Project changes...

"It is not unusual for research plans to change after one begins fieldwork. A range of factors may alter one's carefully made plans, including the absence of expected economic institutions, local resistance to research objectives, state or other political intervention, and so on....So many ethnographies begin with a statement along the lines of 'I went to study A, I ended up studying B'. " (Gregory and Altman 1989:44 - "Observing the Economy")

My first post on this blog described research I was planning to carry out in Sikkim, with the Lepcha, on "Medical Culture". Having recently returned from Nepal after 8 months of fieldwork in a village there, my research is now: in East Nepal, with the Limbu, on the "Political economy of cardamom"! A major shift, though it still has something to do with plants (one plant!), and something to do, loosely, with health (one of the major uses of cardamom is in Ayurvedic remedies, though interestingly the villagers in Nepal who sell the seeds never use it themselves).

Pasted below is a short brain-storm of the new things that I became interested in whilst living in Mamangkhe, Taplejung:

What I’m interested in:

1. Cardamom:

1.1. History of cardamom in Mamangkhe; in Taplejung; and in Nepal/Sikkim more generally [I have photocopied 8 MSc theses (economics and geography) from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu which focus on cardamom cultivation in Nepal].

1.2. Technologies and techniques; knowledge of cardamom and ecology of forest; knowledge of what affects cardamom production (soil types, rainfall, etc.); are there people with more expertise or skill and where did they get this from – transmission of knowledge and experimentation and development of new techniques.

1.3. Economy of cardamom: economic and labour cost of production; market chains (selling cardamom); distribution and use of profits; enterprise, management

1.4. Ecology of cardamom: different forest/land types and their relative productivity; distribution of land types among families (this ties into section 3 below);

2. Class formation:

2.1. The histories of families that have moved away from Mamangkhe or partially-moved to Jhapa.

2.2. Competitiveness within the village as the tourist industry develops. People who can provide services to tourists (lodges, food, portering), often people who have bought houses by the main trail through the village, benefit rapidly and tremendously from this.

2.3. Land location and class: there is a probable relationship between physical location of land within the village and economic “position” or class. Tied to points 2.2 and 3, people who live by the main trail have often been able to buy property there from high-caste Nepalis who left in the last few decades. These houses are often large and modern (i.e. tin-roofed) with enough space to provide accommodation to tourists, porters and villagers passing-through. All village’s facilities are on the main trail: the school, health post, telephone, museum (which incorporates meeting rooms and, more recently, a computer), and all the shops from which villagers can buy basic essential goods (cooking oil, salt, soap). Houses located further above or below the main trail, sometimes up to 1 hours walk from the main trail, are visited less frequently by other villagers and tend to belong to somewhat poorer families (though this is of course not always the case).

3. Land use:

3.1. History of land use: some parts of the village which were previously agricultural -used for maize, rice and millet production - have been replanted with cash-crop cardamom and shade-producing trees. In other areas these basic crops have continued to be grown as it is important to produce a certain amount of ones own food.

3.1.1. What influences land use decisions;

3.1.2. What determines the kinds of land people have access to, inherit, or are able to buy or farm on;

3.2. Work on land:

3.2.1. Different work arrangements including adyiā, Tekā, bāndhoki;

3.2.2. How large land-owners distribute labour tasks to others in the village;

3.2.3. How land-owners who live outside Mamangkhe (Taplejung, Panchthar, Ilam, Jhapa) relate to their village, the land, and supervise production (similar to 3.2.2);

4. Migration:

4.1. Migration from the village: historical movement out of village by high-caste Nepalis; more recent movement out of village by Limbus.

4.2. Temporary migration out of village: Families often move away from the village when the bread-winner goes abroad for long-term or seasonal work. This may involve moving to the mother or wife’s family home, or, in the case of around 15 households, moving to Jhapa. Several families live in temporary accommodation with no agricultural land and are uncertain about their future: if the husband returns with money saved, they can buy a property in the area and stay more permanently (4.1); if they have made no money they must return to the village (Mamangkhe) and pay back their debts.

4.3. Incentive to migrate: Many people cite the isolation and need to personally carry goods into the village from Tharpu (2 days walk away) as the major reasons why they would want to leave the village. Other reasons include bad health services and lack of a good education for their children. There is currently a road being built which will reach Mamangkhe within the next 5 years (supposedly). It is interesting to speculate on how this will affect migration, perhaps by looking at villages that the road has recently reached, like the village of Tellok, about 8 hours walk downstream.

What I have collected so far:

1. Survey of 201 households in Wards 1 to 7, Mamangkhe. Data on demography, education, language, economics (production/consumption/conspicuous consumption), cardamom, travel, health and religious activities.

2. Survey of 30 households in Aitabare and Happenchowk, in Jhapa district. Semi-structured interviews on similar subjects as the survey in Mamangkhe but included questions on past employment (where/how they made enough money to move down), house and land prices at the time of purchase/building, education of children (private boarding schools), motivations and perceptions of difference between up (Mamangkhe) and down (Jhapa).

3. Structured interviews with older men in the village (a total of 6) on the topic of personal, village and Limbu history.

4. Informal unstructured interviews with 8 local phedangma (shamans)

5. Participant-observation throughout my work in the village. This included work experience during every agricultural task from planting and weeding rice, ploughing terraces, clearing forest, picking cardamom, cutting trees, planting maize, setting up fish traps and fishing, etc. As well as involvement in any important local ritual or ceremony such as marriages, funerals, the museum opening, etc.

6. Over 2000 photographs and 200 video clips of all of the above (5) which have been categorised and labelled.

7. Over 150,000 words of field-notes.

Lepcha medical culture in transition: ethnobotany, health and healing in Sikkim, India

On the 7th of November I will be arriving in Delhi, India, to begin fieldwork as part of my DPhil (PhD) in Social Anthropology. The current plan is to initially travel up to Sikkim and stay in Gangtok for two months. The initial focus of my project will be to take intensive Nepali lessons, in Sikkim, Kalimpong and possibly in Nepal itself for three or four months. This will be combined with "contact-building" and basic familiarisation with the general area and tentative plan-making for specific fieldsite locations. The longer-term plan is to carry out around 18 months of comparative research in at least two sites in Sikkim and possibly one further one in East Nepal.

My research interests focus on ecological and medical anthropology and the relationship between economic and cultural changes - in particular how changes in livelihood affect the knowledge (linguistic/recognition & application skills) and use (practical-situationa l) of "traditional knowledge", with particular focus on traditional medical knowledge. My Probationary Research Paper (PRS) is available here. This is a summary the research project as described in the paper:

This research project will focus on how and why traditional medical knowledge is changing among the Lepcha of the Himalayan state of Sikkim in North India. It will focus in particular on both their ethnobotanical knowledge and use of medicinal plants, and their conceptions and perceptions of health and health-systems. There are three aims: firstly, by studying two particular domains of Lepcha medical culture - plant knowledge and conceptions of health - to show how practical knowledge and perceptions are intertwined; secondly, by carrying out a comparative study in two villages, an urban-based one and another more rural community, this study will attempt to determine to what extent medical knowledge is in transition, transformation and change. Finally, the reasons for these changes, if any, will be considered by linking broader social, political and economic changes with local experiences. By integrating ethnobotany with medical anthropology, this research hopes to contribute to a scarcity of studies among the Lepchas. The comparative framework will provide insight into how knowledge changes, why it changes and how people experience these changes through something crucial to their everyday experience: their health and their knowledge of healing.

Methodologically I am interested in combining "classical" anthropology methods (long-term participant observation, in-depth semi/un-structured interviews, linguistic analysis, etc.., with methods developed and recently used considerably in ethnoecology-focussed anthropology. Fundamentally my interest is in integrating ethnobiological methods that have examined what counts as "knowledge" and tested methods for best measuring it, with an historically-influenced, contextual, descriptive-literary-ethnographic study of how one particular group (the Lepcha), is - very broadly (and simplistically) speaking - experiencing change.

In a giant-brushstroke-summary-generalisation, my research project is stimulated by an interest in:

1) Health and what it means to be "well" (e.g. the importance of livelihood - investigating the impact of subsistence vs. cash-cropping on self-perceived well-being);
2) Healing and methods developed to maintain/improve/change health (e.g. medicinal plant knowledge, ritual-healing practices);
3) The transmission/transformation/creation/practice-and-performance of "Traditional Knowledge", particularly related to medicinal plants (as this links with 1 and 2, and particularly as explored in the ethnobotanical/biological literature so far).
4) The dynamics (form and effect) of cultural and economic "change" and how they affect/relate-to each other (e.g. is there such a thing as a "transition" from locally-derived traditional medicinal plant use to internationally-developed biomedical-use and how does this influence people's knowledge and use of "traditional knowledge").
5) Methodology as a systematic (or somewhat unsystematic as fieldwork inevitably starts off as) procedure for creating, organising and analysing anthropological observations. Generally my interest is in combining qualitative and quantitative methods and enlarging, as much as an anthropologist can, the domain that is traditionally thought of as "anthropology" by referring to, in discussions and analyses, to the broader disciplinary domain of the social sciences.