In Between The Everyday and The Extraordinary of a New Fieldwork: How Christians in Nepal Defy Multiple Classifications

This panel is about the messiness of the mundane, and of those situations that defy our ways of organizing the world that are often ignored because they cross borders in the ways we produce knowledge. To talk about Christianity in Nepal is to already be in this space. Christianity is a topic rarely engaged with by researchers specialized in the country, while Nepal is a place not yet investigated by the Anthropology of Christianity. It is hard to disagree that, as anthropologists, at least part of our jobs is in trying to put peoples and groups in boxes and then understanding how they relate to each other. Of course, nowadays we are much more sophisticated than this rudimentary definition and we tend to understand that classifications are often fluid and without well-defined boundaries. However, when we arrive in a new field, we often are relying on the classifications made by researchers who were there before us.

I am an anthropologist of Christianity, and for a long time I was interested in the development of Pentecostalism in Brazil. Before me, many researchers have thought about this subject from different angles. In Brazil, annual surveys and the decennial census keep track of, among other things, the changes to religious affiliation. The rise of Pentecostal churches and their membership as reflected in these documents has been periodized, discussed, criticized, and revised many times. For this reason, I often felt that my research rested upon solid ground, the stable foundations of data and information already analyzed by others – even if the conclusions were not always unanimous.

A couple of years ago I started fieldwork in Nepal. This is when things got messy. I was aware of the scarcity of anthropological studies on Christianity in Nepal, but I believed that my previous research with Christianity in other parts of the world, in addition to a familiarity with recent and foundational publications in Nepal Studies, would be enough to help me to arrive in the field with some structure. The problem is that Christians in Nepal challenge both fields of scholarship. It was not long before I realized the categories that were developed to think about Christianity in places like Latin America, North America, or Africa do not make sense in this context. If the Euro-American context talks about mainline protestants, Baptists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, etc., the truncated timeline and development of Christianity in Nepal does not allow the different groups growing in the country to fit neatly under these concepts. Likewise, if there are three “waves” of Pentecostalism in Latin America, which researchers tend to pick one from to investigate, it is hard to say that there is even one in Nepal.

In a similar fashion, the relationship of these churches with important concepts from Nepal Studies like caste, ethnicity and indigeneity is still under development, as is true for the now first generation of born Christians reaching adulthood. Pastors preach against ethnic and caste divisions and needing to be only one in Christ, while the temple I spent most time in was primarily attended by farming caste Newars, who are struggling to define the guidelines of contemporary weddings – love? caste? education? social-economic position?  My interlocutors seem to differ in their perception about what to do during national holidays and festivals, attending non-Christian weddings, celebrating their children's first rice feeding, protecting their infants from spirits with silver anklets, or going to school on the day they celebrate the goddess Saraswati.  They also disagree in their perception about the law which states: “no person shall …convert another person from one religion to another or any act or conduct that may jeopardize other's religion”.  While some of my interlocutors see this as a way to criminalize their own existence, others believe “it is only about starting to preach on the streets, which no one should do anyway”.

On top of all this, the different surveys from which one can see the numbers of Christians in Nepal tell different histories. Beyond my Christian interlocutors, religious minorities seem to believe there is an inflation of the official numbers of people who identify as Hindus. I was repeatedly told stories about people who, while filling out official papers, noticed that the question of religion was already answered as Hindu. Meaning, my interlocutors firmly believed I should not trust the data from the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Government of Nepal, which say there are 375,699 Christian in Nepal, or 1.4% of the population. On the other hand, the Nepal Christian Society and the National Church Fellowships of Nepal themselves conducted a large survey to ascertain the number of Christians in Nepal, released in November 2022 under the title of the National Christian Community Survey (NCCS). The survey's numbers come from what pastors declare are the amount of people who come to their churches, and only include groups this association understands as Christian – excluding churches they believe are “cults”. The NCCS results affirm there are 683,261 Christians in Nepal, almost the double of the government's numbers. Nevertheless, these numbers encountered disagreement even among the Christian community in the country, including from The National Christian Federation of Nepal, which affirms there are more than 3 million Christians in Nepal.

It is clear, this is a mess. And it means that, at this moment, my data are sitting on my desk, while I struggle to decide if my work is in organizing all of this, trying to label and classify it all.  On the other side, I wonder, maybe my work is to engage with the newness and the messiness, and with what it means? My data are on the fringes of different subdisciplines and usual ways of thinking about the world. They also come from a field that is still new for itself, struggling to find agreements about their own existence.  Nevertheless, the chaos here is not in itself an enemy of research building, but an element of life that questions not only if the usual classifications make sense in this new field, but how much retaining part of that messiness might add to our analyses.