The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
in the morning. Today, we hoped to complete our work in Namgyal and Phuwa and then move on to Thinkar by foot. The jeep lets us out in Phuwa, just in front of the home of the village headman. We go inside to review the list of households in this hamlet and plan the day.
Usually bright, one of our local research collaborators, Yangdron, is subdued. She leans her head on KC’s shoulder. “I feel aches in my chest and back,” she says. “Like electric shock going through my body,” she confides as we are served butter tea and tsampa. I sense her growing discomfort as we eat our breakfast. “I think it is nöpa,” she adds.
As a verb, nöpa is the act of harming. It means to injure or damage, to disturb the peace, to feel ill will or to cause illness. It can also indicate a sacking: of places, of people, but also of logics. In Tibetan Buddhist debate, monks slap and stomp, crimson robes flaring like petals around the stem of thigh and knee, throwing down nöpa as argument, as philosophical contradiction. This form of harm is refutation, that which discredits or disproves. Here, injury is ontological impairment, by which I mean an idea impaled. The world is this way. The world is not this way. Skewered.
But nöpa also live as beings, manifestations like the old grandfather spirit in Drakmar who was so lonely, so neglected and disgruntled, that he drowned those many children. In another case, a nöpa living above the village allowed the headman’s horse to be attacked by a snow leopard. The horse was maimed but not killed, as if for fun. This nöpa was mischievous. Here, nöpa can be understood as the failure to protect, the failure of protection.
By the time we leave the headman’s house, Yangdron’s quiet conviction about what is ailing her is known by all. The headman’s wife kindles juniper fronds as incense, fumigates Yangdron with the smoke, and prepares a weak tsampa broth. The juniper is to appease the nöpa. The broth is to bring back strength.
Yangdron rests in this house while the rest of us work. Later, we all walk slowly to Thinkar. Usually strong and graceful, Yangdron moves as if through mud. She is rigid. Her eyes glaze. When we arrive in the neat home of a village widow, behind the king’s summer palace, Yangdron collapses in a little heap. KC and Yangjin stretch out her long legs, stroke her head, cover her with blankets. The widow—a wise and skilled woman—keeps watch on our friend as we go about our afternoon of work.
At the end of the day, the widow reports that Yangdron felt better for some time but is now feeling worse again. Like the headman’s wife, the widow bathes Yangdron twice in juniper incense and feeds her thin tsampa gruel. I am rubbing Yangdron’s back when she rises abruptly, possessed by nausea. She makes it to the front stoop before retching. The next hour passes in trepidation. We had planned to walk back to Monthang at the end of the day—two hours against a dusk wind—but now must find transport for Yangdron. After various failed attempts to locate horses (all are out at pasture) or find a motorcycle or jeep (most are on their way to Ghami for a big soccer tournament), we begin to walk, one person taking either one of Yangdron’s arms.
We make it as far as the impressive gnarl of poplar near the village center before we hear the familiar rumble of a motorcycle engine. Our one male researcher, Lhawang, all energy and gangly limbs, takes off in search of its source. We continue toward Namgyal. Lhawang returns with the borrowed motorcycle just in time, as Yangdron has again begun to grow weak and stiff, her eyes vacant. We bundle her up in our scarves, shawls, and my windbreaker. Off they go.
The rest of us walk back to Monthang. Upon arrival, Kunzom searches out the local biomedical health worker. She finds him drinking beer and playing cards in the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) kitchen, his eyes red rimmed and foggy. Instead of asking him for help, she locates the woman who assists him and asks her to examine Yangdron.
The assistant confirms that Yangdron’s illness is a mixture of nöpa and gastric upset. After a few brief pokes at Yangdron’s belly, the woman is about to give her a range of medicines, including an IV antibiotic injection. Kunzom insists on a pregnancy test. Yangdron is newly engaged. We have all been wondering. The test is positive.
Yangdron’s fiancé, a jeep driver, rushes to Monthang after hearing the news. The day before, he’d been sent all the way down to Pokhara to fetch a specific medicine for the king. He comes to Yangdron’s bedside after making his delivery to Khar, the Monthang palace. Given this news, and Yangdron’s state, we decide that she should go home, to her fiancé’s village. The next morning, we send her off with oral rehydration solution, multivitamins, and Tibetan medicines. The previous evening, Amchi Pema confirmed a pregnancy pulse but found imbalances. She diagnosed both bile- and nöpa-related disorders, in addition to the pregnancy, and agreed that the women in Phuwa and Thinkar had been right to offer incense.
As we send Yangdron off, into the home of her mother-in-law, I feel protective. I wonder what sort of care she will receive. I also marvel at the ability of Tibetan medicine to recognize what biomedicine cannot see and at the divinatory capacity of peeing on a stick and being told about your future.
As this story resolves into the fact of a pregnancy, I am left thinking about a certain quiescence, between shyness and shame, that surrounds sex, reproduction, and women’s bodies here. As we speak with women that summer, we learn that conception often occurs unexpectedly, invoking fear and joy.
But there is more to it than that. Embedded in Yangdron’s story is a brush with danger—nöpa. As was the case with Karchung, many of the women with whom we speak that summer name nöpa as a primary cause of all sorts of trouble: miscarriages, stillbirths, infertility. However, to speak of nöpa does not mean not to speak of other causes of harm. Some women tell us that newborn deaths occur when they are made to work in the fields too long into pregnancy or work too hard. They connect intimate hardships—the diminished production of breast milk, for example—to larger structures and cycles of precarity: poor harvests, family debt, anger between husbands and wives. The ultimate cause of an untimely death may be a nöpa or may be written on the forehead, but this does not preclude a recognition of the material forces that shape human lives.
AUTHORITATIVE KNOWLEDGE
In reflecting on Yangdron’s story, I see Kunzom’s insistence that she take a pregnancy test as care-full and bold. Although Kunzom is not a mother, she possesses enough of a certain kind of knowledge to assert herself for Yangdron’s benefit. In some ways, Yangdron had been resigned to let the reality of her pregnancy unfold to the slower rhythm of an expanding belly and to not talking as a form of protection, even as she was, at the same time, learning through this research project about the difficult experiences that previous generations of Mustang’s women have lived through and how those hardships are intertwined with silence.
This leads me to the relationship between silence and sharing. In Mustang, as in many other parts of the world, women’s status—as reproductive beings but also as human beings—are subject to a kind of scrutiny that is rarely applied to men. In homes and villages, or in the communication pathways that link Mustang to Kathmandu to New York, privacy can be a thin curtain, pleated by gossip. Sex and sexuality are tossed tacitly back and forth in village melodies, hearthside innuendo, text messages. The question “What is happening to me?” hangs in the air.
I thought I was dying when my blood came for the first time. My mother handed me some wool and told me nothing.
My body burned when I squatted to pee in the fields. What did it mean?
Sister-in-law held me as I pushed that first baby out. She was more scared than I was.
The man’s substance is sticky! After my husband finished his effort, it felt like he had glued my legs together, so nobody else could open me up.
To please a man, rock back and forth like when you thresh grain. To please a woman, let the man drink enough so he falls asleep!
If the afterbirth is slow to come, danger.
These are the voices of older Mustang women, those mostly in their