Pilgrimage on the Package Tour

The grant process is finally over and the results are in. While I have not received a major grant (any one of the top 4 or 5 favored in the social sciences), I have successfully cobbled together enough smaller grant funding to carry out the remainder of my dissertation fieldwork in the high Himalayas of Nepal. In addition to this, I have also received the prestigious designation of alternate for the 2015-2016 Fulbright Dissertation Research grant. While this is little help to me in the practical sense (as it does not carry any monetary value) I am pleased that my research among Shaligram pilgrims warrants attention on that scale. It will likely come in handy later.

For those whose impetus is to offer consolation, I assure you there is no need. The nature of my fieldwork requires a high degree of mobility, flexibility, and the willingness to change one’s course at a moment’s notice. By leveraging multiple smaller sources of funding (rather than needing to adhere to the activity requirements of a major granting institution), my adaptability is preserved and I view my ability to maintain control over my movements as the ultimate silver-lining. By the looks of things, not only will my final monograph focus its analytical trajectory on the sovereignty of mobility but I as the ethnographer will embody it as well.

This also means that my final dissertation research plans are remain equally under my purview and I will be able to focus my attention on Shaligram pilgrimage over the course of two more full travel seasons; the first beginning this June when I return to Mustang District and the second beginning in April of 2017, to conclude sometime the following fall. Planning long-term fieldwork in this way has also been helpful in that it is far easier to disrupt one’s everyday life for four to five months at a time rather than twelve or more in a stretch. In the interim, my time will then be best used reviewing and collating fieldnotes, preparing for the last round of fieldwork with revised questions, beginning the introductory portion of the dissertation itself, grant writing, and transcribing.

The easiest way to accomplish all this, as my previous trips have taught me, will be to once again work through a Himalayan trekking agency, whose access to in-country travel resources and capacity to negotiate permits cannot be understated. Already I am looking forward to at least three government permissions, multiple domestic plane tickets, jeep and horse-back travel, and a fair degree of map-assisted walking. Though, this time, I do not plan on hiring a guide to take me around. My earlier experiences in doing so, though they were no doubt the smartest thing to do in an area I was completely unfamiliar with, have convinced me to break with the packaged tour in the strictest sense. Much of Mustang is reliant on trekking and pilgrimage for its economic livelihood and as such, most of the people involved in the travel and service industries take great pains to ensure that their guests’ “experiences” are up to par. I have a hard time convincing them that the “experience” is precisely what I am not after.

Moving from guesthouse to guesthouse in the high Himalayas is reasonably easy once you get a sense of things and I fear that my poor guide, stuck with me for several months on end, would find my repetitive returns to the same temple and pilgrimage sites rather boring as I sit in some out-of-the-way corner to observe ritual practices, chat with pilgrims, interview nuns or sadhus, or draw detailed sketches of sacred stones. Sadly for the pilgrimage economy, outside of food and lodging, the anthropologist makes for a meager consumer.

So now, as I begin to finalize my plans for returning to Nepal in just a few short weeks, I bid the relative stability of my academic life so far adieu. As I prepare to set-off back into the Himalayas to wander the ever-changing paths of the sacred river Kali-Gandaki, I know that I will be taking advantaging of the roads well-trod before me (by pilgrims, tourists, and trekkers alike), but I will always remember that no matter how many times this route has been taken and no matter how carefully others may attempt to manage how I might experience it, there is no telling what I will find. And that is the deepest mystery the spiral can hold.

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