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

An ethnographer looks into their notepad and finds that they cannot read the notes they took the night before, while an archival researcher notices that their computer’s desktop is covered with documents which, over the course of several months, they have failed save away in appropriately named folders. One reader inadvertently pushes a manuscript off their desk and the loose and unpaginated folios scatter across the study floor, while another reader is led into a room that once was a library but now, to their horror, has been turned into a space that shelters a several feet high pile of manuscript leaves left there from when troops had forced their way into it to destroy the archive. At the end of a service a priest brushes away a flower that he had placed at the centre of the ritual arena, dissolving the ritual world he had built, while a participant looks onto that very same spot as an accumulation of materials that next need to be cleaned away with a broom to ready the space for the next round of worship. As a chariot is drawn to carry the god along their prescribed route, a fistfight breaks out among those coordinating the divine journey, while a few days later the chariot crashes into a temple tearing down electrical lines, swiping tiles off roofs, killing two people and injuring several more in the process. While the latter examples are taken from the seminal 1989 ethnography “The Politics of Divinity in the Kathmandu Valley” by Bruce McCoy Owens about the annual festival of Buṁgadyaḥ that pays particular attention to the power unleashed by its “messiness,” all of the above are moments in which we are confronted with situations that we may tentatively call “a” or, more terminologically speaking, “the mess.” This panel takes its cues from a range of “messes” the ethnographers of religion on this panel have come across during their work in Nepal and that have shaped the way they felt, thought, spoken, and written about them and about Nepalese religion. We expect of academic work that it is done in an orderly fashion for it to be goal oriented, to yield results, and to be intelligible. Academic work is founded on the assumption that all research is built on order, on bringing order in what is or what, due to our inability to create or see a hidden order, may look disorderly. Academic work on religion and particularly on religious practices, usually assumes that rites bring order into a disorderly every-day or that they reflect, repeat, or produce the orders inherent in the communities they help consolidate or transform, or that they break up old orders to create and to keep creating new ones. While at the very best, both the research and its objects, its subjects, its communities, may go, and may indeed need to go, through phases of confusion, these phases are usually expected to be brief and transitory and are seen as moments that need to be overcome and should lead to novel or renewed conditions of order. This particular kind of a prioritization of order and marginalization, erasure, or, at the very best functionalization of disorder applies both to socio-historical transformation, to recurring ritual performances, as well as to research leading to the presenting, writing, and publishing of academic prose. Disorder is good, even crucial, but it needs to be transitory and ultimately needs to lead to order “in order” for it to be valued and recognized. Alternatively, disorder is a by-product of these projects or (re)ordering, is made to populate the fringes of the places of ordering, and, if it does not lead to order, can be discarded, marginalized, and ignored. This panel is not interested in exploring “the mess” in terms of the destabilizing opportunities offered by variant forms of perspectivism, neither is it interested in thinking about mess within the parameters of fractals and chaos theory. Its approach also resists reducing the mess to conflict, trauma, breakdown, or utopia. While inclusive of all the above, if anything, it searches for the anarchic as the indifference between the extraordinary and the everyday. How do we understand conflict as more than just the absence of peace? How do we understand trauma that is more than just the open wound? How do we understand the broken as something more than the loss of the whole? How do we make sense of utopia beyond the absence of the enforcing of rules? More specifically to the study of religion in South Asia, the panel wants to 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 on 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”) without either teleologically subordinating it to or purposefully excluding it from the production of order. For that the panel will, on the one hand, both ask what happens in the environment of “the mess” that is excluded, and how “the mess” resists or contributes, in its own terms and in its own right and not just as a tool, to what the ordering forces try to do with it. On the other hand, it will try to think about ways to talk about “the mess” that do not posit it as order’s other or in any one way relational to order, but which allow “the mess” to unfold forms of experiencing, researching, and carrying out religious practice that are both inclusive of and indifferent to order and allows us to open up spaces in which order may become irrelevant.