Love and Honor in the Himalayas Love and Honor in the Himalayas Coming to Know Another Culture Ernestine McHugh PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Contemporary Ethnography Series Editors Dan Rose Paul Stoller A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Copyright © 2001 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McHugh, Ernestine Louise, 1952– Love and honor in the Himalayas : coming to know another culture / Ernestine McHugh. p. cm. — (Contemporary ethnography) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-3586-9(cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN978- 0-8122-1759-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gurung (Nepalese people) 2. McHugh, Ernestine Louise, 1952– 3. Ethnology—Field work. I. Title. II. Series. DS493.9.G84 M344 2000 306'.095496—dc21 00-062862 for Ursula Record what goes on in everyday life with as much of your life blood and theirs on the paper as if you were writing about death and birth. In Eliot’s phrase, an ulti- mate simplicity costing not less than everything. —Gregory Bateson, letter to the author, 22 February 1974 Contents List of Illustrations ix The People xi Preface xv 1. Reaching Tebas 1 2. Ways of Life Unfolding 17 3. The Fate of Embodied Beings 29 4. The Intimate Darkness of Shadows and Margins 59 5. Paths Without a Compass: Learning Family 93 6. Creating Selves, Crafting Lives 117 7. Shattered Worlds and Shards of Love 139 8. Return 165 Conceptual Context and Related Readings 171 Index 177 Acknowledgments 179 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations Frontispiece: Looking down from Tebas village Preceding Chapter 1: Umbrellas on the road to the hills Preceding Chapter 2: Boy with his grandfather outside the headman’s house Preceding Chapter 3: Young man with his infant nephew and sister Preceding Chapter 4: People pause for a moment at the pae. Preceding Chapter 5: Cliff Shelter from above Preceding Chapter 6: Dharmamitra’s Buddha Vihar Preceding Chapter 7: A ceremonial Buddhist altar Preceding Chapter 8: The path leading up to Tebas All photographs were taken by the author. This page intentionally left blank The People In Tebas Village The Headman’s Family Jimwal/Apa—the headman of Tebas Lalita/Ama—Jimwal’s wife, married into Tebas from Torr Thagu—Jimwal’s eldest son, away in India with the army Tson—Thagu’s wife Ratna—Tson’s baby Maila—Jimwal’s second son Saila—Jimwal’s third son Agai—Jimwal’s eldest daughter, married into another village Maili—Jimwal’s second daughter, also married Seyli—Jimwal’s third daughter Kanchi—Jimwal’s fourth daughter Bunti—Jimwal’s foster daughter Badhay—Jimwal’s elder brother Atay—Badhay’s wife Lakshman—Badhay’s eldest son, away in the army Saras—Lakshman’s wife Ram—Badhay’s second son Radha—Ram’s wife Gopal—Badhay’s youngest son Neighbors/Friends Leela—the young wife of a soldier away in Hong Kong Rita and Mina—two young sisters Amre and Ammaili—Lalita’s friends Mallum, Bhayo, and Muna—old women, each living alone In Dusam Amrit Kumari—a middle-aged woman who runs the general store Tika Prasad—Amrit Kumari’s husband In Cliff Shelter Bhimsen—an former army officer who runs an inn with his wife and children Manju—Bhimsen’s daughter In Torr Pajon—Jimwal’s sister, married into Torr from Tebas, now widowed Siva—Pajon’s son Anna—Badhay’s daughter, married into Torr, now widowed; lives next door to Pajon Neem Bahadur—Lalita’s brother, who lives with their mother and his wife and children Religious Personae Maila lama—a learned and respected Buddhist lama from the northern regions xii The People Prema lama—a lama trained in the north who lives in Tebas Tej lama—a village lama whose family traditionally serves Tebas Dharmamitra—a Theravada Buddhist nun from Pokhara Tini—another Theravada nun, Dharmamitra’s friend, from Kathmandu The People xiii This page intentionally left blank Preface The Gurung people live in the foothills of the Annapurna mountains, a range of the Himalayas in Nepal.Their villages, tightly clustered like medi- eval towns, dot the slopes, surrounded by cascades of terraced fields. I lived in one of those villages for a number of years, and this is the story of what I learned there. I cannot describe the story in a few sentences, nor could I convey the sense of it through analysis. It is about a com- plex world and the people who inhabited it. It is about possibility and place, and what people make of their places and their lives. It is about fragmentation and loss, imagination and affection. The people with whom I lived sometimes mentioned that though their lives were full of toil and hardship, they were fortunate to live in a place with ramro hawa-pani, literally ‘‘good wind and water,’’ which in Nepali means a wholesome or pleasant climate. This phrase evokes not just a sense of good weather, but of a landscape that is kind and bountiful and creates propitious conditions for life. Although people in the village spoke of how loss and misfortune were inevitable in existence, a view shared by most Buddhists, what they stressed above all was the importance of living with grace, kindness, and generosity in the midst of suffering, and of cultivating appreciation and equanimity (a good climate, as it were) in one’s own being, regardless of circumstances. The climate in the vil- lage was largely one of graciousness and good-humor, with the sorrows of life making its joys more poignant and amplifying the value of human connection. My involvement with the Himalayas began when I was an undergradu- ate, in a research project that was directed toward understanding the rela- tionship between ritual, social life, and personal experience. I developed this project under the direction of Gregory Bateson, with whom I worked closely from 1972 to 1977. At that time, I knew little about anthropology, but I had mapped out a project relating to culture and the aesthetics of life. To carry out the work for which Gregory was my mentor, I went to Nepal and lived there from July1973 through April1975. Most of that time was spent in Tebas village. I returned and wrote a thesis for my bachelor’s degree under Gregory’s direction. It was a credible intellectual exercise, and that is what it felt like: an exercise, not fully alive, not quite com- plete. Gregory suggested that at some time it would be good for me to write about these people from a more personal point of view, to bring the reader to them through my experience. I made some attempts, but I was too young and too close to it. My writing faltered. In 1977, I went to graduate school at the University of California at San Diego. This taught me the conventions of the academy and sharpened my mind, as well as providing an array of anthropological perspectives with which to engage the world. My advisor, Roy D’Andrade, had the per- ceptiveness and generosity to help me follow my intuitions through to intellectual conclusions, to clarify and ground them. He encouraged me toward a purity and directness of expression that helped me understand my own ideas more deeply and to develop them as fully as possible. He gave me the tools I needed to live the intellectual elegance that Gregory had revealed to me, the understandings I could intimate but not quite reach with him. I returned to Nepal for the summer in1978 and I lived there again from 1980 to 1982 for my doctoral research, each time going back to Tebas village to live with the same family. My last trip to the Himalayas before writing this book was in 1987, when I carried out a study on maternal and child health care for the U.S. Agency for International Development. I have went back two summers ago, and look forward to returning again. After completing my doctorate, I went on to teach, and am now a pro- fessor at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, in an interdisciplinary department charged to instruct students about intellec- tual life and the world. I have published articles on self and personhood, emotion and ritual, as well as on concepts of honor, subjects I care about and find compelling. This book is a different sort of work, more in the nature of what Gregory suggested so long ago. Though it is not scholarly in its presentation, it is xvi Preface based on over four years of research in the Himalayas, conducted over a fourteen-year period, from1973 through1987.While names are disguised by using kin terms or pseudonyms to protect the privacy of those who confided in me, and names of villages and some rivers have been altered to conceal their places of residence, all events and conversations recounted here actually took place. I have written the book for a broad audience be- cause I do not feel that the knowledge of other cultures should be limited to an elite who are trained to know the codes in which academic writing is couched. I believe that scholarship should be offered to a wider public. From what I see in the classroom and in the media, people are hungry to know of other ways of life. I believe passionately that these are know- able, not just as self-justifying illusions or hegemonic appropriations, but as illuminations of what is possible in human existence.