Article begins
Dawn broke over Bhaktapur on a summer morning in 2022. The air was thick with humidity and the faint scent of flowers and incense. I was roused at 6 a.m. by the rhythmic clang of temple bells resonating in the distance and the animated voices of my neighbors that carried through the thin walls of my temporary home. Today was the day of Digu Puja, an annual sacred ritual where families worship their ancestral divinities. Still drowsy, I walked through Bhaktapur’s timeless brick-paved lanes dotted with countless small shrines and homes, and a temple at every corner, showcasing the exquisite Newari architectural style with their ornate wood carvings, tiered pagodas, and meticulously crafted brickwork. Bhaktapur was built by the Hindu Malla Kings in the twelfth century, and is one of Nepal’s best-preserved cities, despite undergoing cycles of rebuilding owing to its vulnerability to earthquakes. The impact of the 2015 earthquakes, a focus during my fieldwork, had reduced many of the city’s magnificent temples to rubble; however, in 2022 some of these temples had already been rebuilt and others were undergoing reconstruction.
As I made my way to the shrine of Bhokaadyo, the revered local Hindu deity of earthquakes, the city was already stirring. The rituals of Digu Puja were unfolding in a quiet reverence but there an unmistakable fervour in the air. Devotees in vibrant clothing streamed towards shrines, their arms laden with offerings for the ancestral deity. The ritual was accompanied by the sacrifice of a well-fed goat, an offering that symbolized the family’s commitment to worshipping the deity. I stepped into the shrine, a small sanctuary built in stone. I felt undisposed by the sudden chaos at the site, and I slipped on blood-smeared steps, injuring myself. My fall interrupted a family of devotees who had waited in anticipation since morning for their goat to quiver, a mark of the animal’s consent, before they could slit its vein to sprinkle its blood onto to the idol of the deity. I felt a deep sense of embarrassment; I writhed in pain, but it only took a few seconds for me to realize that I had no chance at finding relief then. Within moments, the devotees at the shrine went from welcoming me to looking at me with disdain, their anger shrouded in their unwillingness to tend to my fractured ankle. Before I could move somewhere safer, I heard questions being hurled at me: “Are you menstruating?”, “What caste are you?” Even my usually kind neighbors, who had accompanied me, questioned whether I was supposed to be there, speculating that the deity was forbidding my presence. The possibility of me being a low-caste woman with a health condition that was culturally associated with impurity had invoked a reaction from people who were usually cautious about their conduct around me since I was a foreigner.
Devotees begrudgingly shared with me that annual rituals such as Digu Puja intended to restore the deity’s relationship to the family, protect clans, and harness prosperity. They told me that these rituals of conciliation gained even more significance after the earthquakes and the Covid-19 pandemic, since the city’s residents experienced periods of extreme suffering and uncertainty. They were convinced that my presence could disrupt the course of the ritual as they had planned it and could hinder their attempts at propitiating the deity, who they said was offended by the untimeliness of my presence. Amid intense dissonance and discomfort, the entanglements of caste, gender, and belief all lay bare for me to accept and contemplate. I wasn’t the researcher asking questions or observing devotees in worship from a distance; I was part of the bedlam.
Anthropological fieldwork often necessitates that researchers unlearn prejudice and reflexively oscillate between apprehending our own subjectivities and maintaining dispassionate distance. As PhD students we’re repeatedly reminded that we must prioritize safety, anticipate and circumvent risks and ethically complex encounters. However, it is often in the struggle to navigate the unfamiliar and the unexpected in the field that one is able to explore the transformative potential of discomfort as a means of gaining ethnographic insight into the emotional life-worlds of the people we work with. This photo essay attempts to reflect on some moments of discomfort I experienced during my fieldwork in Nepal and how it opened up lines of inquiry and modes of thinking about and practicing anthropology. One reason I chose to write a photo essay was that I became aware of how I felt in those encounters much later, when I returned from the field, and began revisiting my notes, videos and photographs. I had embodied discomfort in research praxis, but I was only able to truly to access these feelings in writing about my experiences from the field.
Being shunned at the shrine of a local family’s ancestral deity was disturbing, yet it was one of my most profound experiences of encountering religiosity in Nepal. I had spent time in numinous places that my friends in Bhaktapur assured me were imbued with the protective powers of mystical Hindu mother goddesses, but none impacted me as much as this incident. I allowed myself to experience guilt and anger, letting go of the burden of detachment or extricating the self from the ethnographic moment. The discomfort I experienced forced me to analytically engage with notions of purity and social hierarchy that were difficult topics to address in my fieldsite. Could I have truthfully interacted with the people or confronted these prejudices then had I pretended to not care about what had happened? Photographs I took before and after the incident (Figures 1 and 2) continue to remind of how I felt in those moments of discomposure. The researcher’s urge to document everything I was witnessing overcame me, even in those moments of pain and uncertainty. Without that experience, would I have been privy to the affective upheavals that disruptions in rituals could cause within certain communities?
In the early days of my fieldwork, I found some comfort in my interlocutors’ compassionate insistence on the fact that I was one of them, a daughter of their family, a Hindu Indian woman who ate similar food, spoke Hindi (a language they were familiar with), and learnt Nepali, their native tongue. What I found most intriguing was how I was treated similarly by diverse individuals; my position as a researcher enabled me to befriend groups of people across classes and castes. I would often sit with women who labored at reconstruction sites (Figures 3 and 4) during their lunch breaks, and it was common for them to generously offer their home cooked meals to me, while we chatted under sweltering sun. There was an intimacy in sharing food, it was an exercise in trust and acceptance. Yet, there were complicated matters of privilege I had to carefully tread, bearing in mind that I was an upper-caste woman and I was interacting with women from a caste and class that is perceived as lower than mine, and was a crucial marker of difference in Bhaktapur.
I could never refuse to eat the food these women offered me, since it would at once reveal the disparity in our socio-economic privilege. These women were conditioned to believe that caste influenced social interactions, and I was unable to pretend that these differences weren’t a reality. As a researcher attempting to confront these sensitive ethical entrapments, eschewing acts of othering, I often found myself falling ill because I could never refuse meals during fieldwork. I grappled with occupying a liminal space—I could either be perceived as a friend, an “insider researcher” or an “uncomfortable outsider”. The interactions I had in the field were often entirely dependent on how I navigated the ethical complexities that existed within this liminal space, on whether I said yes or no. Not only did I feel responsible for the course of my interaction with my interlocutors, but I was also obliged to consider multidimensional aspects of my identity and privilege that had otherwise escaped me. Still, there were messy disruptive moments, when my body gave in and I was forced to leave a meal mid-way, running the risk of potentially offending a group of very kind and generous women. While this self-awareness is essential to fieldwork praxis, I was only truly able to experience it in moments where I was moved by discomfort and felt compelled to question existing social structures and practices.
I frequently also found that I was at the receiving end of ethically ambiguous situations. Most of my interlocutors were men, and many worked at rebuilding sites. They often invited me to climb makeshift ladders to reach the temple pinnacles and roofs to inspect the reconstruction of the site, while they shared with me their experience of toiling at these temples that were both places of work and worship for them. My research assistant, also a middle-aged man, would often encourage me to take a leap of faith and climb these precarious scaffolds, as I was young and able-bodied. Each time I agreed to do so influenced my interlocutors’ perception of what my body was able to do. It felt like I had endured a rite of passage, one that gave me access to a world I would never have known had I not complied with what I was asked to do. In those moments, there was a shift in the relations of power that enabled a different way of knowing and engaging with the field; the gaze of the people around me shifted as they evaluated, judged, and questioned my choices and movements.
These physically demanding tasks, often suffocating and dangerous, made me acutely aware of my own body in space. I gained a greater degree of understanding of how the people I worked with perceived their surroundings, and how that was starkly different from how I perceived these spaces. I struggled to breathe, overwhelmed by the dust at rebuilding sites, and the noise as I navigated through ecstatic crowds. “This is what it means to do ethnographic research, to practice anthropology,” I told myself each time I landed in a difficult situation that caused me to question my own sense of judgment and discretion. But it was also a revelation to me that I had only experienced this feeling when I encountered ambivalence and uneasiness and was compelled to unlearn what I thought I knew about doing fieldwork.
What I realized was that grappling with discomfort required me to participate more rigorously in matters of the field, to take decisions that influenced the kind of anthropology I wanted to practice, which would eventually have bearings on what I wrote and produced. I was treading fine lines between appropriateness and risk, privilege and sensitivity, and every decision I took either temporarily defused my differences with my interlocutors or further alienated me from them. Yet, it is in willingly entering spaces of discomfort that anthropologists are able to access subtler elements and practices of a culture that are often less visible. This transforms their ethnographic understanding, and they are able to actively interrogate power dynamics, inequalities, and social structures that would be difficult to assess by mere observation. It allows for critical reflection on one’s own positionality and on the impact of their presence. While this praxis enriches the ethnographic narrative, it is not enough to simply allow oneself to feel discomforted. One must also address these vulnerabilities in writing and talking about fieldwork. Too often, there is a tendency to flatten, sanitize, and even homogenize narratives of and from the field. The vulnerability of the researcher is rarely addressed as part of the analysis. Embracing discomfort and vulnerability, in analysis and writing, may allow for a more authentic and empathetic portrayal of ourselves as researchers, and of the lived realities of those who we interact with in the field.