McHugh - Love and honor in the Himalayas coming to know another culture

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

10 9 8 7 6 5

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)
ISBN 978-0-8122-1759-9(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gurung (Nepalese people) 2. McHugh, Ernestine
Louise, 1952 3. EthnologyField work. I. Title.
II. Series.
DS493.9.G84 M344 2000
306'.095496dc21 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 Eliots phrase, an ultimate simplicity costing not less than everything.

Gregory Bateson,
letter to the author, 22 February 1974

All photographs were taken by the author.

In Tebas Village

The Headmans Family

Jimwal/Apathe headman of Tebas

Lalita/AmaJimwals wife, married into Tebas from Torr

ThaguJimwals eldest son, away in India with the army

TsonThagus wife

RatnaTsons baby

MailaJimwals second son

SailaJimwals third son

AgaiJimwals eldest daughter, married into another village

MailiJimwals second daughter, also married

SeyliJimwals third daughter

KanchiJimwals fourth daughter

BuntiJimwals foster daughter

BadhayJimwals elder brother

AtayBadhays wife

LakshmanBadhays eldest son, away in the army

SarasLakshmans wife

RamBadhays second son

RadhaRams wife

GopalBadhays youngest son

Neighbors/Friends

Leelathe young wife of a soldier away in Hong Kong

Rita and Minatwo young sisters

Amre and AmmailiLalitas friends

Mallum, Bhayo, and Munaold women, each living alone

In Dusam

Amrit Kumaria middle-aged woman who runs the general store

Tika PrasadAmrit Kumaris husband

In Cliff Shelter

Bhimsenan former army officer who runs an inn with his wife and children

ManjuBhimsens daughter

In Torr

PajonJimwals sister, married into Torr from Tebas, now widowed

SivaPajons son

AnnaBadhays daughter, married into Torr, now widowed; lives next door to Pajon

Neem BahadurLalitas brother, who lives with their mother and his wife and children

Religious Personae

Maila lamaa learned and respected Buddhist lama from the northern regions

Prema lamaa lama trained in the north who lives in Tebas

Tej lamaa village lama whose family traditionally serves Tebas

Dharmamitraa Theravada Buddhist nun from Pokhara

Tinianother Theravada nun, Dharmamitras friend, from Kathmandu

The Gurung people live in the foothills of the Annapurna mountains, a range of the Himalayas in Nepal. Their villages, tightly clustered like medieval 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 complex 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 ones own being, regardless of circumstances. The climate in the village 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 undergraduate, in a research project that was directed toward understanding the relationship 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 July 1973 through April 1975. Most of that time was spent in Tebas village. I returned and wrote a thesis for my bachelors degree under Gregorys direction. It was a credible intellectual exercise, and that is what it felt like: an exercise, not fully alive, not quite complete. 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 DAndrade, had the perceptiveness 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 in 1978 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 professor at the University of Rochesters Eastman School of Music, in an interdisciplinary department charged to instruct students about intellectual 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.