The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
kora, but this act exists, as language and as lived experience, under the larger umbrella of khorwa, the cycle of birth, aging, sickness, death, and rebirth through which sentient beings travel. In Tibetan Buddhism, such reckoning is often symbolized by a wheel—of life, of time, and of the Buddha’s teachings. These two interlocking concepts have been crucial to my thinking about migration and social change. Throughout this book, I have chosen to use the term khora as a way of representing, imperfectly in an English language text, these two interwoven concepts.
At its root, “diaspora” means dispersal. It is a casting out and across, a transformation of ways of life, a re-imagining of belonging. But experiences of dispersal are not uniform. They do not run in straight lines. Instead, they figure in circles, in cycles. I have come to understand migration and attendant markers of diaspora as khora. Broadly, khora is a way of being in and moving through the world. This concept illustrates patterns of mobility, processes of world-making, and the dialectical relationship between loss and wonder around which diasporic experiences turn. To see such human movement as khora is to expand the affective register of diaspora beyond a one-way trajectory, toward what it means to be—and to belong—in and through forms of circumambulation and transmigration. Many lives can exist within one human lifetime and between one life and the next.
The extent to which one feels at home depends on where one is situated, with whom one walks khora, literally and figuratively. For people from Mustang, as with the seasonal shifts of grazing animals between summer and winter pastures, the transitions between farming and trading, or even taking the subway to and from work, khora signifies a routine, embedded in social networks, that provides solace, guidance, and support. At times, khora enables contemplation of impermanence in a Buddhist sense. The khora of migration is enfolded within the turning of the wheel of cyclic existence—with all its vicissitudes of ignorance, attachment, and aversion. Even so, practicing khora can have a centering effect. Through movement, we find stillness.
Anthropologist Carole McGranahan has described fieldwork as a type of khora. I concur. In fact, I would expand this idea to say that the practice of anthropology can also be khora, in that it is a literal and figurative circling around the sacred center of human connection, over time and across space. Through decentering cycles of departure and arrival, anthropologists learn to navigate uncertainty and practice compassion. This book traces such movements, at once internal and external. I also recognize that the terrain through which anthropologists and our interlocutors move can be uneven, punctuated by power and circumstance, by papers and politics.
All too often in anthropology, we assign the term “theory” to the ideas of (primarily) white, male Continental philosophers, and we discount or minimize theoretical work that gets done in other ways. Yet when stripped down, “theory” is simply the creation and use of concepts that help to explain social phenomena. Khora does such work. I have chosen to root this book in a framework that comes from Himalayan and Tibetan communities not only because it reflects vernacular understandings—not just because people speak about and practice khora—but also because it carries conceptual weight. The work of critical Indigenous scholars (I am particularly grateful to Zoe Todd and Bernard Perley) have helped me to trouble the assumption that theory must emerge from a Western intellectual pedigree in order to be recognizable, let alone capable of opening up new ways of knowing. The difficulties and benefits associated with the daily practice of khora in specific Himalayan contexts reflects the complexities of migration in a more catholic sense, from its legal obstacles and economic prospects to the ways it reshapes families and communities, including their connections to land and lineage, to language and culture.
As a category of experience, khora stands for the pathways we travel from one life or one country to the next—and back again—and how we are changed through these processes. The concept resonates with anthropological discussions of modernity and mobility: circulations of capital and labor across the globe. In this sense, khora connects to dynamics variously described as globalization, transnationalism, and the worlding of people, ideas, and things. Globalization is a gloss for the circulation of resources and neoliberal ideals, transnationalism emphasizes the dissolution of geopolitical boundaries, and worlding troubles assumptions about how or in what directions global movements occur. Onto the bones of these intellectual ideas, khora adds a layer of muscle memory: of cyclic movement, of ethical action, of a walking temporality that links the past and the present to possible futures.
Still, khora is not simply a mode of explaining something, in the ways that a term like “transnationalism” becomes a shortcut for intricate, varied experiences, nor is my use of khora about making a universal claim. Instead, consider khora a way of doing and being, a mechanism for action. Khora can help us to see how the circulation of people, things, and ideas is affectively and materially complicated. The khora of migration interweaves threads of care and belonging as lives are stitched together through time and space. In this sense, khora is rooted in relatedness, in kinship.
Migration at once depends on and works on kinship, the genealogical bonds of descent and alliance that shape humanity. We follow the paths and the footsteps of those who have moved before us. People call upon kinship networks to facilitate the logistics of migration—visas, jobs, apartments—and to help one another through less visible but equally challenging emotional transitions. No matter where people from Mustang find themselves, the cultural obligations that anchor community mean that one’s first effort in any situation is to establish—through a recitation of place-based social history and by speaking names—where and how you fit into networks of kin. In Himalayan communities as elsewhere, such webs of belonging keep people at once beholden to, and endeared to, one another. This says something about love and understanding, and about home.
The Ends of Kinship explores what it means for people from Mustang, including those who have migrated to New York, to care for one another, steward a homeland across time and space, remake households elsewhere, and confront distinct forms of happiness and suffering through this process. How do people honor and alter their shared responsibilities and senses of connection to one another and to a particular geography, not only in spite of but even through the turning of the wheel of migration? How do different generations abide with one another, even when language fades and people struggle to comprehend? I ask these questions across distinct social ecologies, from high mountain villages of northern Nepal to some of the most diverse urban neighborhoods on Earth, at the heart of America’s immigration story.
This book’s engagement with one small region of the world speaks to broader dynamics. Immigration is a lightning rod issue of our time. Whether located in New York or experienced in the places from which new New Yorkers hail, immigration articulates with legal rights and claims to property; the division and reunification of families; legacies of state violence, processes of settler colonialism, and dynamics of political uncertainty; and aspirations for living beyond what is captured by the terms “refugee” or “economic migrant.” This is true for highly visible groups—Central American migrants, Syrian refugees—and for those, like people from Mustang, who remain nearly imperceptible within the demographics of New York and the greater United States but whose presence in America has dramatically reshaped their home communities.
What do I mean by the ends of kinship? At its heart, this book focuses on the fabric of duty and desire that is kinship, as it is experienced through the transformative process of migration. By definition, “ends” references more than one place. It bespeaks physical distance—points on a map, say—even as it signals temporal shifts, notches in a time line, moments of initiation and completion. This book is not only about people who have moved from one place to another. It is also about how people live in and through multiple places, about what it means to leave, to remain behind, and possibly to return. I am not speaking of an end, singular. Quite the opposite.
The relational dynamics of kinship can give meaning to people’s lives in accordance with, or even in spite of, physical and political abilities to move—the warp and weft of citizenship and identity. As with rope or thread, some relationships fray through migration while others are newly knotted. The ends of kinship are ties that bind people to one another in dialogue with