Research Focus Group Talk: Land, Lineage, Embodied Practices, and the Khora of Migration: Himalayan Lives Between Nepal and New York

This presentation will explore what it means for people from Mustang, Nepal, including those who have migrated to New York, to care for each other, steward a homeland across time and space, remake home elsewhere, and confront distinct forms of happiness and suffering through these movements. How do people honor and alter their shared responsibilities and senses of connection to people and place through migration? How do different generations abide with each other, even when they struggle to understand each other? Craig recruits the Himalayan/Tibetan concept of khora—the embodied act of circumambulation as well as a Buddhist philosophical principle that reflects the nature of desire, interdependence, and cyclic existence—to theorize cycles of mobility and patterns of world-making between Nepal and New York. She will interrogate the ways in which migration impacts the bodies and heart-minds of individuals and households as well as how shifts in physical geographies at once reflect and are shaped by understandings of sacred geography that give meaning to land and lineage, up close and from a distance.

Sienna R. Craig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Her publications include Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012); Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalaya (2008); Mustang in Black and White, a collaboration with photographer Kevin Bubriski (2018); and a forthcoming monograph, The Ends of Kinship: Himalayan Communities between Nepal and New York. Craig enjoys writing across genres, from narrative ethnography to creative nonfiction, fiction, children’s literature, and poetry.

Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group, Dalai Lama Endowment, and Division of Humanities and Fine Arts