I leave for Kathmandu, Nepal early tomorrow morning. As is typical of travel from the U.S. to South Asia, I will be negotiating flights for roughly two days of travel time. Once there, it will be another week before I reach my fieldsite in Mustang District. As we ascend higher and higher into the Himalayas, we’ll be first stopping to acclimatize in Pokhara and then in Jomsom, before making the final leg by jeep to Muktinath.

Describing my fieldsite has always been a bit of a challenge for me. Muktinath is a complicated place, embedded in complicated space, and I have not yet found, I think, the best sequence with which to describe it. In other words, I’m often at a loss as to what aspect I should describe first since I continuously feel the need to explain why something is important before I can even tell someone what it is. Imagine the problem a bit like finding two old photographs, full of people you do not recognize, in a shoe box. While both photos are beautiful, one photo has a description written on the back of it including names, dates, and places that everyone seems to know. The other has nothing. In the meantime, I’m trying to describe an album full of photos with nothing written on them.

Good advice for future generations I suppose; document your photos, kids.

In that vein, as I set off to begin my fieldwork in Nepal, I think it’s high time I contextualized all of this a little. So, here is something of an explanation of Muktinath, Nepal:

Mustang District is located in Nepal’s Dhaulagiri Zone, along the western ridge of the Himalayan Annapurna mountain range. Founded as the Kingdom of Lo in AD 1440. Mustang is currently divided into upper (northern) and lower (southern) regions. These distinctions are both locally and nationally defined, and have tremendous economic, social, political, and cultural ramifications partially due to the fact that Upper Mustang is still restricted to foreign travel and Lower Mustang only opened to travelers in 1992. However, the internal divisions, dialects, and distinctions of Mustang’s populace are much more complex than this binary division might imply. For example, Mustang is also home to the Baragaon settlement area which is comprised of speakers of primarily Nepali-Tibetan dialects located in and around the Muktinath Valley, and the Lode Tshodun, the seven principalities of the kingdom of Lo, a Tibetan-speaking area of which the walled city of Lo Monthang is the capital.

The village of Kagbeni marks the division between upper and lower Mustang in that foreigners are not allowed to travel north beyond Kagbeni without special permits. The reasons behind these continued closures is politically complex. The entire region encompassed today by the Mustang District, and in particular the Kali-Gandaki River Valley, has been a locus of trans-Himalayan trade for centuries, particularly in the exchange of lowland grains for Tibetan salt. However, since its consolidation in 1789 during the Gorkhali conquests and until the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, Mustang had maintained strong cultural and economic ties to the old kingdoms of Tibet, Bhutan, and West Bengal. Today, considered an important buffer region between Chinese-occupied Tibet, the Kathmandu Valley, and India, Mustang has maintained a certain degree of local autonomy but has continued to struggle economically in political isolation. In addition, and not surprisingly, given its historical, linguistic, and ethnic ties to Tibet, its position as the base of operations for the Tibetan resistance in the 1960s, as well as the large numbers of Tibetan refugees still living in the region, Mustang is quite often problematically characterized in both travel literature and in academic discourse as “the Lost Kingdom of Tibet.”

In light of Nepal’s long-standing struggles with inter-regional conflict, civil war, and political instability, the central government of Kathmandu has positioned itself as a culturally homogenizing force in the spirit of national unity. Since the unification of Nepal under the Sugauli Treaty of 1816, and the ratification of the civil code called the Muluki Ain, the central government has defined Nepaliness through three principal criteria: speaking Nepali, adopting the Daura Suruwal style of dress, and practicing Vaishnava Hinduism. (Vaishnavism or Vaishnava Dharma, is one of the major branches of Hinduism common in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is focused on the veneration of Vishnu as a supreme deity. Vaishnava traditions then comprise multiple variant forms of polymorphic monotheism and henotheism but all of which give primary importance to Vishnu and his ten incarnations.) Three categories of political belonging which are not exemplified by Mustang District in general, or the Muktinath Valley region specifically; who tend to speak a combination of Hindi, Nepali, and Tibetan, wear Himalayan styles of dress, and practice three historically and discursively separate religious traditions syncretically (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bonpo/Bön). It is within this historical, political, and economic landscape that the Hindu-Buddhist pilgrimage site of Muktinath is situated.

Muktinath-Chumig Gyatsa (Mukinath being the Indian/Hindu name for the site, meaning “Lord of Salvation,” and Chumig Gyatsa being the Tibetan/Buddhist name for the site, meaning “Hundred Waters”) sits at 3750m above sea level just below the Thorong La mountain pass in Lower Mustang along the western slopes of the Damodar Himal, a northern extension of the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountain peaks. While the main draw of the temple site is the Mandir of Vishnu (Hindu Vaishnava), both the temple and the mountain pilgrimage route contain numerous important shrines to Shiva (Hindu Shaivite) as well as Buddhist stupas. As a sacred landscape, Muktinath is even more contentious.

Textual sources drawn from both Hindu and Buddhist traditions alternatively place “Muktinath” (or alternatively “Muktiksetra”) near the source of the Kali-Gandaki river (some 4000m higher up the mountain) or in the mythic region called Salagrama (an indigenous term for the area that will have special significance in a moment) which is variously placed in central Nepal, elsewhere in the Annapurna range, or near the Trisuli river in highland Tibet near the Chinese border. This ambiguity highlights our first contention at Muktinath. That being the contention of Muktinath’s “real” location which I argue is likely indicative of its religious position as a Buddhist-Hindu syncretic site and indicative of the problematic characterization of the primarily Nepali Hindu Annapurna pilgrimage circuit by tourist literatures as essentially “Buddhist/Tibetan.” These particular tensions often revolve around a historical record that documents Muktinath as having been a Hindu pilgrimage destination as far back as AD 300 before being incorporated into the Buddhist revival of pilgrimage sites in the area sometime in the late 8th century AD. These textual ambiguities are also unsettled in practice through the modern Buddhist understanding of the deity of Vishnu at Muktinath as also being that of an incarnation of the patron bodhisattva of the nation of Tibet, AvalokiteÅ›vara. This is because the vast majority of pilgrims who visit the site are comprised mainly of Hindi or Nepali-speaking Vaishnavas (from primarily central Nepal or northern India) while the permanent residents of the nearby villages (such as the main pilgrimage stop, Ranipauwa) remain split between Nepali-speaking Pahari (“hill people”), the Tibeto-Burmese-speaking but ethnically Nepali Thakali peoples, and the Tibetan-speaking Bhotia of Baragaon who migrated not from Tibet, but from other regions of Nepal.

The issue of religious syncretism is also a primary one. Though I won’t go into depth here about the discursive problems of the term “religious syncretism,” (See my interview on “This Anthropological Life” for more in-depth discussion of this term) religious co-participation is one of Muktinath’s primary features. What does that mean? In general usage it means that the people of Muktinath simultaneously practice more than one religious tradition (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bonpo/shamanism). However, I argue that these traditions and spiritual ontologies are not being reconciled into new hybrid forms, but are, instead, held in continuous contention. What is more, often times this contention is articulated in national terms. What I mean by this is that Hinduism is often coded as distinctly Indian, Buddhism as Tibetan, and Bonpo as Nepali.

So who goes there? – Pilgrims to Muktinath are primarily North Indian or Eastern Nepali Hindus, and somewhat fewer Buddhists from southern Tibet. Also, somewhat surprisingly, Muktinath is not run by either Buddhist monks or by Hindu brahmacharya as is typical of significant pilgrimage places similar to Muktinath. Rather it is run primarily by a resident order of Buddhist nuns of Nyingmapa/Lama Wangyal sect. This point is particularly interesting because neither Mahayana or Theravada Buddhism nor Vaishnava Hinduism allow women to maintain religious authority not are other pilgrimage sites similar in scale and prestige to Muktinath run in this way. Female practical authority, however, is known among practitioners of shamanism, including the local traditions of Bonpo.

This articulation with shamanism and Bön practices is important on a national scale because it situates Muktinath within the larger Hindu-Buddhist-shamanistic ritual system that is prevalent among Nepal’s hill communities and which may also reveal broader uses of religious syncretism for negotiating identity in the Himalayan regions. In this way, the complicated linkages of transnational religious and gendered identities and structures of power that continue to affect the ascetic women (Buddhist nuns) who live and work at Muktinath complicates the site’s religious and ritual positions vís-a-vís the local Nepali residents and the international and transnational pilgrims drawn to the temple site. This is important because I ask whether the nuns may represent a continuity of Bön practice, or, if their practical authority at Muktinath may demonstrate enough of a deviation from orthodox Hindu and Buddhist practices that possible religious claims to the site become problematic, or perhaps a little of both.

But the enduring and over-arching draw for pilgrims, domestic and transnational, actually lies a few hundred meters higher up the mountain at the source of the Kali-Gandaki river, the Damodar Kund, a lake which sits at roughly 8000m and whose ancient shale beds are the source of the sacred Shaligram Stones.

Since at least the 5th c. B.C.E., the veneration of sacred fossil ammonite stones has been a prevalent feature of both Hindu and Buddhist ritual practices throughout South Asia. Even today, Muktinath remains the sole geographic source for these stones, called Shaligram Shila, venerated as the naturally occurring manifestation of Sriman Narayan (Lord Vishnu) and his avatars. To Buddhist practitioners, these stones are often read as manifestations of various kinds of celestial beings or occasionally, as parts of the Buddha himself. Ritual and religious uses of the stones are widely varied, and include use in public shrines, in home worship, in festival events, and for exchange during major life events such as weddings and funerals. Shaligram stones are primarily found in along the river banks, and in the tributaries offshoot lakes, of the the Kali-Gandaki river. This particular association with rivers is especially important given the view in many South Asian religions that rivers often constitute a sacred bridge (tirtha) between the material and divine worlds. Thusly, the parallels between a stone that “travels” into the mortal world and pilgrims who “travel” into divine worlds through movement across landscapes is also symbolically significant.

In the discourses of science, Shaligram Stones are comprised of three species of fossil ammonites that originate in the shale beds of the Damodar Kund. They date specifically from the Early Oxfordian to the Late Tithonian age near the end of the Jurassic period some 165-140 million years ago. But this kind of discourse is largely absent from the religious discourse of pilgrimage and among the pilgrims themselves who journey to Muktinath to obtain the stones. Suffice to say, Shaligram Stones constitute a primary draw for religious pilgrims to the temple valley and accordingly have been one of the major sources of income (either by catering to the food and housing needs of pilgrims or by selling the stones directly) for residents of the region. Shaligrams then, and their significant draw in terms of pilgrimage, serve as a focus of national and international commerce within the region even though their exchange is positioned in religious terms. And it is here that I am just beginning.

See? I told you it was complicated.

“This book is written with the hope of helping to diminish the once rather widespread notion that Archaeology was the unnecessary and fatuous excavation of the broken remnants of a bygone, and therefore superseded, antiquity. It tries to tell the story of the unexpected resurrection of the past into the liveliest and most fascinating form of modern science.” R.V.D. Magoffin. The Romance of Archaeology (1929)

On some level, just about everyone loves archaeology. From salesmen and CEOs who display Chokwe masks or Salado pottery (please tell me that’s a replica) in their offices to presidents and doctors who unabashedly adore Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider, to popular recurrences in episodes of Dr. Who and Star Trek, the curiosity about the nature of just what runs deep in our collective veins more often than not appears in the form of the Intrepid Archaeologist. For some, archaeology and anthropology will remain armchair hobbies, a topic debated and discussed at length betwixt and between the floating introspections our quote-a-day desk calendars see fit to provide us with. But for others, the romance of archaeology is a childhood sweetheart, whose absence evokes an emptiness of the kind only a first love can. For them, even the sorriest task can be met with an enthusiasm typically reserved for singing Dickensian chimney sweeps. Forgive my sentimental prose, but those truly embroiled in the field and in the labs, usually intensely focused realists, almost never speak of anthropology and archaeology in this way. And for good reason.

My own experiences with this kind of intensity of purpose were realized the first time I went on dig. One afternoon, after nearly 7 hours already in the field, in the grip of Belize’s mid-July heat, a colleague of mine came running breathlessly over a hill, dirt-crusted lithic in hand. With a grin that either indicated jubilation or insanity, he asked us if we wanted to see an ‘amazing’ new stratigraphic layer he’d found in a pit dug a hefty up-hill hike away from the main test trench. Without a moment’s hesitation the entire group leapt to its feet and charged after, chattering with excitement, just to see what rocks and mud and clay might finally reveal to us that day. At that moment, it was also a welcome boon, not only from the long work hours of nothing but dirt and jungle debris, but from several difficult moments left over from the previous day when we had discovered that multiple sections of the site had also been previously looted and left completely destroyed by shovels in search of recognizable objects to feed the growing black market demand for Mayan artifacts. Day in and day out, this is the kind of excitement born of dedication, not of romanticization, of a sense of responsibility to our work and not of imagined glorification. It is because a romantic past is a false past.

In the coming weeks and months you will likely see me write quite a lot about the topic of “false pasts”, “false culture”, and pseudo-science, so for that reason I will only briefly touch on the subject in this introductory post by saying this: there is nothing wrong with interest and fascination, but comfortable fables conveniently situated in the present rarely reflect the way things actually work. As Kenneth Feder put it, “only by understanding it can those of us dedicated to the study of the human past hope to deal with it”. I would add that this is equally true for those of us face-to-face with cultural issues in the human present as well.

Therefore, it is not only for myself that I write this blog, but also for the archaeology geeks and linguistics fanatics, religion scholars and anthropology buffs that lurk through the halls of universities, libraries, and social media. This is for all those who understand that anthropology isn’t just a profession, it’s a pathology. This is also for those we are never able to reach. I don’t mean to imply that I’m necessarily aiming for a “popular science” blog so to speak, but part of what it means to engage in scholarship also means making it accessible and I aim to include as many as I can in this discussion by keeping my overall focus in layman’s terms.

Unfortunately, no single commentary could ever hope to encompass everything that falls under the gaze of anthropology and archaeology. We could debate the events of history, analyze the lifeways of a society, argue over the advent of linguistic memes and agricultural mores, follow new developments in semiotics, and discuss politics, religion, theories, myths, and mysteries. Each of these subjects could easily fill hundreds of pages of their own books and blogs, and many do. One of the greatest strengths of social science is that almost anything could be found within its purview. Therefore, limited topics must be selected.

Anthropology and archaeology address a wide range of subjects, from the uplifting, to the uncomfortable, to the otherwise unremarkable. War, religion, the fall of civilizations, and politics integrate with food, media, narrative, symbol, and well, frankly, literal garbage. Even the meaning of “Anthropology” itself could be debated, but semantics aside, I simply endeavor to create an expectation of scope. One can only cover so much.

Inevitably, I expect that there will be questions of academic credibility and analytical legitimacy on my part. I do not typically discuss myself in public forums so I will say only this. I have a degree in Anthropology/Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I participated in an archaeological dig in northern Belize (Lowland Maya). I am currently a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology (focusing on religion, language, and gender) at Brandeis University. I have previously conducted fieldwork on Hindu ritual practice and language in West Bengal, northern India and now work primarily on ritual practice, religious syncretism, and identity in western Nepal. But assumptions and limitations aside, my greatest joy is sharing my love of culture with the people around me and my greatest wish is to be able to engage in informative discussion about the important topics that anthropology and archaeology address today.  I want my opinions challenged and my knowledge improved. Learning and growing is a team event and solo performances rarely, if ever, rate high.

I make no claims to ultimate knowledge and I expect that this will always be the case. However, silence begets only silence and eventually regret that nothing was attempted and nothing was gained. May this not be a monologue but a community of dialogues. May we learn what we did not know before.

Picasso once said that a painting was never finished; only abandoned. If history is the magnum opus of mankind, then perhaps we are simply picking up where we left off.