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Can You Believe the Mess? Confusion and Method in the Study of Nepalese Religion

Submitted to Program Units
1: South Asian Religions Unit

Rachelle Saruya, University of Toronto, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Inspired by the seminal 1989 ethnography by Bruce McCoy Owens about an annual Nepalese festival which pays particular attention to the power unleashed by its “messiness,” this panel has scholars confront “the mess” they deal with in their current research and explore ways in which we can divert the field from its persistence on the ordering forces at work in concepts like caste, ritual, asceticism, cosmology, colonialism, knowledge systems, and institutional history, paradigmatic of a fixation on the containment of “mess” that holds the danger to be mimetic onto its object and to reproduce the stereotype of a intrinsically chaotic South Asia persistently called to order by itself and by others. This panel asks whether there is a way to stay with “the mess” (in the sense of “staying with the trouble”) in South Asian religion without either teleologically subordinating it to or purposefully excluding it from the production of order.

Papers

  • Christoph Emmrich, University of Toronto

    Finding and Making a Mess. Illegible Fieldnotes, Wayward Translations, and the Undecided Archive of Newar Religion

    Abstract

    This talk is about what happens when those who are involved in Newar religion co-produce an environment that is neither ordered nor disordered, yet as if both calling for order and accepting what may seem like the absence of order, its inhabitants being both troubled by it and yet willing to go with the flow. Sharing moments in which it remains undecided when and how the mess happed and who caused it, only knowing that both my research partner and I are involved in it, I will talk about the relation between conversation and note-taking (interview), the suspension of understanding in the heterolingual (translation), and the interruption of the textual by the material (manuscripts). I want to talk about how in the period of engagement something else emerges that is neither order nor its other, but which may be better understood as a situation that is suspended and still open.

  • Monalisa Maharjan, Social Science Baha

    “Even if we have COVID We Want Our Chariot Procession!” Understanding the Importance of Public Sentiment in Heritage Through the Conflict During the COVID-19 Chariot Procession

    Abstract

    The chariot procession of Karunamaya – the god of compassion is one of the major festivals in the city of Patan and Bungamati which is five kilometers from Patan. Every year the chariot goes through the ancient city of Patan and every twelve years from Bungamati to Patan with the belief of good rain for a good harvest. Communities carry out the procession with fanfare, even people from other cities and villages participate during the procession. In 2020, during the time of COVID-19, the chariot was stranded on the street for several months without any certainty of procession. So one ordinary day local people started pulling chariots which led to conflict. This paper focusing on that event will try to understand the reasons and factors behind the conflict as well as underlying issues and the solutions brought by the mess.

  • Alana Sá Leitão Sá Leitão, University of Toronto

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

    Abstract

    To research Christianity in Nepal is to fall in-between, in-between the scope of research on Nepal and the scope of research on Christianity, where concepts and classifications do not seem prepared to grasp what is happening in the everyday lives of my interlocutors. However, the messiness goes far beyond my own struggles to find the proper theoretical and methodological tools to reach the field. Christianity is still quite new for most Nepalis. For my interlocutors, ordinary life is permeated by the extraordinary as they first encounter Christian teachings and technologies for creating their lives anew. This means that consensus around practices, abstinences, or even the numbers of faithful are difficult to find. This presentation is about the messiness of researching a field that is new to me, that is new for its two parent disciplines, and most of all that is being newly formed by the people who take part in its projects. 

  • Austin Simoes-Gomes, University of Toronto

    It’s a Bloody Mess! Newar Buddhist Sacrifice in Nepal

    Abstract

    A sacrificial arena, initially tidy with carefully arranged paraphernalia in straight lines, is now a bloody mess. The body of a goat to one side, blood splattered everywhere, and rigor mortis slowly setting in to the quivering sheep’s body. Parallelly, ask any ethnographer to tell you stories from their research period and you will elicit a stream of tales regarding the mess of it all. However, in academia, the tendency to write out the messy dynamics of these processes remains. In thinking intersubjectively about ethnographic data related to the performance of the sacrificial ritual to the Buddhist goddess Hāratī called chāhāyekegu, this paper argues that mess is an everyday reality not something out of the ordinary. Mess is an integral part of social research that seeks to portray more accurately and sensitively the everyday.

  • Ian Turner, University of Toronto

    "Where Is it Still Dirty?" A Day of Ghost Hunting for Gathāṃ Mugaḥ

    Abstract

    On gathāṃ mugaḥ, one cleans the house. Of what? The dirt of the rice planting season, certainly, but what hitches a ride with that dirt? Or who? Ghosts, bhut, pret. There are elaborate rites for this kind of house cleaning, from the individual residence to the neighborhood. Bundles of thorns are carried burning through each room of the house, top to bottom. Six-foot-tall strawmen with explicit male genitalia of round fruits and cotton are paraded burning through the streets by young men shouting sexualized phrases. But not everywhere. Not everywhere is it still dirty enough. For who still plants rice in June and July? The ground floor is now a garage, home office, reception room, not a barn. This paper recreates a single day spent in search of a 'proper' gathāṃ mugaḥ, and of the forms of life we negate when all the mess becomes yecu picu, neat and clean.

Responding
Bruce Owens, Wheaton College, MA
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours

Schedule Preference

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Schedule Info

Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Session Identifier

A26-129