Talk by Carole McGranahan (Anthropology, University of Colorado)

What does a day of ethnographic research look like? In this talk, I present one day, over the course of thirty years of research with the Tibetan community, sinking into what it feels like to be immersed, to notice, to ask, to listen. I move across field sites – Kathmandu, Toronto, New York – and among people, mostly Pala, Ama, and their families. This is about what it means to make home as a refugee, to learn ethnographically, and to commit to a community. It is an exercise in theoretical storytelling across place and over time about how research grounded in Kathmandu and stories of Tibet extends across continents and oceans to Himalayan North America.

Carole McGranahan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, USA, and a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. She is the author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020). She is currently co-editing The Tibet Reader, a volume on Ethics and Ethnography, and finishing a book about theoretical storytelling.