Cultures of expertise and ethnographic testimony: a multi-disciplinary approach to Newar Buddhist intellectualism

The ethnographer arrives at the field site, only to discover he has been beaten to the punch. Someone else has preceded him. Someone else endeavoring to turn experience into text and practical knowledge into abstract argumentation. No, this is not a rival colleague, but a member of the community he has travelled to study. What is this tardy ethnographer to do? Shrug his shoulders and set up camp somewhere else? Re-do the work of his predecessor? Try to collaborate?

This paper questions how ethnographers of broadly conceived literate and learned Buddhist communities should approach texts and interlocutors who, in their own para-ethnographic projects, develop "cultures of expertise" and act as both "subjects and intellectual partners of inquiry" (Holmes & Marcus 2007). Whereas Buddhist Studies is driven largely by interrogation of the intellectual achievements of philosophers, theologians, teachers, and litterateurs, anthropologists tend to be made uncomfortable by the pedantic interlocutor who offers freely the supposedly tacit mores of social life (Keane 1995). This is even more perplexing for the anthropologist of Nepal today who encounters texts suggestive of thick description written in minority languages by and for self-identified members of the given community. These encounters became increasingly common post-1990 when a democratizing politics of knowledge and voice was enriched by the proliferation of a conceptual lexicon deployed by activists and public intellectuals – "religion", "culture", "identity", etc. – that had only recently been removed by deconstruction and post-colonial theorists from the anthropologist's privileged toolkit (Gellner 2011).

I argue that Buddhist Studies offers the anthropologist of Buddhism in Nepal a way out of the problem of coevality and the politics of representation implied above, in the way those scholars treat seriously the intellectual projects of their 'interlocutors' as intellectual projects. I envisage an anthropological encounter in which the ethnographer endeavors to understand how intellectual work may be conceived otherwise – its modes of authority, methodologies, dissemination, etc. Othering should not be done without consideration; because, of course, there are Nepalese anthropologists and social scientists. Nor should we negate the broader influence of these discourses on persons peripheral to them. What I am concerned with are those writers and thinkers who, either by choice or circumstance, do not participate in anthropological discourse either as a Western or alt-Western field of inquiry. Outside of this West/Non-West binary, we might consider the multitude of intellectual genealogies that appear plainly or concealed in any utterance or manner of text.

To instantiate this approach, I look to encounters in person and in prose concerning that institution of anthropological worlding – the traditional cultural house – alongside Buddhist, and specifically Newar Buddhist, thinkers and actors. Taking the house as organizing theme is particularly apt given that, for some, the house is where anthropology began, whereby dwelling amongst the natives became the epistemological and methodological foundation of fieldwork, offering a model of microcosm for the researcher to expand upon (Miller 2001). Conversely, the house represents, for Buddhist Studies, that which is left behind by renunciant and scholar.  As such, the discussions initiated by authors and interlocutors treating their house and domestic habitus as a matter of concern to them, puts into question the ethical and interpretive role of myself as Buddhist anthropologist.

In response, I argue that the ethnographer is required to adopt a methodologically plural approach, one that acknowledges a diversity of intellectual histories, trajectories, and performances. In the Kathmandu Valley, for instance, we must consider how Buddhist revivalist movements around the middle of the last century deployed the techniques of modern education towards a confessional mode of religious subjectivity (Gellner & LeVine, 2005). In so doing, they entered a broader political field wherein education was also associated with the social condition of women, cultural preservation, secular education, and mother-tongue activism. Yet extant modes of participation and knowing persevered in the public recitations of canonical Buddhist stories, the execution of rituals by trained liturgicians, and the inter-generational reformulation of cultural and religious knowledge through the family. Literary modernism and the development of middle-class culture dynamically intersected in print and in performance, as did the new types of public intellectual – the international developers, tourism agents, and anthropologists – who entered the country alongside the exiled dissidents post-1951. Each introduced discursive modes of addressing social and cultural reality that found their way into the document, onto the dais, and behind closed doors. Textual forms, like social roles, are likewise cumulative rather than linear, and the current glossy-jacketed inkjet-printed culture texts replace neither the didactic handbooks introduced by Buddhist reformers a half-century ago, nor the ritual manuscripts of the priestly ritualists (Emmrich, 2021), nor indeed the text-like oral injunctions of the domestic matriarch. 

A methodologically plural approach is not intended to be exhaustive or to neatly demarcate the world in which a person, text, or event makes sense. On the contrary, by acknowledging the porosity, multi-vocality, and specific materiality of a text, we extend to it and its author the kind of complexity and perplexity experienced through the ethnographic encounter. The anthropologist who derives their knowledge from participation in the field has at their disposal more data than they can possibly use, provided they are prepared to engage with them. The lacunae within Buddhist Studies scholarship – gender disparity, socio-economic occlusions, circumstances of the laity, etc. – are in part problems of sources. Not only does the ethnographer have the possibility of addressing those lacunae by creating their own sources – interviews, participant-observation, multi-sensory documentation, etc. – they may address that axiomatic question of anthropological inquiry – how does this all play out in practice?

The jotted notes we make in the margins and from the margins draw lines of connection to other texts and contexts. Such lines can both converge within and diverge between discrete people, events, and things. Such thinking also encourages, I believe, the kind of anthropological community desired, one premised on discussion rather than consensus. Following the MacIntyre (1988) model of tradition as “an argument extended through time”, this approach emphasizes dialogic meaning making and community formation across different cultures of expertise.