have children and it's hard to make do if you do have children! ... That's what's called hardship. What else? To call it ease or comfort: if children weren't born, if there were less work, if one got to go around without a care, that would be ease and comfort." And I gather they haven't exactly paid it back, even now, have they? [Everyone laughs.] NHANU: [Laughing] Hardly! In fact, they didn't do much to repay that debt when Mother fell sick TULARAM:

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again more recently. I alone took Mother to the hospital that time. Mter I took here there, sometimes my firstborn daughter would stay with her. ... Sometimes Father18 would stay with her. ... Sometimes I would stay with her. ... It was only because we took care of her that she went to the hospital at all. Mother had cataracts. We waited and stayed with Mother when she had the operation to have her cataracts removed. We'd wait and stay by her. ... "Bla-bla-bla," she'd prattle on and on in her sleep. Even as she tossed and turned all night, we stayed by her. ... [Sharply, to a small child who is fussing] What's the matter with you? Why can't you just sit quietly? [Returning to story] There was this other woman there in the hospital, too, from some place called Syelle Bhokangyi-although I don't where that is-but she and Mother had their cataracts removed at the same time. Someone elsel9 said, "Lie still and don't touch your eyes!" But, immediately afterwards, Mother kept tossing back and forth-even in her sleep, she rolled around a lot, touching her eyes. When she touched her eyes, we'd say, "Someone else said to lie still and not to touch your eyes!" "Oh, but I can't sleep like this! My back hurts. And I'm so hungry that I can feel my heart weighing down my stomach," she said. But at the same time the doctor had told us not to give her anything to eat. Well, after cooking a little bit of food in a saucepan, I put it into a dish and hid itlike this [demonstrating]-inside the folds of my overgarments. As soon as the doctor went out of the room ... munch, munch, munch ... I fed my mother. Sometimes, while I was feeding her-chomp!-she'd bite down with her teeth on my fingers! She couldn't see what she was eating! [Laughter] But still-chomp!-she'd bite right into the very hand that was feeding her! [Still laughing] But then, the doctor would come back again, and I'd have to take the folds of my overgarments and, pulling the cloth up over the dish to conceal it, sit there very still. Then, as soon as the doctor wasn't around anymore, I'd pull it out again, and, in that way-chomp, chomp!-I'd feed Mother. Over and over, like that! Then, after feeding her like that, for ... two days, three days, four days, five days ... waiting with her and staying by her ... then on the fourth day of waiting there, I placed my firstborn daughter with her. Then after my firstborn daughter came back up home, I put Father to stay with her. Only after six whole days, on the seventh day, to the very day, did I send word to my fourth born younger brother. "Hey!" I said, "She's not only my mother! She's your mother, too. You go 18. Meaning her husband. 19. The doctor? NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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and stay with her some!" So saying, I sent word to the one who is now the father of Banner's mheme family circle.

It is tempting to focus-as Nhanu in some sense wants us to-on Nhanu and her devotion to her mother. But in order to understand the full significance of her devotion, we have to know who all the other people are who did not help Nhanu attend to her mother. Obviously, at the top ofNhanu's list of negligents were her brothers; there were, after all, eight of them. Even though she was the only daughter, she would have us believe that she and her marital family were more devoted than all eight of the original sons. Distressed as she must have been with her brothers, in this story she oscillates between emphasizing that they are younger than her ("my fourthborn younger brother") and according them the deference to which they are now entitled ("the father of Banner's mheme family circle"). This last is a particularly interesting-and exemplary-Tamang woman's way to refer to a man. As we have amply seen, adults are rarely either addressed or even referred to by their proper given names. Instead, they may be identified by a kinship term-identifying the relation they have with the speaker, with the person being spoken to, or with other characters in what is being spoken about. One of the two most common ways to refer to a married woman is as the ''wife of so-and-so," or, in Tamang, "so-and-so sya':._literally, "so-and-so wife" or "so-and-so woman." The other common way of referring to a woman, as the "mother of so-and-so," can also be used to address that woman directly. The whole system is made even more complex by the fact that adult so-and-so's must also be referred to obliquely. Men are typically referred to as the "father of so-and-so" but only very rarely as the "husband of so-and-so." Instead, a man's relation to his wife is invoked in the common, but more complex, reference to him as the "father of so-and-so's mhemegroup"-that is, as the man who fathered the children in some specific mother-and-children grouping. Thus, the "father of Banner's mheme" here refers to the man who fathered the group of mother and children known as Banner's; Banner is probably the oldest surviving child in that mheme group, since the mother would not likely be referred to by a personal name like Banner. Later, on the ninth day to the day, he brought Mother back up home, without even waiting the number of days that she was supposed to stay in the hospital! At the time I sent word to him, though, when he had finally come down to take his turn with Mother, he came down to the market town20 only after night had fallen. I, well, the sun had gone down completely by the time he got there. I,

NHANU:

20. The market town of Trisuli is where the closest hospital or clinic is located, a half-day's journey from Stupahill.

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well ... since it was nighttime, I shouldn't have tried to come running back up here after nightfall. Oh, but, it was ... well, there was ... from the Number Two Bridge along the trail onwards, a man who looked like he was from Tibet, from the northwest, from the region around Seven Hundred Streams, he pursued me then! I was being chased by an unsavory northerner. I began running ... running along with my sickle in one hand, I would turn around and look back, while I was still running, running all the while. [She talks faster and faster.] Night had fallen. "Now," I thought, "I've had it. I'm really going to get myself killed by this northerner. Maybe this is finally going to be the way I die." Those were the thoughts that came to mind then! Then, there by the base of the magnolia tree, he finally paused to talk with a blind man who was sitting there. "There," I thought, "at the base of that magnolia, will he stop there for a while? Will he sit talking over there for a bit or not?" Even just thinking about him coming after me, I was overcome by the need to run. And so, running the whole way, I had come back up. When I was almost to the Bell Rock,2 1 there he was; that northerner was still down there, down near the old Royal Mango Orchards, and he was coming after me again! Oh, dear! That northerner, that Tibetan type, still seemed to be coming up after me! Even as I said to myself, "What will I do? What will I do?" night had really fallen. The moon was up. I had run all the way. Running, running quickly, after running and running, I thought, "Oh, now, let me get across the river, and after crossing the river, please," I said, "let me reach Old Man Topale's house.22 There I'll find the sleep I need!" And, so saying, I ran on. Just as I crossed the river to this side, that northerner-that Tibetan type-had, just then, at the very same moment, reached the opposite shore .... He stood there for a minute, staring fixedly after me, and then, turning around, he left. After he turned around and went the other way, I, well! ... after coming up to Old Man Topale's house, I called out, "Unclefather-in-law! Let me in! Uncle-father-in-law!" and so saying had called out to that Old Man Topale, but no one in the house woke. They didn't wake up. "Well, now," I said to myself, ''I'll have to go stay at Tariff Hill," and so saying, went there. There, too, at Tariff Hill everyone was sound asleep. "Who can I call to?" I wondered, "Who can I call to here?"

Place and place names Among the most resonant details in all these accounts, after the richness of kin names, were place names. Houses, fields turnings in trails, river cross21. 22.

About halfWay home from the market towu. In the lower part of Stupahill. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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ings, and hillocks all had names encompassing whole histories. Americans number streets or name them after flowers or trees in alphabetical order so that we, who probably have no other knowledge of the place, will not get lost; the Tamang place names in Stupahill have generations of stories and attachments. Some of the locations are as historical as they are physical. Tariff Hill, for example, is a small settlement on a rise just above the river that runs below Stupahill. Taxes were collected there from travelers on what used to be one of the main trails between Kathmandu and Tibet. There were many such taxation or customs houses along the route, enriching petty officials and establishing complex relations of patronage and profit. The trail on the opposite side of the river was improved, then closed, when Tibet became closed in the 1950s, so that only the name Tariff Hill remains. More poignant is the name of the large mango grove on the hillside above the clinic where Nhanu had taken her mother: the Royal Mango Orchards. Maintaining this grove and carrying the mangoes to royal households in Kathmandu had been the corvee obligations through which the Tamang people from Earth's Hole and its neighboring villages secured their land rights. The special relation between daughters and mothers The relations revealed by place names such as Royal Mango Orchards figure in Nhanu's account primarily as background; the real relationship that preoccupies her is with her mother: NHANU: That was how it came to happen that I came running all the way up to the main part of the village in the middle of the night all alone. Mter running all that way, I was exhausted when I reached the resting platform at the base of the magnolia right near the village. There I sat down for just a minute and, leaning back, fell right asleep. Then, oh, my! I thought, "Now everyone in the village will really have gone to sleep! There won't be anyone awake to let me into the house! What will I do now?" So saying, having come up running all the way, here, too, everyone else seemed to be so soundly asleep that not a creature was stirring anywhere. "When, oh, when had they all gone to bed?" I thought. Everyone did seem to be asleep. Coming up to that house there,23 I tried to wake someone up. "Who did you come up home with?" he24 asked. "Who all came up from the market with you at this time of the night?"

23. She indicates Mondzom's house, which would have been where she was living in the extended family household at the time. 24. Her husband.

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"I came up all alone," I said. "Oh, afraid! I was so afraid coming back up here .... " "In the dead of the night!" he cut in. "Shit! Who wouldn't be afraid! What the shit were you doing prowling around at this time of night?! You should have just stayed down there one more night!" he scolded me. "But I was so impatient," I said. "I just wanted to come back. When my fourth born younger brother came down, I just wanted to come back up, and so, walking-no, running!-! came back," I said. And so I had. From then next day on, though, I was terribly sick. Somewhere in that night, in my fright, a ghost had attacked me, a masaan-ghost maybe? In any case, I fell sick, and, after falling sick, spent two days, three days, flat on my back. Mter that, after I couldn't get up I was so sick, they did the ritual to cast out that masaan-ghost. Mter casting out that masaan-ghost ... this way, that way ... in every possible direction ... well, I got up again. Mter getting up, I said, "I've got to go see Mother. Today it will have been nine days since she went to the hospital. It's been four days since I left her there with my brother. She's been down there for nine days. I must go down to see Mother this very day. My fourthborn younger brother has been there for three days now-whatever has happened to her?" I said. And so, saying "Come on! Let's get going!" I had just reached the river at the bottom of the village when there he appeared, leading our mother, walking up the trail. There was our mother, walking, being led up the trail. Mter that, then, well, I kept her here and here gave her whatever I could of good food and things to make her comfortable. Only from here did she get such things. But, "Oh! by doing all this maybe she will get well soon," I said! The year before last, too, well, after taking six porters, we went up to the Hot Springs. I did take her to help her get well there. That, there, well, along the trail from Barleyfields, we went, with my children's Eldest Father25 up there to Hot Springs. As soon as everyone else started saying they were going, we, too, went. There, then, on that awful uphill climb, the one by Sapukhanto, Maru Hrong said he wouldn't carry Mother any farther. I said, [softly] "But I can't carry Mother," and, then, well, after saying to myself, "She's my mother after all; I, too, must carry her awhile .... " So saying, I carried Mother all the way up that climb, all the way up from there on the other side of Pearl Barley River. My load was so heavy that my tumpline itself creaked-creaked-creaked-from the weight. The trail was so steep and my mother so heavy that I couldn't walk very far at a single stretch the way the others could. I had to switch back and forth, following the more gentle

25. That is, her husband's eldest brother.

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inclines of the cowtrails weaving back and forth across the slope. In that way, I carried Mother all the way up to the rock at the top known as New Mother's Feat! My own mother! KSM: To the Hot Springs? I, too, have been along the trail up to the Hot Springs where Nhanu carried her mother. Although I make no claims to mountaineering skill or endurance, that section of trail is one of two uphill climbs that, in all my years in Nepal, have made me weep with frustration and exhaustion at the unrelenting pitch. Carrying another person up that trail remains almost unimaginable to me. How much more real seems Nhanu's devotion to her mother when I can so vividly recall my own memories of that place. My calves and shins burn, my heart pounds, my head throbs, my throat is dry even years later. If my understanding ofNhanu's account is so palpably informed by one shared geographic experience, what might be the synesthesia of her usual audience? I, after all, have never been chased by a masaan-ghost or known anyone who drowned in the river below Stupahill or hoped a hot spring would cure my mother. Along the way to Hot Springs ... I carried her that way to New Mother's Feat. Mter carrying her in that way, after doing all that, after staying those many days up there, after providing all the care she needed, and after bringing her back down home, then, once again, after putting her up here at my house for one month, after saying I would feed her whatever appealed to her to build up her strength, I gave her whatever I could.

NHANU:

Listening to Nhanu here I found another particularly good example of Tamang narrative style and its ability to draw one into the story. Whereas in spoken English storytellers use lots of and thens to carry their listeners through run-together strings of events, Tamang tales depend on another kind of sentence construction. For example, in English we might say: "Around noon I went to town in my car to mail some letters and saw him standing there, so I went up to him and told him about your mother." In Tamang, these events retold would sound more like: "Mter going to mail some letters, after going downtown in my car, after seeing him standing there, after going up to him, I told him about your mother." In Tamang, one event follows another as one participial phrase after another, to culminate in a final simple statement-as if it were the obvious fact to which all the prior statements necessarily pointed. In Nhanu's account, the obvious fact is her dedication to her mother. Nothing in my anthropological training gave me the professional vocabulary to describe this devotion. Tamang are patrilineal: children belong only to their father's family line; their mother is not even part of that family. To be Tamang means to belong to your father's clan, to live in his house, to inherit 110

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from his house. Mothers belong to another clan; they come from another village; whether mothers live or die, whether they stay or remarry and move away, they have no formal relations with their children. Nevertheless, it is clear in these women's narratives that mothers are vitally important to their daughters, and vice versa. A few anthropological accounts puzzle at this discrepancy. Most notable is Margery Wolf's ( 1972) work in Taiwan. Wolf describes at length the structural and affective counterpositioning of what she calls the uterine family and the patrilineal one. According to Wolf, a Taiwanese mother creates her own island of sociopolitical and emotional security in her husband's house by bearing children and binding them to her through ties of intimacy. These ties are grounded only in love and caring, in contrast to the ties of patrilineal descent, based on respect and filial obligation. In many ways, the Tamang mheme is just such a uterine family-a mother and her own children-created within the larger patrilocal patrilines of Tamang society and acting as the locus of intense emotions of loving nurture. But the Tamang case also highlights something still submerged in Wolf's description of Taiwan: Nhanu's mother had eight sons and one daughter in her mheme; in Nhanu's account, it is the daughter's affection that survived the years and became return nurture, not the sons'. How are we to understand Nhanu's daughterly love? Like her brothers, she was nursed and nurtured by their mother. As with Wolf's Taiwanese mothers, we can understand Nhanu's mother's investment in her children to be, at least in part, practical, an investment in allies, protectors, and future maintenance. All nine of her children owe her the mother's din-birthdebt. Because of sons' greater access to productive resources, like land, Tamang and anthropologists alike are wont to assume that mothers in such situations will invest more heavily in, and be repaid by, their sons. But Nhanu's story describes many instances in which she, and not her brothers, retumed the debt most generously. This imbalance appears not just because it is Nhanu speaking to glorify herself here. Her claims are both true and not true: not true because her mother lives with a son who feeds and houses her on a daily basis, and who will share this responsibility with his brothers until she dies, as sons must; yet true, too, because the sons' care is never enough. In Tamang society, the duty a son owes his mother is mandatory, not freely given; the love between a mother and a daughter is always a gift, not an obligation, and therefore seems the purer. Nothing worked. Nothing worked. Nothing at all happened. She didn't get better. Her eyes still couldn't see. She still couldn't walk. So, after all that, then, what? Mter we'd gone up there26 ... in any moment she

NHANU:

26. To the Hot Springs. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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could fall down; in that moment she could die! At any moment anything can happen. Whatever had happened? I'll tell you. Every day, I would go to see after Mother. Today, I'd go up there to see her. Tomorrow, I'd go up there ... so often that my legs were constantly muddy up to my knees from having walked along that wet trail between our houses so much. Then, once, even though I'd gone to see her only a few days earlier, once when a couple of days had passed without my going to see her, she tried to come down here to see me. On the way down ... there at the place of the Old Landslide ... she fell and, falling, split her lip wide open. This Old Landslide is the one that divided the communities of Stupahillwhere Nhanu lives-and Warmwaters-where her brothers and mother live. Every year, more of the hill falls away as small rivulets become destructive after big rains. The trail across it has to accommodate these changes with new twists. Such alterations are particularly deadly to the elderly, who navigate trails increasingly by memory as their eyesight fails. In all my travels through Nepal, I have never come across trails as poor or as precipitous as those through the Stupahill region. Two forces worked inexorably against improvement. One was ecological: carved out of unimaginably vertical real estate, the trails were washed away by monsoons every year and had to be rebuilt. The other force was human: if better trails had connected local Tamang with the opportunities of the world, there would have been reason to maintain them. Instead, the better the trails were, the more easily Tamang people in Stupahill were exploited by the ruling families of faraway towns and cities. I found these rough tracks exhausting and dangerous, but my frustration was small change compared to the total human cost of trying to survive as a Tamang farmer there. KSM: You mean she fell on her way coming to see you? Mter saying to herself, "''m going to my daughter's place," she fell? NHANU: She said, "I can't endure this. Someone else27 doesn't give me food to eat; I'm going to Daughter's place!" And so saying, on the way coming down here, they say she fell. You know what happened? That Lambu's wife, from the house up above, told my secondborn daughter, "Your grandmother seems to be sleeping on the Old Landslide." Had she died? Was she still alive? Oh, how I ran! But still I couldn't see anything! Word had come to me: "Go see to your mother!" That was the word being passed around, it seems. At the time I heard the news-oh, my!-I had gone to the spring, saying I would wash some wool. Saying I would wash some clothes, I had gone to the spring. Oh, I thought, only after I've

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finished washing some clothes will I go. This one time, whatever, whatever has happened, let it be! That's what I thought to myself for a moment, and so I dawdled and stayed there by the spring for a moment. Then, suddenly-Mother! oh! Mother! crying out "Mother!" after coming back up from the spring, I ran off to her! There was my daughter, too, on her way just ahead of me. My second born daughter and I, we both had gotten as far as Owl's Nest-up there, on that little rise along the trail by the Old Landslide. I followed my secondborn daughter. [Very softly] But Grandmother2 8 didn't seem to be there at all. "Maybe," I said, "she made it back across over there29 after all." And so saying, I squatted there at Owl's Nest, sitting there because I was tired. Just then, my secondborn brother came down the trail. After carrying our mother home, he was now coming back up here. "Oh, Second Uncle-father-in-law!30 Uncle-father-in-law! They say that Mother came down here!" I said. "What's happened?" [Loudly] "I don't think that anyone actually saw it, but it seems that she fell from the cliff earlier, and after falling, is all cut up. I went to her, and after carrying her, took her back home," says he. So I went to see her. There she was, with her lip split wide open. Her forehead, too, was split open. She seems to have cracked her head clear open. They had lain her down on her side, this way [demonstrating by tipping her head to one side], and a pool of blood had congealed on her pillow, and more blood was still pooling there .... [Her voice gets high-pitched with strain.] Unseeing eyes ... fallen unconscious ... caked over with blood ... [Her voice becomes matter-of-fact.] As soon as I saw all that, I said, "Lo! Surely Mother has died." So saying, oh, I cried for a while. Then ... a little while later, Moon's Mother,31 that Moon's Mother from down below, came up. When she came up, she pulled back the covers and said, "Look at what all has happened to your mother!" And, after pulling back the covers, she showed me everything. Then, after sitting her up, after heating some water, after washing everything, after cutting her hair back, the next day, after bringing Urtsa Lama's medicine-the medicine I'd asked for from Urtsa Lama-I applied those medicines to her lip. After she'd split her lip so badly that way, after applying the medicine, in this way, I put the split halves of her lip back together again. But I seem to have put the halves back together a little crooked; her lip is still a little uneven. Urtsa Lama was the local nickname given to David Holmberg: the yellowhaired lama-clansbrother. From his first solo days in the community, and 28. Referring to her mother as her daughter would. zg. Back to her sons' houses in Warmwaters. 30. Calling out to her brother by the term that her daughter would have used. 31. Her fifthborn younger brother's wife. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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continuing into our most recent visits, we were often called on to provide the medical services so inaccessible in Stupahill. Since we didn't have anything beyond the usual-for the United States-knowledge of first aid, we often could do little but encourage people to make the four-hour walk to the market town in hopes that someone would be at the clinic and that the needed medicines would be available in the bazaar. Our "practice" was limited to cuts and contusions, for which soap and water, some antibiotic, and sterile bandages often worked small miracles. Certain things set us starkly apart from our Tamang hosts in Stupahill: being educated, not making our living through manual labor, and being healthy. Daily, I was reminded how different were my presumptions of good health, of adequate food, of first aid, and of sophisticated medical care. Some of the stories we heard were very sad: of those who died from treatable maladies, or were maimed from small injuries turned septic, or were stunted and withered from a life of poor nutrition, worse sanitation, and parasitic predation. Some stories were funny: Suryaman's midnight lamentations that he was going to die, he was never going to be able to pee again, he was going to rupture. Most of us can sympathize that bladder infections are acute adventures in discomfort, but, knowing how responsive they are to antibiotics, few of us imagine death by them. All such stories were lessons in difference. Tamang people's experience included endless examples of loved ones who were alive and well one day, then suddenly dead from something arguably not distinguishable from a cold, a stomachache, or a fever. Even if the people of Stupahill tried to pursue medical attention for all of their afflictions, there wouldn't be the money, the medicines, the doctors or nurses, or the facilities. It should not have surprised me that the Tamang would begin death lamentations as soon as anyone took to bed. I should have been thankful, not irritated, that women friends would offer to come sleep with me if I got sick when David was away, that they would sit on my sleeping pallet to keep me company, to keep watch. I, of course, wanted nothing so much as to be left alone, to pull the blanket over my head and sleep until I recovered. Therein lay our difference: I lay down in the oversimple confidence that I would get up again; they did not. [Emphatically] Mter that, I'd go every day to apply more medicine .... Every day, I'd go! TULARAM: To be with your mother? NHANU: Yes. Mter all that, then, after doing all that, after celebrating Tshe Chhu,32 after falling sick myself again, I hadn't gone to her for, well, for one, maybe two, months I hadn't gone. I had only finally just gotten to see Mother just NHANU:

32. The largest festival in the village, a nine-day dance drama festival.

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the other day for the Chait Dasain Festival.33 I hadn't been to see her for a month, since the month before, the month of Phalgun. For Chait Dasain Festival, I had gone again; carrying some food for her, I went. Mother said, "Oh! I thought you were dead! I thought they said you had died! And yet, here you are, coming up to see me!" That's what she said to me. The affection in Nhanu's account is evident: to Tamang, affection is marked by material care, by gifts and visits. When livelihoods are based on constant hard work and hard choices always must be made about food, clothes, and medicine, to love someone is literally to care for them. It means doing demanding work for them, sharing precious luxuries with them, dividing basic essentials with them. Motherlove is quintessentially caring in these terms; Nhanu is repaying that debt in kind. Underlying this affection, however, is the knowledge that what is given to one cannot also be given to another, in part because there is usually too little to go around. As often as Tamang women spoke of their mothers' love for them, or of their own love for their mothers, they spoke of this lack: What, after all, did they really have to give? What, in the end, was more likely than failure? Neglect haunts Tamang tales of mother-daughter love, like the folksong about wild garlic that several women sang to or told me: Lha hai lof34 On the tops of the mountains there came to be growing some wild garlic greens. "Go cut some!" [said the mother]. "I just might die; I won't go," [said the daughter]. Mother and I abandoned each other.

Wild garlic is an uncultivated treat that grows in precarious places. It can only be collected with difficulty and not inconsiderable danger. The mother's request acts as a test of her daughter's devotion, a test the daughter fails. The last sentence, however, is complex: because of the uninflected word order in the Tamang, neither subject nor object is indicated, as would usually be the case. The sentence-nga-ni ama yenala--literally means "I (emphatic) mother abandoned." In ordinary Tamang sentences it would be clear who abandoned whom; the pronoun of the one doing the abandoning is modified by the postposition eke, so that nga-ni ama-che yenala would mean "Mother abandoned even me," and nga-ni-che ama yenala would mean "Even I abandoned Mother." Here, then, each is grammatically abandoning the other. Other versions of this song include a different final line: nga-ni ama hinala, "I

33· A lesser celebration, tied to the all-Nepal festival cycle, when sisters and daughters return to their parents' and brothers' homes bringing gifts offood. 34· This opening phrase may not have meaning other than to set the tune or rhythm.

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(emphatic) mother am," or "I am [the or a] mother." This equivalence of mother and daughter heightens the ambiguity of who left whom. I think we must assume it is intended. The love between Nhanu and her mother is carved from this precipice of ever-imminent mutual abandonment. Is her mind slipping a little? Or did she just decide to say that since you hadn't been to see her? NHANU: She may have heard how, here, they were saying that I was so sick that I might die. Maybe she thought she'd heard them say that I'd died. [Tularam chuckles.] OLD MAN PASSING BY: Whose dying tale are you telling now? NHANU: Our mother's tale.35

TULARAM:

The death of parents and a woman's old age "Real suffering ... " says Purngi, who describes herself as lucky in every other way, "only one's father and mother dying is real suffering. Only after your mother dies is it really hard. And, when sons and daughters die, sorrow follows." The loss of parents or children is hard to bear emotionally, but losing parents also has a direct impact on Tamang women's material well-being. As long as their parents, and especially their mothers, are alive, Tamang women have both a refuge and a vital resource: they can always go home if hardship strikes, even for extended periods. Similarly, they have enduring claims on family wealth, not in the form of any specified inheritance, but as continuing gifts and loans. Although siblings can never quite replace parents, they become each other's last resort after their parents' deaths. "Where will I go? What will I do? Where will I say what? Whose place will I go to?" laments Tikiri. "I don't have a father. I don't have a mother. I don't have older sisters. I don't have younger sisters. I don't have older brothers. I don't have younger brothers. Where will I go? What will I do?" Death could fracture her hopes for love, refuge, and protection as well as for more tangible comforts-inheritance, food, clothing, loans, recourse against bad marriages. Without her own kin, a Tamang woman became, like Tschirto, whose widowed mother left her in the care of adult brothers, "adrift ... with nothing." A woman needed to be able to turn to her parents for both emotional and material care. Tschirto said, "If I had my father and mother, I'd live with them, leaving everything! Then I could speak of happiness or comfort! If I had Father and Mother! With a father and mother, I'd go about wearing nice clothes, eating tasty foods. But Father died when I was still little. Mother left

35· A section is omitted here as I inquired whether Nhanu had learned to spin, knit, and weave from her mother, which led to a discussion of what things she had learned when she was younger and what things when she was older.

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me behind. How then could there be any question of joy or ease?!" Tschirto and Mlangdzom, themselves half-sisters (the widowed mother of one married the widower father of the other), both felt the hardship of their orphanhood acutely. Neither had been given any dzo-property and neither felt she could continue to work the family property to claim her annual khala phyapa-share. Neither felt she could count on much by way of gifts or loans from her surviving parent or brothers. Above all, neither felt she had a home or advocates to turn to in times of adversity. The Tamang women of these narratives, as we have seen in Nhanu's account, reserved some of their most poignant language for their mothers. Nhanu's story of caring for her mother in the face of her brothers' neglect was a much-told tale in the community. Many others spoke of the unreliability of sons and the special love of daughters. Tschirto, Mlangdzom, and Tikiri tell heart-wrenching stories of their separation by widowhood, remarriage, and relocation. The youngest woman, Sukumaya, tells of not wanting to leave her parents' home to marry at all. Even the oldest women-Phurko, Hrisang, and Setar-who had lost their mothers many years before, still grieved. The bond between mothers and daughters is described by these Tamang women in ways that would warm the hearts of many feminist (and other) theorists. "A mother, well," said Purngi, "a mother must give birth to you. She has to love you, has to care for you. She has to clean up all the shit and piss. I guess a mother's love is always there. She has to nurse you. A mother's care is enough for me. Me, now, my mother took good enough care of me." A mother's love, from this perspective, is forged, displayed, and tested in the daily physical care she gives her children. It is described in sensual, emotional terms, as when Tschirto lamented, "I'll never know Mother's warmth. I'll never get to taste her." In her old age, though, it is primarily on her children that a woman must depend. Women without surviving children suffer. They may adopt a son and bring in a daughter-in-law, as did Mhojyo's mother. If there are no other claimants, they might keep a daughter with them and bring in a son-in-law to work their own property; or, as Hrisang did, they might simply go live with a daughter and son-in-law. None of these solutions is thought to be as desirable as having living sons and daughters-in-law to care for you. "But," as Santu pointed out, "even if it's said that a son will care for you, who knows how any son will turn out?" Some of the women advocated building up and retaining control of enough personal property to take care of themselves until they died. Indeed, all the oldest women who spoke with me had, to varying degrees, done just that. Mondzom lived entirely on her own resources, with some help from the two young granddaughters she was fostering. Phurko and Hrisang, too, negotiated their final care with leverage from their own properties. But all the women also invested heavily in personal relationshipswith parents, sisters and brothers, and especially children-to protect themselves against adversity. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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Familial relationships and resources provided some of the main avenues to well-being chronicled by the Tamang women. Without those avenues, life was hard; even with them, it was not ever easy. But, as Purngi observed, ''When has it ever really been easy for peasant farmers?" With supportive parents in her youth, brothers and sisters in middle life, and devoted children in her old age-and with lots of work-a Tamang woman could hope to live with some security and freedom from want. Nhanu's stories of her relationships with her brothers, her care of her mother, and the cultivation of her own wealth are a record of the strategic lifelines that matter to Tamang women, as well as a testimony to their resilience and energy. Facts and the forces underlying them Often, these narratives seemed to wander from one thing to the next, but each woman had very definite places she wanted to take me. Nhanu's account culminated in the following summary. The afternoon was winding down; her family was returning from the day's activities and neighbors passed by, stopping in to see what we were doing. Perhaps because she realized that we were soon going to have to stop, Nhanu restated her story, emphasizing the same facts about her life in almost the same order but often with even more eloquence than in the first telling. OLD MAN: So much talk.... What a tale of ''Who?" and ''What?" and ''Who Needs What?!" NHANU: [Laughing] We seem to have filled your tape recorder up with sorrows, filled it up with joys! I don't know anything! Sweaters, oh, and even more so crocheted sashes ... I don't see well enough to knit anymore. Someone else has to weave now. TULARAM: Oh ... well ... when you were a child living with your father and mother, were you content to wear the same clothes as everyone else, or did you want to have nicer clothes, better food ... NHANU: [Interrupting loudly] I never got anything! I was never given anything nice! Me, well, I, for one, was never given anything you could call especially nice. Once a year, only, they would give me one blouse-one cheap black blouse! I go around, wearing that blouse. Of course, I don't need anything fancy! I don't ever wear nicely woven gya-overclothes, only cheap purchased guniya-cloths.36 What's the difference, anyway, all I get to do anyway is work in them! I never had the op-

36. Nhanu is highlighting the differences between these kinds of overcloths: gya-cloths were tightly woven in the village in traditional plaid designs; guniya-cloths were cheaper purchased cloth, gaudily floral during Nhanu's childhood but dotted like a swiss, red and white or red and blue.

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portunity to get all dressed up and walk around contentedly. Even when I lived with Father and Mother, I didn't have the chance. KSM: Even when you had finished your labor exchanges,37 you didn't go walking around with friends? NHANU: Oh! I would do so much exchange labor! So much! I would herd the animals and then still have to go off to do exchange labor. And that wasn't all, either. Since I was the firstborn child, I had to everything, by myself, all the time. All my younger brothers were nothing but little crying babies. After me eight younger brothers were born! ARROWFORCE: You were the only girl. NHANU: Yes. BELOVED'S-WIFE: [Interrupting the conversation] Has Dusky3s eaten yet or not? NHANU: Who knows? How would I know whether Dusky's eaten or notshe's gone offto the spring. BELOVED's WIFE: [Looking at the food remaining in the pot] It looks like someone in this house didn't come to eat at mealtime .... NHANU: [Picking up her earlier thoughts] I was an only child. I was all alone! 39 I was the firstborn, and I was the lone daughter. I don't have any elder sisters or any younger ones either. KSM: Tell me, across over there in your own village, did anyone get involved in trade in order to buy and wear things of gold, jewelry, and all ... or, what did people do, that is, how did they manage to put things together, little by little, so that they'd have jewelry to wear? NHANU: [Emphatically] Me, I never had the chance to trade or parade around! I never did anything that way! I had goats ... for my dzo-property ... my goat-dzo! And even those goats, they weren't given to me by mother; they were goats given to me by my grandmother, from up the mountain there, on my father's side of the family. Sometimes I would sell the goat kids; most of the time I would herd them. I herded them, and after herding them, like that, I came to have 37· Much Tamang agricultural labor is done in cooperative work groups. People, mostly women, from several houses get together, pool their labor, and work in each of their fields in succession. 38. Nhanu's oldest son's oldest child. 39· Note that Nhanu calls herself an only child, even though she has eight brothers. When asked how many siblings (thet) they have, Tamang typically tell how many same-sex siblings they have. Although it is, of course, possible to find out the total number of children ("How many altogether? Elder brothers, younger brothers, elder sisters, younger sisters?"), common usage seems to indicate that people think of siblings in separate sexed groupings. It might be noted, too, that this echoes the separation of the family groupings mheme and phepe by the sex of the parent.

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thirteen goats. So, in that way, I came to have goats to leave behind at my parents' house.4o Then, another time, when my firstborn younger brother's daughter seemed like she might die .... Mter he said, "My daughter looks like she might die!" he bought one of my goats for five rupees and sacrificed it so that she would get well. In those days, you could get a pretty big goat for five rupees. So after that, after selling that goat, then, well, sometimes I sold a nanny goat; sometimes I sold a kid. Mter doing all that, I bought these little flower dungri-earrings. 41 Well, actually, it's a tale of my mother's adding a little money to what I'd had and getting those earrings and giving them to me, too .... But even if that's true, it wasn't as if anyone gave me any other dzo-property. I wasn't given any other dzo-property. KSM: You know how some people get given ten or fifteen gallon-measures of grain every year, no matter what, from their own families .... You weren't given any grain to build your dzo-property? NHANU: [Sharply] Hardly! Well, sometimes nine or ten gallon-measures .... Sometimes I scavenged the leftover grains after harvesting the fields at home. Sometimes that got me a little-nine or ten gallon-measures, maybe. Then, well, I loaned out a little here and there, at interest that would be itself paid in grain. Then, too, now and again, I trafficked in little businesses-like the selling of chickens and little things like that. We children, and, well ... my ... well, you know my fourth born younger brother and I combined our grains. That is, well, after my parents divided up the household, when I was just coming down here to Stupahill to live permanently, I gave eighteen whole gallon-measures of grain to my fourthborn younger brother. 42 And ... well, I gave ten gallon-measures to my fifthborn younger brother, too. So, well, among the things I brought down here from my own parents' house were seventy-two gallon-measures of millet. I mean, I didn't actually bring the seventy-two measures of millet themselves down here; I sold them and, after selling them, brought the money down. That, and a little more, here and there .... Well, my dzo-property-here or there-it's mostly just talk. It's not as if I have any stash wrapped up and

40. Presumably left behind only temporarily, until she and her husband had built their own house. 41. Popular among young women at the time of this research, dungri-earrings are floral-design earplugs worn in the middle of the ear and were among the first kinds of jewelry most women got. 42. Presumably so that he would keep it safe for her, or perhaps even invest it for her-in any case, Nhanu expected that at least the original amount of grain (or equivalent value) would be hers to reclaim sometime in the future.

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away somewhere. All I ever did was eat my fair share and work as a herder. I worked in exchange labor and as a herder. That's what I went around doing. Anything that my younger brothers didn't give me, I left alone; I didn't just take little bits here and there to make up my own dzo-property the way some others do. Even from what they did give me, I would, well ... I'd weave and give one or another of them a turban: I'd buy the thread and, after buying the thread, I'd weave and give one of them a turban. I never said, "This is mine," or "Not only that, but you all haven't even given me any money either." Even so, whenever I had a little, well, it would please me to weave a turban and give it to one of my brothers. I'd weave for them because it was my nature; I liked weaving for them. They never had to ask me. I'd say, "Take and wear this! You should look good, like fortune has smiled on you!" That's the way I am; that's the way my heart and mind work. I never once said to any of my younger brothers, "Where and when will I get mine?" KSM: Things today are different, are they? NHANU: Different! I'll say! Then you could get twelve skeins of silk thread for one half-rupee coin. Of silk. TULARAM: In those days, whatever else you might say, you had to give to them. Now, though, all your younger brothers are married; you, too, are married here .... Now, what's happened; how has it become among you after you all married? NHANU: Now, each is alone. Each of us is set up separately, one here, the other there; each has hardened toward the other. [She laughs.] TULARAM: [Laughing] Hardened! Separated and apart! THE LAMBU: You used to be able to get-you know, the good quality Bombay thread, well spun, the thread used for men's white overclothes-you used to be able to get that thread for three twenty-five-paisa coins for twenty-two skeins .... NHANU: . . . for twenty-two skeins! ... THE LAMBU: With three twenty-five-paisa coms you could even buy enough-you could go and get twenty-two skeins and then go ahead and weave the long white overclothes for a man. You could get enough to weave even a ten-hand-long43 men's overcloth. I know; it used to be that way in my own lifetime. NHANU: You used to be able to get twelve skeins of silk thread for one halfrupee coin. Other kinds-you could get a skein for only an anna. At that price, I wove at least two women's long, plaid overcloths-maybe more. Nowadays, you can't get it at that price anymore; that was a long time ago.

43· About three yards.

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They would give you twenty-six skeins of the white thread-for weaving men's everyday overclothes-for three twenty-five-paisa coins in Kathmandu. NHANU: Well-in those days, money was expensive; goods were cheap. Now, well, money is cheap, but things are expensive .... THE LAMBU: When I first went to Kathmandu, well, I carried nine gallonmeasures of corn and, after carrying that corn, had gone to Kathmandu. From those nine gallon-measures of corn, I got five half-rupee coins and one twenty-five-paisa coin! The twenty-five-paisa coin was enough to buy me food for the whole trip, and with the five half-rupee coins I brought back five jackets for my five siblings to wear! [He chuckles quietly.] TULARAM: But, say, now, Elder Sister, you're setting all your sons up wellwith house and lands for each-and you're sending your daughters away in marriage ... then what's left before your own time is up, before your dharma is worked out?

THE LAMBU:

To the Stupahill Tamang, karma is that which foretells what will happen during this life. Accumulated over many lifetimes, relative good and bad karma regulate rebirth. Dharma is doing what is right and fulfilling your obligations justly. Stupahill Tamang follow Buddha dharma, the morality ordained in the oaths of the primordial Buddhas. In my interviews with Tamang women, the words dharma and karma appear with the greatest frequency in discussions of the women's own and their children's marriages. Parents give daughters life and give them in marriage; parents give daughters their karma. A daughter's duty is to be born and to marry, ideally following her parents' wishes; a daughter's dharma is to accept the karma her parents give her. A mother's karma is to have or not have living children; her dharma is to see all her children safely and comfortably through to their own marriages. It is almost exclusively in these contexts that these women mention karma and dharma. Each time karma or dharma is introduced, it is balanced by expressions of caring, of finding love, or of hurt at losing someone dear. Dutifully following the path ordained by birth and one's parents is just; and moral behavior contains some of its own rewards. But virtue is not all the happiness these women seek. They also hope to find people who will care for them along the way. Now, well, to all others I say, my dharma is all filled out; my karma is all worked out. Mter dividing the property, sitting there eating and saying, "Lo! This is your share!" I'll say, "This is your share of the household wealth," and then there will only be the lastborn ones left. Then, my dharma and my karma will be done. Only my obligations to my lastborn son and daughter are left; I have to take care of those two. I sent off my two elder daughters with large public feasts at their wedNHANU:

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dings; in the same way, my two elder sons, oh, there was such feasting at their weddings, and at their first haircuttings. 44 You should have seen how we did those first haircuttings! Now, ifl fulfill my obligations to those two lastborn-my son and daughter-well, my dharma will be all worked out. There's nothing else I have to do. I'll tell each of them, "Here's this much land for you. Here's this much household wealth for you." Then, after telling each of them of their shares, well, whether they find they are happy with each of their shares or not, my dharma will be all worked out now, won't it? Now, well, oh so much ... well ... that's it. They won't get anything more, even if they say they want to separate off from the main household. All I can say is: "Lo! You get this much; and you get this much." That's all that's left to be said now. No matter what anyone says, that's all that's left to be done now. Throughout these accounts, hunger, scant clothing, illness, and death were repeatedly named as the measure of how much hardship or ease a woman had found in her life. Even comfort was described in relation to hardship: "We never suffered from famine" (Tasyi); "Oh, as for clothes to wear, I've had clothes to wear" (Tschirto); "I've never been hit by illness" (Phurko). Each woman described her own difficulties relative to those of others in the community. As readers, we might never have had to deal with famine, nakedness, or epidemic, but we have a shared understanding of things like these, as part of the human condition. Through our sense that we share these facts of life with the Tamang, we construct a shared humanity built of old, known bricks. But the women talk with almost equal frequency of sources of joy and pain that are less immediately apparent to us as readers from half a world away. These sources invite us to expand our definition of the human condition; they add new bricks to the edifice of human possibility we build with and through each other. Some of these-if I may continue to abuse the metaphor-bricks are easily translated from their original Tamang context to ours. For example, as anyone who has visited Nepal knows, Tamang are the traditional porters of all goods throughout central Nepal. Thus it is both literally and figuratively that Hrisang exclaims, "My body had carried loads! As much as it could carry. As much or more. Now I've become an old woman sitting to the side. I only carry little loads now. That's the hardship I've found." Among the more distinctively Tamang hardships and pleasures, then, are 44· The first haircutting is a ritual celebrated when a child is about three. It is the first time a child's wider circle of kin is called in. It is interesting that Nhanujuxtaposes first haircutting and marriage: ritual haircutting involves the parents' opposite sex siblings (father's sister and mother's brother); the same categories of kin as will later become important when the boy marries his mother's brother's daughter or father's sister's son. NHANU: PARSING A LIFE, NAMING WHAT MATTERS

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some that are simpler to interpret and translate, perhaps because they are more concrete. They are not familiar, and understanding them requires some effort, but it is never too far a stretch for us to appreciate their importance. Other facts in these accounts bespeak more subtly the very different lives of these Tamang women. These are elusive because to know them we need to move ourselves toward the speaker, not move the speaker toward us. To understand, for example, the importance of Nhanu's brothers to her, we need to look less for the surface affinities between her brothers and ours, and more at the social realities that create Tamang brother-sister relationships. Perhaps because our own mothers are important to us, understanding Tamang mother-child relationships may appear deceptively transparent: we must resist eliding Tamang mothers into all mothers or a universal generic motherhood. If we try to hear Nhanu's words as much as possible through her own history, we enrich ourselves even as she, in having the words put down on paper, enriches her children.

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Purngi's family. Photo formally posed by subjects.

(top) Tikiri. Photo semiposed by subject. (bottom) Weaving a syama-skirt

(top) Phurko and Hrisang wa tching festival dances in Stupahill (bottom) House, porch, yard

(top) Setar with trail beer. Photo formally posed by subject. (bottom) Setar leading women, including Nhanu, in line dance and singing

(top) J yomo's and Nhanu's husb ands survey millet being winnowed. The house David H olmberg and I lived in can be seen in the background. (bottom) Winnowing millet injyomo's courtyard

(left) Tschirto's younger sister wearing dungri (flower earrings) popular among younger women then (right) Sukumaya carrying a pongjug ofliquor for cousin-brother's first haircutting

(left) Mlangdzom's mheme (family circle). Photo formally posed by subjects. (right) Tschirto and her newborn daughter, Phurko, with Tashi and daughter watching. Photo semi posed by subject.

(top) Purngi carrying a tray of offerings to festival dances. Photo semiposed by subject. (bottom) Mhojyo and Santu on the trail by the river

Nhanu spinning wool

(top) Tashi. Photo semiposed by subject. (bottom) Nhanu's husband,Jyomo's husband, Suryaman, and Purngi's husband wearing marigold garlands given by their sisters. Photo posed by subjects.

(top) Jyomo working in her courtyard (bottom) Nhanu and her daughter on Guptiswar pilgrimage. Photo semiposed by subjects.

(top) Mondzom, whose nhali-plate earrings (worn by married wome n) were among the largest in the village. All photographs by D. Holmberg/ K. March. (bottom) View of the Stupahill region from Queenspause looking up the Trisuli River valley toward the northern border

IV

JYOMO'S LIFE OF WORK

What's the matter with me? I don't think about finding good, sweet things to eat like others do. Or about nice things to wear. Only one thing: "Will this work or that work not get done? What work needs to be done?" That's the o nly thing I think about. J yomo, Stupahill, 1977

TULARAM: Tell us, "This is how I've gone about; this is how many calendaryears I've seen .... " JYOMO: I don't know how old I am in calendar-years. To know how many calendar-years-oh!-I only know in cycle-years. KSM: You know the cycle-year? JYOMO: I'm of the cycle-year of the monkey-monkey. This time, well, what can I do? This time I will have lived to reach four, even almost five of the twelve-year cycles. That's a lot! I have nearly achieved my fifth twelve-year cycle. 1

Jyomo is the wife of the eldest of the three brothers who are Mondzom's surviving grandsons. Because of her senior position in the sublineage, she is Arhagren (Eldest Mother) or Anyigren (Eldest Aunt-mother-in-law) to much of the village. She is an extremely hard worker and frequently undertakes the most arduous tasks herself rather than ask anyone else to do them. She was sought in her current marriage chiefly because of the household's need for

1. Elided he re are discussio ns of J yomo's age according to the various calendrical systems and of her n atal kin, the ir birth orders, and their d eaths.

more laborers. Reserved but influential, Jyomo has become an astute manager of one of the most complex households in the village. Although she is not by any means a gloomy person,Jyomo clearly takes the events of life more seriously than many. Her first marriage was a very unhappy one and ended in divorce. When she married into her present husband's household, she had no close kin of her own there, or, indeed, anywhere nearby. When she arrived, her husband already had one wife, whom he apparently kept trying to convince to move to live with him, without much success; during this time, his relations with Jyomo seem to have been often strained. Now that she is well settled as his only wife,Jyomo maintains warm social ties of her own in many directions. She enjoys having her married daughters or her sister's daughter visit. She is actively interested in other people's news, although she is herself restrained when it comes to gossip. In all her relations, she seems genuinely concerned about others, their doings, and their difficulties. Her husband is a prominent force in the village and in the entire region, both because of his position at the head of a powerful lineage and because of his own political energies. Jyomo sometimes seems to stand in his shadow; certainly, her manner is much less imposing than his. She seldom speaks first and rarely argues. She is not given to the sharp banter that arises between the other two brothers and their spouses. Even when directly criticized by her husband,Jyomo rarely rises to his bait or engages in a verbal argument. This should not be mistaken for any weakness on her part: even in the face of her husband's authority, she nevertheless plies very much her own way. As do most Tamang wives, she controls the household purse strings, and she doesn't submit easily to her husband's ideas of where the money should go. She tempers his political activity by rarely relinquishing as much money as he says he will need. Through all the waves of turmoil she has seen in her household, her community, and the entire Stupahill Tamang region, Jyomo has continued on her own way, utterly reliably and more or less unperturbed. Those who have her as an ally know they can rely on her unfailingly. Those with whom she does not agree are never confronted openly, but the disagreement remains there, unforgotten. Through everything, Jyomo shows a sharp awareness of her social obligations and sense of moral duty. It was Jyomo who extended to me my first major social invitation-to accompany her on a somewhat lengthy local pilgrimage-and she remained a thoughtful senior advisor throughout my stays in the region. I acquired my first local identity in her house: David Holmberg came to be called a son there, and I then becameJyomo's eldest daughter-in-law. Jyomo's interest in this life history project was keen from the beginning, but as with all things that interested her, she listened quietly to talk from all quarters, carefully collecting information until she was fully satisfied. Then she approached me herself one day to say that that afternoon was a good one 126

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for her to tell her story. It was a sad one, she said, that should be told but that would not make the hearer happy. If I would be ready, she would come to my house in the late afternoon and we could record. Present during Jyomo's narration, were: Jyomo KSM (courtesy daughter-in-law and younger clansister tojyomo) Tularam (classificatory younger brother to Jyomo)

An unhappy marriage ends in divorce When I was twelve calendar-years old, I had been carried off to Firestone. Mter the wedding was done to one who was only twelve, I stayed for eight calendar-years. Then he brought in another wife. He would be contemptuous of me; I'd be beaten. I wouldn't be given food to eat, or clothes to wear. In order to endure, after enduring, I didn't stay. I came here. I would have stayed there in Firestone, but ... every day, I'd get beaten, even on the trail. He would be jealous and cast the evil eye on me. "Go find yourself a husband you like," he'd say. With that kind of insulting talk, I didn't stay. That would have been eight calendar-years after the wedding had been done.

JYOMO:

It didn't take me long in the Tamang community to learn that, although most Tamang women and men spend much of their adult life in stable and companionable marriages, divorce and remarriage are extremely common. Divorce is especially likely in young, childless first marriages. Almost all Tamang men and women will remarry if their partner dies, no matter how old they are. Among their Parbatiya neighbors, both divorce and the remarriage of widows have been strongly censured traditionally; these secondary unions (as the literature calls them) were definitely second-rate. Such ideas contributed strongly to orthodox Parbatiya disdain for Tamang and their marriage practices. Since the restoration of the monarchy in 1951 and even more so since the People's Movement of 1990, some sectors of Nepali society have been agitating for legal and social reform that would extend to Parbatiya women the same marital freedoms that Tamang women have always exercised. Tamang marriage is more than the casual or transient union of two people, however; women and men neither enter nor leave marriages casually. There are complex arrangements for undoing marital alliances. Everyone I asked said that dissolving Tamang marriages involved a public ritual called "breaking of the sticks." Couples who were determined to separate would get a third party to hold a stick that had been scored in two places; if husband and wife each both broke off one end, the marriage was finished. Some people said that the broken pieces of stick would be placed in the JYOMO 'S LIFE OF WORK

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house rafters, so that they could be rejoined should the couple decide to remarry. Neither I nor anyone I asked, however, had actually witnessed any real sticks being broken or cached away in attics. The breaking of the sticks seems to be a conventional phrase and metaphoric explanation but not, as far as I could ascertain, a real practice. Whenever a marriage is terminated, public settlement of what are called the wedding expenses must be made. If the woman is the instigator of the divorce she (or her representative) must pay her husband between one and one hundred fifty Nepali rupees (in 1977) as dola, said to be the amount he would have to spend to find and marry another wife. If the man wants to end the marriage, it costs him more. If his wife has children, he must divide his property and provide her children with their share of the inheritance; even if there are no children and she is unopposed to the divorce, she is entitled to up to five hundred Nepali rupees as warchya settlement. If adultery can be proven, the adulterant parties must pay the defrauded ones. Thus, if a married woman runs off with another man, she (or her new husband, or her own parents) must pay. If a married man takes up with another wife and his first wife is neither willing to become a co-wife, nor in a position to claim inheritances for minor children, she can still demand the adultery settlement of him (or his family, or his new wife and/ or her family). Typically, adultery settlements are somewhat steeper and more bitterly negotiated than simple repayment (or prepayment) of wedding expenses. In all divorce cases, all parties reclaim their own property. A woman is entitled to take anything she brought in as her dzo-property, including any offspring oflivestock, interest collected on loans, or new property she obtained herself. But she must leave behind any goods acquired from her husband or his family, especially any gold jewelry they might have given her. Subsequent marriages are as respectable as original ones, regardless of the circumstances of the divorce, but negotiations can be bitter and tempers hot, so neither divorce nor remarriage is lightly undertaken. Mter breaking the marriage sticks, well, I came here. And then, well, that's how I had lived. In those earlier times, that's how it seems I lived. I couldn't tolerate my husband. I stayed even though I couldn't stand him. I would continue working in his fields; I'd keep on taking care of his animals. I stayed and carried on in that way; even though I couldn't stand it, I stayed. Even though I was beaten, I stayed. I stayed on and on in that way. For six or seven calendar-years, then, after eight calendar-years, I went and came here. I worked hard there: I cut fodder and firewood; I worked in the irrigated fields; whatever I could do. I kept on and on doing things myself, after saying to myself it didn't matter whether I could stand it or not, I kept on working in the fields. In order to fulfill my allotted field tasks, myself, I

JYOMO:

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stayed on working. But I couldn't stand it. But, then, after staying on like that, I went and came here. Now, then, after breaking the divorce sticks, this time I really stayed, didn't I, after reaching here in marriage? There, working and working in the fields, what? Well after all, my girlhood friends were there. Even in someone else's village, there were people I knew. I even went to cut fodder and firewood with someone else's children. I even went to the forest; I even worked in hard field labor. With my girlhood friends, there was so much affection, but now, where have they all gone? To someone else's village place. Not to your own village place. That was Firestone. I stayed because of the love of my girlhood friends. Nowadays, one isjundar's wife in Daughters' Pleasure, and the other was Old Sol tang's fourth born younger daughter. Well, I would go around with them with so much affection. Everywhere we went-to the other side of the va,lley, or this side, even in the forest, herding or whatever-there was so much affection with them. With the one called that Old Soltang's daughter, too, I went wandering all over with her so lovingly. I stayed a long time. Nowadays she's called K.P.'s junior wife, or something. Whatever she's called, whosoever's wife, now her house is way over across there. I stayed then because of that woman's great love for me, there in Firestone. Nowadays, she's K. P.'s junior wife, there in Earth's Hole. TULARAM: She's of Earth's Hole ... KSM: In Earth's Hole? JYOMO: She's reached Earth's Hole in marriage. She went down to Earth's Hole. In Firestone, while we were all in Firestone, it was with those twono one else showed me any affection-but with those two-with Old Soltang's daughter. ... Nowadays she's the one who's reached Earth's Hole in marriage; she's called K. P.'s wife ... and with that other one-with those two there was so much affection, going to the forest, going to collect firewood, going to work in the fields. It was with those two that I went around lovingly. "Lingma Song"2 [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! I will purify for the local village divinities, for the mother earth, with incense! Hya hwai lingma! 3 Come! Lingma! Purifying for the mountain divinities [requires] juniper incense. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! 2. A work song to which Jyomo referred. Jyomo is adamant that she does not sing, so we arranged to have this recorded and added afterwards. 3· The "Hya Hwai" (or "Song of the Hand") is a mythic creation song; lingma is the category of work songs. For a more detailed study of the "Hya Hwai," see March ( 1998).

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Purifying for the lowland divinities [requires] pine incense. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Make the golden bright young men's mouths open [in song]! Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Make the golden bright young women's mouths open [in song]! Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Set the stalks of corn straight! Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Pull the stalks ofweeds4 straight out! Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Purifying for the mountain divinities [requires] juniper incense. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Purifying for the lowland divinities [requires] pine incense. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Make the golden bright young men clever and agile. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense! Make the golden bright young women's mouths open [in song]. Hya hwai lingma! Come! Lingma! [Name and] purify with incense! Purify with incense! I will purify with incense!

In that way, I would stay even in a place where I was beaten, even though my girlhood friends would say, "If you were to leave, it would be OK, you know." All the while I went about there, my heart hurt. I would be beaten and I'd cry. Someone else would beat me and I'd cry. It would have been better to go away than to stay that way. I said to myself it was an intolerable place to be in since they beat me daily and, even so, I stayed on

JYOMO:

4· The rhyming contrast in the original Tamang is between makai dongbo (trees of com) and mraki dongbo (trees of weeds) and is far more satisfying.

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those eight calendar-years. And, then, well, that's how I went and came down here. I've stayed down here ever since. But, well, when I was living with Father and Mother, I'd go around with my girlhood friends. Nowadays there's Syipa's Wife's Mother, for one, and, there, our uncle-father-in-law-the one called Middle Muge ... TULARAM: Middle Muge? JYOMO: Yes. Nowadays, that one's Partap's mother. With that one, too, with them-my daughter-in-law and my husband's elder sister-! would go around lovingly. I didn't go around with others much. I didn't have a lot of girlfriends to go around with lovingly. With that one, that Partap's Mother for one and, from the hamlet below, Syipa's Wife's Mother for another, I went around lovingly .... [She drinks from the liquor I've offered her, but when I offer more says:] That's enough. KSM: [Pressing a bit] A little more? They say your head will ache if you don't ... JYOMO: No more now; I'll drink some more in a bit. Hospitality work All Tamang social events aspire to involve food and drink. Tamang people can and do drop by one another's houses casually, without any expectations of eating or drinking-especially when they are neighbors who see each other daily-but an offer of food and drink is the more common experience of social visits. Because I had asked for the special favor of these recording sessions, it was appropriate for me to have drinks, snacks, and tobacco on hand. The preferred drinks were ji, a fermented millet beer, and mksi, a clear liquor very like Japanese sake, distilled from the beer mash. Tamang preferred ji on a hot afternoon after working in the fields. It was served by whisking water with the beer mash, and without straining out the mash, so it was filling as well as refreshing. It was also considered slightly more informal. Raksi, however, could be served on any occasion. It had about the potency of wine and, because it was not mixed with water, did not present the otherwise inevitable risks associated with drinking unboiled water anywhere in Nepal. I found it smooth tasting from the first, and although I welcomed a bowl before dinner in the evening, I never entirely accustomed myself to the practice of drinking it first thing in the morning on festival days. Raksi was served in the small bronze drinking bowls that were part of the symbolic core of a woman's inheritance. The drink was to be served cold in summer, heated in winter, and accompanied by some kind of ku-a spicy snack of beans, popcorn, vegetables, or meat. In the mid-1g7os, it was also common practice to share cigarettes. In Tamang language, tobaccotamaku-is also called tam-ki-ku, "the accompaniment of talk," and the bub-

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bling of water pipes regularly punctuated conversation on porches throughout the community. Although few people smoked an entire cigarette by themselves, cigarettes with such alluring names as Hope and Rhinoceros (the cheapest) and Yak (the fanciest) were then welcome signs of hospitality. By the 1ggos, a local anti-smoking campaign had cut down on tobacco consumption considerably and tea was available in the village as an alternative drink. To many who have worked in Nepal, the idea of a village without chiya, the sweet milk tea that is found throughout the subcontinent, is almost inconceivable. The Stupahill Tamang, however, did not drink it in their homes. The leaves, spices, and sugar needed to make tea were luxuries beyond the cash means of almost everyone. Instead, they would offer home-brewed jibeer or raksi-liquor to those who drank alcohol and hot, fresh milk or cooled buttermilk to those who did not. Proper etiquette involved offering at least one refill of drink and, usually, a second serving of the snack. People who didn't want to drink or eat much learned to leave their bowls largely untouched until after the refill round. Whether because of the need for grain for food, or the effort involved in brewing and distilling, or social pressures against excessive consumption, drunkenness in Stupahill was rare and almost exclusively the domain of young men on festival days. One bowl or two, accompanied by a spicy snack, was the Tamang avenue to easy conversation, relaxation, and companionship. I would go to the forest with those girlhood friends, and to do exchange labor in the fields. We'd go around working. That's how we went around, wherever, whatever work there was to do. Lovingly though all that was, I didn't go to festivals the same as all my friends. Oh, I got to go and see now and again: I would go to see Red Powder Festival for one, and I went to see Cedarforest Festival once. But I can tell you that I didn't go to festivals all over the place like they do nowadays, not when I was young. I only went after coming up here in marriage, like to the Horse Festival! But at that time I didn't go to festivals. I didn't go to see them; I didn't even go to see them. Then it wasn't like nowadays, when friends say, "Lo! Lo! Let's go!" and they go off. My friends, well, they weren't like that. I'd go see that Red Powder Festival for just a little while, and that Mud Festival for example, or Cedarforest Festival for another. Those were the festivals I'd been in a position to see. I saw those; I didn't see any other festivals, but I saw those. That's how I went around. If I called them friends, it was because we would work together and, finding ourselves working together, we'd exchange labor. Sometimes we'd go to the forest to cut fodder or firewood. All we'd do was work in the fields and exchange labor. That's all.

JYOMO:

Tamang are peasant farmers, and, as Tschirto said, "Up here, we farming people have to do so much-so much!-work." They support themselves by a 132

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mix of subsistence farming, herding, trading, weaving, wage labor, exchange labor, borrowing, lending, and sharing. All Tamang are well aware that making an adequate living in their fragile mountain environment is not easy. As Jyomo said, "if the work doesn't get done, no one eats." Weaving work

In order to take me seriously, the Tamang had to find a way to construe what I did as work. In their eyes, it was important that David and I were willing to carry water, wash clothes, cook food, and even, with what were uniformly adjudged to be poor results, try our hands at various agricultural labors. To Stupahill women, it was particularly important that I learn to weave. Weaving was, in practice and in myth, central to western Tamang ideas about women's and men's rightful work in the world. The moral importance of weaving is apparent in the "Song of the Loom. "5 This song was said to have originated as a competition between a brother and a sister. The sister was learning to weave, and proud of her womanly work, while her brother was proud of learning to read and write so that he could become a lama. Setar told me that the brother was trying to get the better of his sister by extolling the virtues of his work, but that she wouldn't be put down. She matched his challenges item for item; for each piece of the lama's paraphernalia he sang about, she retorted by singing about a part of her loom. Since the beginning ofTamang time, asserts this song, work has bound men and women to their respective roles. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning, the woman straightened out the hollow behind her knee, pushing against the footboard of her loom. This is the work that anchors women, this is the one work that anchors them alike. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning, the woman straightened out the hollow behind her knee, and used the shuttle of her loom. The lama has his thighbone trumpet. This is the one work that anchors them alike. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning, the woman had the beater of her loom. The lama had his ritual sword. This is the one work that anchors them alike. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning, the woman had her device for wetting her weaving. The lama has his bamboo pen. This is the one work that anchors them alike. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning,

5· The 'Thara-i Namtar"; see also March (1983). JYOMO 'S LIFE OF WORK

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the woman had her device for keeping her selvages straight. The lama has his printing of books with woodblocks. This is the one work that anchors them alike. When the cycle of rebirths was beginning, the woman had lease and hettle rods. The lama has his walking stick. This is the one work that anchors them alike.

It was Tikiri who offered to teach me to weave and who gave me a credible specific personal identity in the community. She instructed me in what was then the defining womanly art and, while she was teaching me one day, announced that I was her eldest daughter. This made Tschirto and Mlangdzom my younger sisters and clarified my relations with everyone else in Stupahill. Whereas before I had been Daughter-in-law, Younger Sister, or Elder Sister to everyone, now I was Eldest Aunt to Purngi's and Nhanu's children and Elder Mother to Suryaman's children. Although Tikiri's naming me Eldest Daughter gave me a clear position in Stupahill, and I learned some weaving, my notebooks, pencils, and tape recorder, and the writer's bump that I had on the middle finger of my right hand, still defined my work and set me apart. When one visitor to Stupahill expressed his envy of my good fortune in "not having to work," he was loudly contradicted by Jyomo's husband: "Our women work with sickle, tumpline, and carrying basket. You see her pencil; that's her sickle. And her notebooks and tape recorder are her tumpline and carrying baskets." In the Tamang world of Stupahill, where everyone must work to eat, it was important to people's understanding of me that: I was willing to work as they knew it; I wasn't very skillful at work as they knew it; and, I had calluses on my fingers from the work I did know-writing. Although my writing work differentiated me from the westerners of Tamang imagination-who never have to work to eat-there were no illusions about whose work was harder. I only plowed paper, sowed endless questions, and harvested words. The situation of the Tamang women was explained by Purngi: "Here, oh, these days it all depends on working, and working is hard on me these days. But if you don't work, you'll be a hungry rascal. When has it ever really been easy for peasant farmers, eh?" So people work, and work hard, to eat. Tschirto is blunt, "Whatever else might be said, one has to work; one has to eat." The main crops in this region are corn (maize) and millet, which are intercropped all up and down elaborately terraced hillsides. Wealthier families also have irrigated fields below springs or along the river basin where they can grow wet rice and winter wheat. In addition, everyone grows smaller quantities of beans, lentils (pulses), various squashes, some vegetables, chili peppers, onions, garlic, peanut (groundnut), soybeans, amaranth, and flowers. Many people have a few fruit trees as well, and most also grow mustard

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for oil. A few are experimenting with new cash possibilities in crops like coffee, apples, ginger, and different vegetables. Work exchange groups As a whole, the village of Stupahill was self-sufficient in the late 197os, producing more or less enough of everything it needed. But not everyone could produce or profit equally. As in most peasant communities, in Stupahill, land is what separates rich from poor. In 1977, about half the households in the village had enough land to produce what they needed to feed themselves and to sell or trade for their other needs. To make ends meet, these households had to balance mouths, land, and work carefully. Two strategies were particularly important to these marginally self-sufficient houses: first, to expand the family workforce through exchange labor; and second, to send some mouths out into wage labor. Exchanging labor is an essential work strategy in Stupahill. In a system of rotational labor called nang phapa phopa, groups of eight to fifteen neighbors, kin, and friends agree to work each other's fields in rotation. This allows each house to benefit from a larger workforce than it can assemble by other means. A household's normal workforce would consist of all the able residents of that house, with the possible addition of married daughters temporarily returned from their husbands' houses. But at moments of peak agricultural labor, this is often not enough. In these mid-hills of Nepal, the agricultural cycle can vary by as much as three to four weeks across the different elevations and exposures of fields in a single village. A cornfield near the river bottom may need to be hoed and weeded on the tenth of the month, while at middle elevations, the same first cultivation of corn may occur on the fourth of the next month. By pooling their labor, even modest households can ·put more land into intensive agricultural production than their own workforce could otherwise handle. Households with more people than their lands can feed may send some of their excess workers out in paid day labor, but they neither need nor can afford large nang work gangs. Conversely, the large landholding families rarely have workers to spare for nang phapa phopa exchanges; they need much more work done than they have workers, so they must pay for the help of additional day-workers, either in cash or in kind. The rotational nang exchange can only be successfully utilized by families that have only slightly more land than labor. The pot of this collective labor is sweetened as one household offers another beer and snacks to work in its fields. Although the work is hard, there is a feeling of plenty and promise in these balanced and rewarding exchanges among equals. Most women, when they spoke of nang phapa phopa, said little about its economic value but talked about how much more pleasant it

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made the work. "Whatever I do, I have to work, I have to go out to work in the fields," said Tschirto, "and so, that's how I went about working in the labor exchanges with a big friendly group like that." Women who live and work together in these groups often become each other's best friends. In the mid-1g7os, about five percent of the households in Stupahill had more land than they needed to feed themselves, but they were often short of labor to work all their lands. They could either rent their surplus lands out to marginally landed farmers or they could hire day laborers and continue to manage their own lands.6 Although such arrangements were primarily a means of protecting the rights of the larger landholding families, they also fed the rest of the community. The large landholding families' ties to all but the few caste blacksmith families were reinforced by marriage and other traditional forms of Tamang exchange. This connectedness created a strong cultural flavor of equality, although an aftertaste of the underlying inequity remained. The poorest families had to work in wage labor both in and out of the village, particularly in porterage. Their survival was often dependent on the work of women. Poor or landless women portered for local and long-distance trade; undertook complex borrowing and lending arrangements involving goods, grain, money, and animals; and, especially, wove traditional Tamang cloth. Tikiri, for example, ''wove, wove, and only wove ... throughout the whole cold, dry season I'd weave fifty gallon-measures' worth."7 The most enterprising women of these narratives managed to use their trading, herding, lending, and weaving skills to pull their families away from the brink of starvation and buy themselves lands and herds, and even to build substantial houses of their own. Farming work

Regardless of how much land people have or who owns it, agriculture structures the basic pattern of work in Tamang villages and shapes Tamang conceptions of the day and the year. The period of intensive agriculture begins as the monsoon rains arrive in mid-April. It ends in October or November, as the last crops are harvested, a couple of months after the rains have stopped. Ritual and social life, however, flourish from October until mid-April. These two faces of the Tamang year do not exactly correspond to the annual alternation in weather from rainy to dry, since agricultural efforts last longer than the monsoon. Nevertheless, the Tamang think of the year in two parts: the 6. As national regulation of tenant rights increased, these households became less likely to rent their land. Instead, they employed temporary workers from other households in the community, including the approximately 35% of households without enough land to feed themselves and the 5% with no land at all. 7. Here, Tikiri means that she earned fifty gallon-measures of grain in exchange for weaving during the slack agricultural season.

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(mostly wet) yarsungseason for farmwork, and the (dry) mharsungseason for feasts and other ritual, leisure, and social events.s Just before the monsoon rains begin in earnest, men go out to plow the terraces, borrowing plow animals if they have none of their own, while other household members work to repair terrace walls and transport manure into the fields. Men and women plant corn together, but the bulk of the subsequent hoeing and weeding of the cornfields is done by women. Mter the corn has been sown, various pulses and beans are planted along terrace walls, and, as the corn grows, millet and rice seedlings are started in irrigated beds. When the monsoon rains begin in earnest and water is plentiful, rice is transplanted into irrigated fields by large labor groups, hired for a few days by wealthier landholders. Mter this, in mid- to late summer, the millet sprouts are transplanted from the seed beds to be intercropped amidst the ripening corn. This work is often done by the nang groups. Harvesting the corn and transplanting the millet overlap in what is a very intense agricultural period for all, compounded for some families by the weeding and general maintenance of irrigated rice fields. It is a trying time when a person must work as hard as possible-according to Jyomo, "saying to myself it didn't matter whether I could stand it or not, I kept on working in the fields." Mter more weeding and hoeing of the millet comes the rice harvest at the end of the monsoon, followed quickly by the other main harvest, of millet. It may have been hard sometimes. Sometimes in those friends' houses, well, someone else would scold and even beat me, and I'd cry. That's how I might have stayed, going around there. Mter coming here, here, well, I had a lot of girlhood friends. I would go around with my father's younger sister, Puttili, who's now the lama's wife, married in Slidsprings. We'd go around together affectionately. And I'd go around with Middle Wife in our house. 9 Sometimes we'd go around arguing the way anyone who lives together does-we lived in a single house then, you see. We'd do the fieldwork for the house. Nowadays that's much easier: I don't have to go so far away to get to our fields anymore. Then, we had to go as far as the other side of the river upstream a ways, to the wet rice fields on the far slope of the river, 10 and to the wet rice fields which Sweetriches's Mother now works,ll and to the lowest hamlet in Stupahill and the wet rice

JYOMO:

8. See Holmberg (1g8g) for a more extensive discussion ofthe Tamang calendar.

g. Nhanu, who, as wife of the middle (grand)son, is called Middle Wife, Middle Mother, or Middle Mother-in-Law depending on her relation to the speaker. 10. These fields were inherited by her husband's middle younger brother (Nhanu's husband) when the household was divided, so she no longer has to work them. 11. These fields were given to Jyomo's eldest daughter, now known as Sweetriches's Mother, when she protested her proposed marriage into a poorer household in a neighboring village. Many such special arrangements mitigate against the general prohibition of daughters' inheritance of paternal lands. Indeed, there is some evidence that Tamang daughters once had subJYOMO' S LIFE OF WORK

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fields in the river basin below,I2 and to the fields by that place called Red Swing,I3 and there below the spring .... Before, when all the brothers were still together, we had to go work the fields in all those places. Among the many delights of doing fieldwork with farmers was being privy to their knowledge of soil, water, seed, fertilizer, traction, sun exposure, and seasons. I was particularly moved by the intensity of their involvement with every square foot of their holdings. It is not surprising, I suppose, since terraces are built and maintained laboriously on little bits ofland, scarcely wider than the bund walls that divide them are high. Land holdings were talked almost as if they had lives of their own. Every field and terrace had a name, and sometimes there were named parts even within a single field. Some of this attention to minutiae undoubtedly arose from practical concerns about soil fertility or water availability or solar radiation, all of which could dramatically affect productivity in the thousands of mini-climes found in the holdings of a single household. Wheat grown at the base of Stupahill, for example, matured in three months and could be rotated with two rice crops each year, while it took a full year to produce a single crop of winter wheat at the top of the village. Fields whose angle gave them a few degrees better sun exposure were concomitantly more productive. Fields with sources of water, whether natural or irrigated, were agricultural gold. People's involvement with the land went beyond these practical implications. Places where something dramatic had occurred were marked-where someone had fallen, or been attacked by a tiger, or where the cow had hung herself by falling out of a tree she had climbed to forage. Trees, rocks, cliffs, streams, pinnacles, caves, open flat spaces, dripping mossy spaces ... the land was so saturated with human histories that the landmarks themselves seemed to have biographies. One could trace not just past owners of a field but users and notable passers-through, in times of flood, earthquake, landslide, or drought. The land reverberated with stories I had never imagined. There, then, the men would build the bunds in the irrigated fields; we [women], well, we would finish off the work, shaping the edges of the bunds and scraping them free of weeds. Nowadays, women have it easy. We'd work to finish off shaping and scraping the bunds. We mothers would go to the fields carrying the midday snack for however many fathers there were building the bunds in the irrigated fields. Then we had to spend the whole rest of the day shaping and weeding bunds. You know, you have to

JYOMO:

stantial inheritance claims, now undermined by two hundred years of rule under high-