Traveling with: Engaging Himalayan elders through pilgrimage

Abstract

This creative ethnographic essay emerges from an ongoing comparative and collaborative research project being conducted with two culturally Tibetan regions of highland Nepal and those from these regions living in urban Nepal and the greater New York City area. Although the broader project is engaging Himalayan elders as well as their families, communities, and caregivers through methods that include demographic surveys, interviews, life histories, and participant‐observation, this essay emerges from a process of traveling with a group of Himalayan elders on pilgrimage. Here, the rite of passage that is pilgrimage works both as a method and an ethic for attending to the experiences of an older generation who is bearing witness to profound transformations in their lifeworlds. Traveling with elders becomes both a form of embodied ethnographic knowing and an expression of care. Told as a series of short ethnographic evocations interspersed with expository analysis of similar length along with still photographs, this essay aims to illuminate dynamics of suffering and resilience, loneliness and community, tradition and adaptation, absence and presence that structure Himalayan elder lives.