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Paper short abstract

In this paper I engage with an unexpected encounter with other-than-human beings during my fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, and the way it radically transformed my experience of the place. I also discuss the role of a methodological openness, rooted in phenomenology, in enabling this transformation.

Paper long abstract

During my doctoral fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, I occasionally encountered remarks and situations suggesting that the landscape was inhabited by other-than-human beings. Yet for a long time in the field, my attempts to understand these presences were met only with vague explanations. Although I gathered fragments of information, these remained quite abstract, and this dimension of local life long eluded me.

A pivotal shift occurred through an unexpected encounter while returning home at night from an archery festival in a nearby village. As my local companion, who was unsteady from drink, and I approached a gorge flanked by two chortens, he abruptly began shouting into the darkness. Only after my questioning did he explain that dangerous demons lived there and might take us if not frightened away. The next morning, he didn't remember the incident. Nevertheless, this fleeting yet extraordinary event initiated a chain of encounters that fundamentally transformed my understanding of local life, enabling me to understand local relationships with other-than-human beings more effectively than months of careful questioning.

In this paper, I discuss how these encounters did so by allowing me to partake in locals’ embodied ways of inhabiting environments dense with presences, obligations, and relationships; realities that cannot be fully articulated through words and escape the “distribution of the sensible” that dominates Western modernity (Bennett 2010: vii). Moreover, I explore how my capacity to be reconfigured by these encounters was predicated on a methodological openness to the metamorphic nature and multiplicity of the world, rooted in phenomenology.