Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the challenges faced by the applicants in co-authoring a book on the development of Limbu written culture in Sikkim. The Limbu are an Indigenous community from the Nepal-Sikkim borderlands. The paper examines the difficulties of navigating hierarchies inherent to this collaborative relation, such as West/East, man/woman, writing/data gathering, local/international publishers, politics/culture, and standardized English/Himalayan English. It explores how an East/West collaboration can be framed to ensure that all voices are equally articulated and represented.

Paper Abstract:

For the past six years, we have been co-authoring a book on the history of Limbu literature in Sikkim, focusing on the development of Limbu written culture. The Limbu is an Indigenous community whose homeland spans eastern Nepal and Sikkim. Khamdhak, a Limbu scholar, teacher, and writer, provides most of the information, drawing on decades of involvement in Limbu literary production, his connections with Limbu writers, and his multidisciplinary expertise. Vandenhelsken, an anthropologist studying Limbu cultural dynamics, contributes interviews with Limbu authors, organizes the material, structures the book, and revises the text.

While the emerging field of ‘collaborative’ ethnography reevaluates the relationships between anthropologists and the communities they study during fieldwork, this paper focuses on the less frequently discussed issues of co-authorship, and collaboration in an academic publication. The book is significant as the first international academic publication on Limbu literature. However, the collaboration presented challenges, particularly navigating hierarchies such as West/East, man/woman, writing/data gathering, local/international publishers, politics/culture, and standardized English/Himalayan English.

This paper will discuss these ‘hierarchies,’ addressing a central question: how can we simultaneously “seek[s] forms of praxis and inquiry that are emancipatory and empowering” (Denzin and Lincoln 2014), avoid reinforcing constructed dichotomies between Indigenous and Western knowledge and practices, without re-constructing essentialized notions of Indigeneity? We ultimately advocate for the importance of direct discussions and working in-person, which allowed us to prepare a book that we are both satisfied with.