"If Each Comes Halfway": Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal
By Kathryn S. March
By Kathryn S. March
For twenty-five years, Kathryn S. March has collected the life stories
of the women of a Buddhist Tamang farming community in Nepal. In If Each
Comes Halfway, she shows the process by which she and Tamang women
reached across their cultural differences to find common ground. March
allows the women's own words to paint a vivid portrait of their highland
home. Because Tamang women frequently told their stories by singing
poetic songs in the middle of their conversations with March, each book
includes a CD of traditional songs not recorded elsewhere. Striking
photographs of the Tamang people accent the book's written accounts and
the CD's musical examples. In conversation and song, the Tamang open
their sem-their "hearts-and-minds"-as they address a broad range of
topics: life in extended households, women's property issues, wage
employment and out-migration, sexism, and troubled relations with other
ethnic groups. Young women reflect on uncertainties. Middle-aged women
discuss obligations. Older women speak poignantly, and bluntly, about
weariness and waiting to die. The goal of March's approach to
ethnography is to place Tamang women in control of how their stories are
told and allow an unusually intimate glimpse into their world.
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