Nepalis in Thamel and Worldwide

with Dr. Benjamin Linder

The Mobilities and Methods Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is pleased to share this interview with Dr. Benjamin Linder, about his dissertation project with Nepalis in Thamel and Nepalis’ networks around the world. Dr. Benjamin Linder is an anthropologist and cultural geographer. His primary research explores the geographies of cultural transformation in Nepal, with a particular focus on questions of cosmopolitanism, place-making, and socio-spatial contestation. He has related interests in scale, infrastructural development, and literary geographies. The following conversation explores questions of (im)mobility, ethnographic methods / methodologies, politics of research, and productive challenges of anthropological fieldwork. To find out more about his research, please email Dr. Linder at benjaminlinder12@gmail.com

Doyeon Shin (DS): So, could you tell us a little bit about how your project was conceived? How did your project come to be about research on mobilities?

Benjamin Linder (BL): My research explored the co-production of place and cultural transformation through an ethnography centered on Thamel, which is a dense urban neighborhood in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thamel actually has a long and fascinating history that extends back centuries, but it was in the 1970s—for a variety of demographic, political, and economic reasons—that it started developing as a hub for international tourism in Kathmandu. By the late 1980s, it was the primary space for Nepal’s burgeoning adventure tourism industry, and what followed was a bunch of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, and trekking agencies populating this formally peripheral area that once marked the outskirts of the old city. My project really reacts against the popular and academic treatments of Thamel that frame it through this discourse of tourism and that suggest tourism is the most important thing for understanding Thamel. The more time I spent there, the more I came to realize that tourism is almost superficial to the multiple worlds that the neighborhood engenders and reproduces among Nepalis themselves. So, while tourism was and remains integral for the modern development of the neighborhood, it is significantly overvalued, I argue, as a driver of the space. There’s a lot going on there aside from tourism, and tourists are an increasingly peripheral part of the story. The meanings and experiences of Thamel shift along demographic and social registers. In the case of Nepal, that means class, caste, nationality, generation, and gender. These Nepali experiences are not reducible to foreignness. The discourses surrounding Thamel among Nepalis reflect a fault line in the cultural politics of 21st-century Kathmandu. They basically represent a struggle between Nepali national identity versus cosmopolitanization, and tradition versus modernity. So that’s where my project started, from a need to highlight the Nepali dimensions of Thamel rather than the tourist dimensions. Ethnographically, that entailed theorizing and paying attention to how places and subjects co-constitute one another and effectively create new modes of identity and cultural practice.

In terms of mobility, I started engaging with that literature at a more conceptual level. Initially, I saw it as a way to reinvigorate debates about globalization and cultural transformation that had sort of peaked in the 90s in anthropology. In particular, the distinction in the mobilities literature between a sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics was particularly fruitful for the case I was looking at. There seemed to be a kind of anti- essentialism built into the mobilities approach, which I found really compelling. That appealed to me because it is anti-essentialist in a way that was theoretically rich but also more easily grounded empirically and ethnographically compared to other, more philosophical treatments. So that’s where I started in the mobilities work. The more time I spent in Thamel, though, the more it became clear that the neighbourhood is connected with other spatial sites around the world. I knew about the foreign tourists, of course, and they come from all over the place. But what I had underemphasized was the degree to which Thamel was part of this sprawling network of spaces that link Nepalis globally through circuits of migration and exchange. Suddenly, at that point, mobilities became much more literal. Mobilities became not just an analytical framework, but a methodological and ethnographic one as well. At that point, I was actually talking about physical movement rather than just using mobilities for its conceptual anti-essentialism, if that makes sense.

DS: It totally makes sense. So, it sounds like your project focuses more on the movement of Nepalis impacted by tourism scheme?

BL: Yeah, I mean, as much as possible, I always try to not frame it in terms of tourism. So many of the Nepali transnational networks I was looking at had very little to do with tourism, and that got folded into my bigger critique of the “tourist narrative” that has weighed on Thamel for at least three decades. I really wanted to move away from tourism and highlight the Nepali circuits of migration, exchange, and media that spatialize in Thamel and connect it to other sites around the world. That became a way of almost reclaiming Thamel as a Nepali space, or particular kind of Nepali space, rather than as this “inauthentic,” “foreign” thing that just happened to be in Nepal. Disparaging narratives of Thamel portray it as some kind of mimetic copy of the West, and part of my project was to show how inaccurate that is. What Nepalis are doing in Thamel is not reducible to tourism or to some image of foreignness. It is much more complicated than that.

DS: So, to talk a little bit about the methodology: your research questions are related to mobility and movement, which are really hard to grasp, the movements of people and non-moving actants. Were there any methodologies that you anticipated before going into the field? Or were you able to implement any new methodology to capture movement in the context of your research?

BL: Yes. For me, there were two ways that I operationalized a mobilities perspective methodologically, both of which surprised me because I had not anticipated either when I first started this research. First, once I had already conducted most of my interviews, I felt emboldened to experiment with less traditional modes of ethnography within Thamel. I tried things like photography—either with me being the photographer or giving other people cameras and having them narrate the photographs they took back to me. I did a couple of walking interviews, where I would literally stroll through the neighbourhood with people as I asked them questions. I also solicited some guided tours of the neighbourhood. I used digital mapping technology, too. Of course, the quality of these different experiments, and the data that they yielded, varied dramatically. Some were way more successful than others, but I at least tried different ways of moving beyond traditional ethnographic interviews and normal modes of participant observation. So that was within Thamel.

The second way has to do with Thamel’s linkages to other spaces. Like I said, I started realizing that Thamel is existentially interwoven with these other sites around the world. After my first stint of fieldwork, I started applying for grants to conduct what I thought would be a multi-sited approach, always with an eye towards understanding Thamel. I ended up going to multiple places that had come up in my interviews to explore why this or that space had been brought up in conversations about Thamel. I went to multiple places. I spent the most time in London and Hong Kong, but I also conducted interviews with Nepalis living in Finland, Australia, the USA, Canada, and Thailand. That started as a sort of comparative multi-sited project, but as it went on I ended up connecting with Nepalis in Thamel that I had met in Hong Kong, or meeting someone in London who connected me with someone in Hong Kong. So, it became not only multi-sited, but also about tracing the connective routes in actual practice. Someone I had randomly met in Hong Kong would message me on Facebook back in Kathmandu, so we would meet there in Thamel. That sort of thing. It gave me a much better sense of how these places are connected in practice. So, the method was more than just in a comparative mode like, “Oh, Camden in London is similar to Thamel and has a lot of Nepalis.” It was more about showing that these sites are part of the same transnational processes. For example, Camden is not just superficially similar to Thamel, but directly imbricated with it. So that was another insight that was unexpected. Not only did I not expect to do a multi-sited ethnography, but, once I did, I didn't expect it to be so coherent. I didn’t actually expect to be able to identify and follow those links so concretely.

DS: I am amazed about how you follow people, because we usually focus on one site as a central place where all happens, but you are following Nepalis and thinking of people as the place where we do ethnography, which is very cool.

BL: Yeah, this is not my area of expertise, but I am sure there are parallels and forbearers in commodity chain studies, where there are great ethnographic examples of researchers following chains of production and exchange in similar ways. Maybe that is what I was doing, but in my case, it was more about the production of space rather than of value or commodities. Part of the mobilities turn is explicitly methodological, about “mobile methods” and “moving with”—mobility not just as a conceptual framework or theoretical literature but as a method for understanding the importance of movement in social worlds. For my work, that meant exploring exactly how movement constitutes neighborhoods as well as the imaginaries that attach to neighborhoods.

DS: Were there any challenges that you faced in the field?

BL: In the field, I think I faced the common challenges of ethnography, and those were difficult. Once I started trying out these mobile methods, I already had a broad base of traditional interviews, which I had spent the first year of my research collecting. So after that, I felt a little more free to experiment a bit. Like I said, photo interviews, GIS mapping, and walking tours yielded different qualities of data. Some were more usable and illuminating than others but having the traditional ethnographic stuff in my back pocket enabled me to try out those other things. I guess it took away a bit of the pressure because if something failed, I could just move on, and it was not a fatal blow to my dissertation work.

DS: So your first year of research gave you a safe space, so even if you failed with experimental methodologies, you always have your interviews. When you were posing research questions, did you specifically mention methodologies?

BL: That’s a good question. In my later grant proposals, yes. But initially, no. I don’t think I focused too much on method in my early trips to Nepal. I was more or less doing interviews and participant observation in a way that felt self-justifying, or at least did not require much extra explanation in my grant proposals. In the subsequent proposals that funded the transnational research, I did talk a bit more about methodology. That drew a lot on discussions of multi-sited ethnography, Doreen Massey’s “global sense of place” argument, and also the mobilities imperative to move with your research subjects.

DS: Yeah, because compared to traditional ethnographies, now we are more encouraged to find new methodologies other than participant observation and in-depth interviews, so finding new methodologies is sort of a new area for us.

BL: As an anthropology PhD student, I knew that I ought to do some traditional ethnography, but once that was kind of established and I had some ethnographic bona fides, I started taking GIS classes and looking into other things. Even at the time, I was not sure what I was going to do with them, or how I would use them. For example, GIS is one where I was not quite sure what it would mean for my project. Very little of my digital mapping ended up in my dissertation, but just this month, I finished an article coming out which mobilized that data. The piece is partially about cataloging commercial signs in Thamel and seeing how the name “Thamel” travels around the city. This was based on a dissertation chapter, but I also used some of the GIS data in an unrelated side project that was published in 2019. You never know what data will end up being valuable. For me, it was just a matter of trying out as much as I could, seeing what proved useful and keeping whatever helped expand and diversify my understanding of the space.

DS: Were you able to find something that you had not seen before? When you were trying out new methodologies, was there anything you had never seen before using traditional methodologies, compared to when you implemented new methodologies?

BL: I am hesitant to take too much credit because I am just building on what other people were already talking about and trying. I didn’t invent new methodologies. But in terms of the “experimental” or “less traditional” methods that I employed; the GIS stuff ended up being pretty useful to me. When I lived in Chicago before and after my fieldwork, I took a couple of GIS classes, one in archaeology and one in urban planning. For those courses, I was mostly just playing around with map-making. I had been gathering some geographical data in Kathmandu because the data I wanted did not exist yet, and GIS enabled me to analyze and visualize it. GIS is very common these days, but it still seems underutilized in ethnography and cultural geography. Again, I am definitely not the first person to use GIS in this way, but it was really helpful for me to get a handle on how Thamel’s boundaries, and the imaginaries that are attached to Thamel, shift and rearrange through time. In the two articles that grew out of that, I use GIS in very different ways, but they were both centered on mapping commercial signs—the languages on signs and the toponyms on signs—to analyze how the neighborhood is materially expanding and transforming, and also what kinds of imaginaries are expanding and transforming with it. In that case, I was able to clearly demonstrate something that would have been much more difficult with just interviews.

DS: Were there any strategies that you had to improvise or change according to the situation in your fieldsite?

BL: In addition to what we talked about, one thing was the level of reflexivity and multi- vocality required of the project. Of course, being reflexive as an ethnographer has been par for the course for a long time now. For me, that became increasingly important, specifically as a way of understanding the complex inter-subjective encounters in Thamel. Early on in my fieldwork, I had these really perplexing moments where I would witness a scene (or be part of a scene) that seemed, on the one hand, irreducible to any of the individuals involved, and, on the other hand, resistant to a God’s-eye perspective from which one could objectively untangle the encounter. So, in my field notes, I had to empathize with and embody as much as I could the different actors involved. I tried to get a sense of how misunderstandings and misperceptions created generative ambiguities, and how people in Thamel can take advantage of these in all sorts of ways. This became a major part of my dissertation—how certain folks in Thamel are able to leverage social ambiguities to create new possibilities. I tried as much as possible to understand how different situated knowledges intersected with each other and created emergent properties. This began with normal reflexivity, attending to how I was perceived or misperceived as a researcher, how I may change the dynamics that I was there to observe. It also required ever-increasing degrees of empathy, critical reflection, and multi-vocality. So that was one aspect of my method that I had to continuously hone as I went along.

DS: This maybe a really silly question, but when you were walking around the neighborhood or site, how long did you walk?

BL: It’s a good question. When I was in the field, I walked a lot, not even with other people necessarily. I would often go to a café that I liked to write or read in the mornings, then just walk around afterward. If I did not have interviews scheduled that day, I would walk the streets and just wait for something interesting to happen, which normally does not take long in a place like Thamel because something will catch your attention. So, yeah, I probably walked an hour a day at the very least, I would think. I would stroll around a lot. Often it just led to mindless, bored walking. But often it didn’t, and it was for those moments that I had my field notes ready to go. I enjoy walking in general, not just as a method. But in terms of research, walking proved really useful for finding these corners of Thamel that are less overt and more hidden. When you start trying to explore every little alley, suddenly you end up in a place that is totally new to you, even though you have lived in this neighborhood for a year. You will come into a medieval temple courtyard that feels far removed from what is going on a block away. Maybe over a year into my research, I realized that there was a Muslim quarter in my field site, which, as far as I can tell, has almost nothing to do with tourism and is tucked away in a quiet part of Thamel. I had done most of my research at that point, so it just drove home how much I have left to learn.

There is always more to uncover, and there still is. Thamel is open and ever-changing, because place in general is open and ever-changing. There are so many layers of meaning and materiality folded into Thamel. Walking, for me, turned out to be a useful way of finding them.

DS: Your walking part of the methodology is really interesting. I have seen some literatures where walking has become an important part of actually being in the field and knowing more about the field.

BL: For me it started with Michel de Certeau, though there were definitely others before him who extolled walking as a way of getting a new vantage on urban life. De Certeau’s essay on walking the city is a foundational text for thinking about how different ways of engaging with space yield different sensations, perspectives, and meanings. You can look at a map, or any representation of space, but to be on the street is a different experience, a radically different experience. Attending to that lived dimension of place-making has always been really appealing to me. It does not necessarily mean walking, of course, but just trying to engage with space in a variety of different ways.

DS: How did you capture the dynamism of movement, and how did you put that into writing?

BL: Great question. I grappled with this a lot as I wrote my dissertation. I suppose part of the solution was to write in non-linear ways, or at least in non-chronological ways. Sometimes, that meant returning to the same history or ethnographic scene from different vantage points. The goal was to enrich the site or scene so that, by the end, its shifting interconnections (and the mobilities that produced it) came out clearly. There are particular bars, venues, and subcultures that I use to tell the history of Thamel in my project: the owner to who went to Hong Kong and returned with inspiration that helped him ignite the vibrant nightlife that would then take over Thamel; or, how this particular falafel stand and that particular currywurst stand, both owned and operated by Nepalis, came to be in Kathmandu; or how Thamel’s musical genres are linked to music scenes going on among Nepalis in the UK or Hong Kong. For me, these sorts of narratives illuminate the ways in which transnational mobilities are continually reconstituting Thamel. These are forged in everyday practices, but when you take the wide view of it all you get a sense of Thamel as this incredibly dynamic place. Importantly, it also highlights the primary role of Nepali networks (rather than tourist networks) in that process of building Thamel.

DS: Last question is about your teaching. How have you implemented your methodology or your research into classrooms?

BL: For me, one of my main teaching objectives is to get students to think beyond the rigid, essentialist approaches to place and culture that are still so prevalent. Nowadays, academics agree that place and culture are both contested, ever-changing, and never fully coherent categories. They are always open and dynamic. That is one of the foundational ideas I hope students absorb in my classes. It opens up new considerations of so many other ideas: belonging and identity, politics and history, power and opposition. I rely on academic texts to teach that, but I also try to use current events whenever possible, as a way of showing that this isn't just an abstract academic debate. The way we think about place and culture has direct relevance to what is going on in our world. I have also found literature to be particularly useful in the classroom. There are so many great novels and poetry collections that grapple with themes of urbanism and cultural contestation. Many especially challenge those essentialist ideas and provoke students to embrace a more complicated, open, global sense of place. Literary fiction is a great resource, and it’s something that I would love to assign more of in future courses.