Domestic Space, Activities and Experience of the Cosmos
‘For our house is our corner of the world…it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
What could be more ordinary than houses and the straightforward mundane life that people live within them? Yet, the themes of this book are that underlying the ordinariness of houses are rich and complex ideas about the cosmos and that commonplace domestic activities are simultaneously cosmogenic acts of building the cosmos and revelatory acts of knowing its fundamental principles. I explore these themes through an ethnography about the houses of high caste Hindus of Nepal portraying their lifeworld as they live it, experience it and come to know its sacred cosmos through the activities they carry out in the taken-for-granted spaces of their dwellings (ghar).1 Rather than just a backdrop to their everyday lives (Wilson 1988), Nepali houses are maṇḍalas (mystical diagrams) ‘not just in daily life but also in the imagination’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1996:64). They are materially built, ritually constructed and practically configured as functional spaces for domestic life and as sacred spaces that reiterate the nature of the cosmos so that living in these domestic mandalas is productive of knowledge of the cosmos they represent. As mandalas, houses are a context and a medium for daily life and for embodied knowledge of the cosmos in which that lifeworld is given meaning and significance.
The people whose domestic architecture and lifeworlds I describe are members of a Chhetri clan living in the hamlet of Kholagaun in the village (VDC2) of Banaspati located in southern reaches of the Kathmandu Valley (Map 1). Chhetri is the name of one of a set of castes—including high caste priestly Brahmin (Bāhun) and Royal Thakuri and Untouchable castes including Blacksmith (Kāmi), Tailor (Damāi) and Leatherworker (Sārki)—that together are known in Nepal as ‘Pārbātiya’ [literally ‘hill people’]. Parbatiya are descendants of high caste Hindus and associated Untouchable castes who immigrated from Northern India beginning in the second millennium A.D., spreading through the hill zones of western Nepal and in 1769 conquering and settling in the Kathmandu Valley (Höffer 1979:43).3 Brahmins and Chhetris are the largest caste or ethnic groups recognized in the 2001 census representing almost sixteen per cent and thirteen per cent respectively of Nepal’s total population of twenty-three million. Throughout the history of Nepal, high caste Parbatiya have been and continue to be dominant culturally and politically: Thakuri is the caste of the current Royal dynasty; Chhetris form a major part of the civil service and army; and Brahmin-Chhetri culture, including Hinduism and the caste hierarchy, permeates the social, economic, legal and educational fabric of the Kingdom.
Map 1 The Kathmandu Valley
Religion and cosmology in the Kathmandu Valley, itself conceived as a mandala,4 are a complex syncretism of Buddhism, Hinduism and Tantrism. The Newars who are the indigenous inhabitants of the Valley and the builders of its three royal cities—Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur—are highly syncretic in their religious beliefs and rituals. Among the Newars of Patan ‘some are wholly Buddhist, others are wholly Hindu, but the majority … participate in the rites and practices of both religions’ (Gellner 1992:5). Similarly, in city of Bhaktapur, Newar clans use both Hindu Brahmin and Buddhist Vajracharya priests (Levy 1990:86-87). While the Parbatiya are clearly Hindu, their religious practices, pantheon and cosmology, like those of the Newar, are infused with Tantrism. Tantrism is one of the most important currents in Indian religious tradition (Gourdriaan 1979:5), but as Robert Levy so elegantly stated, it ‘is relatively easy to recognize in its manifestations and notoriously difficult to define’ (1990:294). Tantrism encompasses extremely varied forms of rites, deities and beliefs whose import is to provide an alternative to the more ‘pure’ form of Hinduism based upon the Vedas—the primary scriptures of Hinduism, consisting of four collections of verse and hymns. Perhaps the most useful description of Tantrism is given by Goudriaan (1979) who identifies two common dimensions within its diversity. First, Tantrism it its wider sense refers to a set of rituals that generally have a magical character whose aims are to provide a non-Vedic alternative way of achieving worldly aims or spiritual emancipation. Second, in a narrower sense Tantric rituals are predominantly infused with Śākta symbolism denoting the importance of active female energy in the cosmos (1979:5-6).
Throughout the book, I will be using the construction ‘Hindu [tantric]’ to represent the syncretism of Vedic Hinduism and Tantrism that characterizes the religious rites and cosmological ideas that make up the Hinduism that Chhetris of Kholagaun practice. They often described themselves to me as following Hindu dhārma (sacred duty). When I asked them to tell me what that meant to them, they enumerated one or more of the following five elements of Hinduism usually associated with the Vedas. First, the most important deities are Vishnu and Shiva, two of the primary gods of the Hindu pantheon. Second, pūjā [worship] is the principal form of ritual for interactions with the deities. Third, Hōm sacrifices involving the offering of vegetal materials to a fire in the centre of a mandala is used in major rites of passage to provide the divine power for transformations being effected. Fourth, life-in-the-world is seen to progress through four stages (ashrāma): the celibate student learning the Vedas (Brahmachārya); the Householder (Gṛhastha) married, raising children, producing subsistence and worshipping the deities; the Forest Dweller (Vanaprastha) retiring from Householder life and performing penances and austerities; and the Wandering Ascetic (Sanyāsin) renouncing all possessions and social relations. Finally, humans exist in an everyday lifeworld characterized by a continual cycle of death and rebirth (samsāra); the goal of life-in-the-world is to achieve liberation (moksha) from it.
Despite this foregrounding of Vedic elements in their self-identification as Hindus, there are also important tantric themes [denoted by brackets] in Kholagaun Chhetris’ ritual practices and cosmology. First is the prominence and importance of sākti, the ‘universal and all embracing dynamis which manifests itself in human experience as a female divinity’ (Goudriaan 1979:7). There are a number of examples of the way in which female divinity is emphasized by Kholagaun Chhetris: the worship of Durga and her victory over evil in the major festival of Dasaĩ; the female deity, Phulchokimai, as their clan goddess; the divinity and worship of chelibeti [divine daughters and sisters] by men; the conception of a wife as a man’s shakti (Kondos 2004:7); and the prevalence of people identifying with a person tutelary female deities (istadeota). Second, and inseparable from the importance of shakti, is the dualistic and complementary male–female cosmos in which female energy activates male potentiality. This dualism is personified by the god Śiva and his consort Pārvati as well as in the more abstract representation of the lingam combining the male phallus emerging out of the female yoni (Figure 3.4). Third is the use of concrete devices, such as geometrical designs (pictographic mandala and geometric yantra), verbal incantations (mantras) to express abstract cosmological principles (Goudriaan 1979:8). The final tantric aspect is the dual nature of the pantheon: deities have benign and terrible aspects. For example, among the Kholagaun Chhetris the two major male and female deities they worship have this dual pacific-terrific aspect: Devi and Kāli, Shiva and Bhairab.
Pervading this syncretism of Hinduism and Tantrism in Kholagaun Chhetri religion and cosmology are three common elements. First are the systematic equivalences between the macrocosm and the microcosm, that is, the homology and mystical connections between multiple planes of existence—the cosmos, the city as mesocosm (see Levy 1990), the temple and house in the Vāstu Śāstras (see Kramrisch 1976 and Chakarbarti 1999), the body and the mandala. It is more than just a system of homologies and connections; there is a magical and instrumental potential to them that enables people to use knowledge of them in the performance of rituals, bodily discipline or meditation to realize mundane worldly projects as well as to achieve religious enlightenment. Second is the notion that excessive attachment to the world, the consequent illusion (māyā) and loss of consciousness of the ultimate reality, is the cause of humans being entrapped in the continual cycle of death and rebirth. Third is the idea that liberation and release (moksha) from the cycle of death and rebirth is attainted through knowledge (gyān) of the ultimate unity of the cosmos, expressed by the word and deity ‘Brahma’, which transcends all worldly concepts of time, space and category.
Within this Hindu [tantric] cosmos, Kholagaun Chhetri spend the majority of their life-in-the-world as Householders. Theirs is an enigmatic lifeworld. They are motivated to live in and form attachments to the world because of their sacred duties (dharma) as Householders to rear children, produce subsistence and worship the deities. Their aim is to prosper not just in the narrow sense of material wealth but also in the wider sense, captured by the Nepali word samŕddhi, of an abundance of those things that characterize the ‘good life’: children, health, well-being and peaceful relations with oneself, other human beings and the deities. At the same time, they are enjoined to remain detached from these manifold worldly attachments, to resist enslavement by them (Madan 1987:3) in order to achieve liberation by seeing through the veil of illusion that conceals the fundamental unity of the cosmos.
For the Householder, then, the lifeworld is at once practical and cosmological. As they engage in everyday domestic activities, Kholagaun Chhetris are at the same time fulfilling their sacred duties. They are also configuring their houses into functional spaces for these activities and building them into microcosms where they acquire revelatory knowledge of the cosmos within which their enigmatic lifeworld has a richer and more comprehensive meaning. In the following chapters I describe this complex domestic architecture—both the process of building and the resulting built form—of Kholagaun Chhetris’ lifeworld.
Dwellings and Dwelling: Space, Activities and Experience
Space always has meaning or significance. This is because space is a human product, not an a priori, abstract, empty, neutral, homogeneous ground upon which humans inscribe meaning. Adopting a phenomenological approach that analyses human consciousness in its lived immediacy, Casey (1996) argues that the experience of place is prior to and constitutive of the concept of space. Humans are always somewhere, in some location that is actively perceived and constituted through the body’s senses and movements. In this respect, the experience of place is elementary ‘lived experience’ (Casey 1996:18). Our modern understanding of space, formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a pre-human natural phenomenon (Casey 1997), is derived from that primary experience of placedness. Ironically, then, the seemingly abstract and objective phenomenon of space decentred from human agency is itself a human product. In this respect, space is historically and socially located: ‘There is no [single abstract] space, only [historically and socially specific] spaces that are simultaneously the media and product of human action’ (Tilley 1994:10; see also Soja 1989:70 and Relph 1976, 1985).
Space and meaning emerge simultaneously in human action. Architecture is a particular instance of this process. Architecture ‘produces space’ (Till 1996:9), is ‘the thoughtful making of spaces’ (Louis Kahn in Till 1996:9) and ‘creates boundaries out of otherwise unbounded space’ (Kent 1990:2).5 But the architect does more than create space, because in the very production of architectural space is the production of meaning of and for that space (Rapoport 1969, 1982). This moment of the architectural process is what I call ‘intentional architecture’. Here I am referring to the (usually) reflective human action of architects in designing spaces to serve functional and figurative purposes. For domestic architecture this means that houses are designed to be places where people eat, sleep and socialize as well as meaningful world in which these activities have significance. ‘What finally decides the form of a dwelling, and moulds the spaces and their relationships, is the vision that people have of the ideal life’ (Rapoport 1969:47).
This intentional production of domestic space and meaning is exemplified by architects of all kinds, including not only those who have received formal training in architecture but also anyone who creates configurations of space and meaning through the planning and construction of built forms. Modernist architects of the twentieth century, epitomized by Le Corbusier, created models for cities and houses aimed at producing spaces that were not just functional in providing ‘machines for living in’ and meaningful in reflecting their analysis of the crisis of industrial capitalism, but also transformative in attempting to use the design of houses (and whole cities) to coerce change in the social conduct and moral attitudes of people living in them (see Holston’s [1989] analysis of Brasilia). Indigenous domestic architects of Indonesia meticulously plan and construct houses that not only provide shelter, but also create symbolic space that reflects ‘in its layout, structure and ornamentation the concept of the ideal natural and social order’ (Waterson 1991:xv, xvi). The architects of Batammaliba of Togo and Benin are revered specialists who plan and build houses that translate imagery from the cosmos and human experience into architectural forms that are texts ‘whose meaning can be understood through [their] orientation, form, materials, construction process and details’ (Blier 1987:1). In South Asia there is a Hindu theory of architecture, vāstu vidya, originating in the Vedic era (1500-1000BC), continuously developed and modified until the fifteenth century AD and compiled into the Vastu Shastra (see Chakrabarti 1999). Vastu vidya constitutes a tradition of architectural knowledge consisting of detailed design and construction principles that configure humanly constructed spaces and built forms into mandalas which are in turn microcosms of the Universe. There is a number of ethnographic accounts about the layout of individual structures, cities and entire regions in India and Nepal showing how they follow vastu principles, particularly highlighting the way architectural forms employ the mandala to reiterate Hindu ideology and cosmology: Kramrisch (1976) for temples, Moore (1990) for Nyar houses, Ifeka (1987) for Goan Houses, Säävälä (2003) for the houses of middle-class people in Hyderabad, MacFadyen and Vogt (1977) and Gutschow and Kölver (1975) for the city of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley, Slusser (1982) for the Kathmandu Valley as a whole, and Shepherd (1985) for Newar culture more generally.
The first three chapters that follow highlight this intentional moment of the domestic architectural process among Kholagaun Chhetris. In Chapter 1 I describe the Hindu vastu system and conceptualization of space, its nature and quality, how it is configured and organized by human action and how humans relate to space. This involves analysing the mandala form and how it encodes not just the enigmatic cosmology of tantric Hinduism but also the means of gaining knowledge of it. I use the Hindu architectural texts, the Vastu Shastra, and commentaries upon them to show how this codified design system incorporates spatial principles of the mandala and the cosmology they represent in the orientation of the house, room layout and location of activities, so that the house and surrounding compound are a microcosm of the cosmos—a domestic mandala. I abstract from the mandala form and its elaboration in the Vastu Shastra architectural design template two spatial modes which I call yantric and mandalic. Both are immanent in Kholagaun Chhetri houses and give them a duality of structure as auspicious places for the production of worldly prosperity and pure places for the attainment of religious knowledge. The yantric mode highlights the mandala’s alignment with Hindu sacred geography, including the presiding deity for each direction and its realm of power. Its diacritical features are its geometric shape as a four-sided polygon constitutive of worldly space and its orientation to the cardinal directions that anticipates harmony between the human and cosmic orders of reality; this spatial auspiciousness portends worldly prosperity that is a dimension of the Householder’s life-in-the-world. The mandalic mode highlights its configuration of concentric spaces around a centre point in which movement inward is the path toward knowledge of the fundamental and transcendent unity of the cosmos and release from rebirth into the world and movement outward is the vector of worldly creation, illusion and rebirth into the world. One of the abiding themes of the book is that these two modes of mandala spatiality exist as ever-present possibilities in everyday domestic life and in the performance of ritual—the one always implying the other, each the background of the other as foreground.
In Chapter 2, I introduce the hamlet of Kholagaun and describe the principal architectural features of its mixture of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ houses. The focus will be on the orientation of the main entrance towards the southern quadrant, the deities framing the main entrance as threshold, the interior layout of the house and location of functional spaces in the house, particularly the worship room. In these aspects of the domestic mandala, the yantric mode predominates in Kholagaun Chhetris’ concern with auspiciously orienting domestic activities so that they are aligned and compatible with sacred geography. I suggest that auspiciousness includes both a temporal and spatial dimension, the former in Kholagaun Chhetris’ concern with the propitious conjunction of events in relation to cosmic time and the latter in their everyday interest in establishing compatibility between their houses and cosmic space that is characteristic of a yantric configuration. I point out that the location of the kitchen does not appear to follow vastu design principles in its expected auspicious spatial orientation to the southeast, the realm of Agni, the god of fire. This is an issue that forms the central theme of Chapter 4.
In Chapter 3, I turn to explaining how, in the process of construction, Kholagaun Chhetris build this spatial auspiciousness into their houses. There are three interweaving process of house construction. The first is the material construction of the house. The second is an auspicious scheduling of the stages of material construction to the flow of cosmic time and the consequent linking of the house owner with the house so that their qualities and fates are in harmony; they become so closely intertwined that they are refractions of each other (see Waterson 1991:138ff). The third process, the main theme of the chapter, is making the house an auspicious place portending prosperity for the owner and his household group. This involves creating a harmonious spatial intersection between the house and the space where it is built and which is created in the act of building. Spatial auspiciousness entails ensuring compatibility between the physical structure and the spatial milieu in which the house is erected. It is built into houses through the performance of rituals accompanying each auspiciously-timed stage of material construction—selection of the site, position of the house on the site, laying the foundation—and inhabiting the completed house.
Domestic architecture is inhabited space. As much as intentional architects create houses with meaning—the ideal life, the social order, auspiciousness and the cosmos—their designs and layouts are not coercive of inhabitants’ conduct nor the significance they attributed to them. Instead, inhabiting houses itself produces domestic space and meaning. I am not the first to recognize this other moment of the architectural process: ‘Buildings…do not force people to behave [believe or experience] in specific ways. For uses to occur in a particular way and for particular meanings to apply, there has to be complicity between building and inhabitant’ (Jones 1996:23, words in brackets added); architects ‘mention the numerous ways in which a user fails to carry out the intentions the architect thought he had incorporated into the design of the building’ (Gutman 1976:38 in Kent 1990:2). Holston (1989) provides a detailed account of the modernist planning and nation-building ideology of the Brazilian Government’s intentional construction of a new capital, Brasilia. He describes the way in which the new inhabitants of Brasilia subverted the intentions of the city’s architects, both professional and political. This is a second moment of the architectural process: the production of space and meaning by inhabitants living in houses, or what might be called ‘conventional architecture’ (see Rapoport 1982:15-19). It gives to the users or ‘consumers’ (see de Certeau 1984:xii-xiii, 91ff) of houses the agency of building, re-configuring or re-creating domestic spaces and meaning in and through their inhabiting activities.
Conventional architecture and the production of space and meaning through inhabiting a house is a particular form of the general mode of being-in-the-world that the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger calls ‘dwelling’ (1975b:145). For Heidegger, building and dwelling are the essence of human existence; they are not directly about architectural ideas, their implementation through construction techniques or the aesthetics of architectural forms. Nor do they concern providing housing and shelter, no matter how well planned and built. Instead, dwelling refers to the consubstantial relationship between humans and their world, produced in and through their embodied actions of using and doing things in everyday life.
There are three aspects of Heidegger’s notion of dwelling that are particularly important for understanding Kholagaun Chhetris as conventional architects who inhabit their houses as places of food, shelter and social relations and at the same time build them into a microcosm and come to understand the fundamental truth of the cosmos. First, dwelling is a practical engagement with things. The formative act of dwelling—and of building a world and knowing it—is doing things with entities: picking them up, manipulating them, using them, discarding them. Like Casey’s reversal that gives primacy to the experience of place over the theoretical and reflexively derived and explicit concept of space, Heidegger’s phenomenology of being-in-the-world (1962) emphasizes that our primordial relation to the world is praxical rather than theoretical. Instead of seeing practical action in the world as the implementation of knowledge first gained through contemplative inspection and examination of pre-existing objects by a pre-given, separate and knowing subject (Macaan 1993:73), being-in-the-world is primarily a pre-theoretical and praxical relation. Humans first and foremost use things in everyday life and by using things ‘human existence’ (Dasein) and the world emerge simultaneously, are mutually constitutive and consequently consubstantial; being-in and world are inseparable, two dimensions of a single phenomenon. ‘The world is not there for Dasein to exist in; rather the world is only because Dasein exists’ (Macaan 1993:74, italics original).
Second, dwelling is spatial. In doing things with entities humans bring them into a spatial relationship with their embodied selves and with other things they use. Dwelling as the utilization of things in everyday life also has a referential function: the use of any thing implicates the use of other things so that together they form a coherent totality, a world in which each has a proper—and thus meaningful and nameable—place in the sense of its spatial and practical relation to other things. Following on from the referential function, dwelling is a way of seeing the things used as mutually entailed spatially as well as meaningfully. In the act of using these entities, humans gather them together to build a meaningful world. Through dwelling, humans build a world that is experienced as an inherent part of their being and where they feel they can carry out their lives in an understandable way. ‘Dwelling involves a lack of distance between people and things … an engagement which is neither conceptualized nor articulated, and which arises through using the world rather than through scrutiny’ (Thomas 1993:28).
Third, dwelling entails a corporeal engagement such that body and enveloping space become two dimensions of a single phenomenon. While this aspect of dwelling was less developed by Heidegger, it is the primary theme of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly in his major work, Phenomenology of Perception (1962). One of Merleau-Ponty’s most important insights is that human consciousness—seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, believing, wishing, understanding—is not an operation of the mind that is somehow distinct from the body.
A core principle of phenomenology as developed by Edmund Husserl is that the fundamental condition of all human existence is that consciousness in all its myriad forms is intentional. By this Husserl meant that consciousness is directional, ‘all perceptual acts … have one dominant characteristic; they point toward, or intend, some object. Thus all thinking is thinking of something; all willing is willing of something; all imagining is imagining of something’ (Natason 1973:85, italics original). Every act of consciousness, every experience, inherently involves a sensuous relationship with the world (cf. Sokolowski 2000:8ff). This is so whether we are perceiving through the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste or touch6—seeing a tree, hearing a tune, touching a religious icon, moving through space, believing in deities, knowing the cosmos—or through other acts of awareness—judging, believing, meaning, valuing, desiring, loving, hating, remembering. While ‘consciousness is consciousness of things other than itself’ (Crossley 2001:47), this intentional relationship with the external world is internal in the sense that the object of consciousness ‘is not to be understood as a “thing” [separate from consciousness] but rather as the correlate of its accompanying act or acts’ (Natason 1973:85). We experience our sense of sight only in and through the things we see; we experience our sense of sound only in and through the things we hear; we experience our sense of believing only through the things we believe; we experience our sense of knowing only through the things we know, we experience our sense of desire only through the things we desire. Not only does consciousness always intend an object, whether material or ‘intentionally inexistent’,7 but the act of consciousness and the object of consciousness cannot be separated. Consciousness exists only in and through the objects towards which it is directed so that the substance of consciousness is co-extensive with the substance of the world. Consciousness is both being-in and constituting the world.
For Merleau-Ponty, we are conscious with and through our bodies. In this sense, the intentionality of consciousness is an ‘incarnate intentionality’ (Langer 1989:40). We live in and constitute the world as embodied subjects.8 Further, this being-in and constituting the world as lived bodies is primordially spatial. Humans inhabit spaces through their body’s constitutive consciousness and actions. We see, hear, feel and move in relation to things with our bodies and these things have a spatial relation to our bodies so that our inhabited space is constituted as bodily space. Through the lived body’s consciousness and actions, we project ourselves into the world, embrace it, encompass it, inhabit it, dwell in it. We do not exist as conscious subjects without it; it doesn’t exist for us without our consciousness. In this sense, body and the surrounding spatial environment are mutually constitutive; there is no body outside its sensuous relations to the world.
In the final two chapters, I describe the way Kholagaun Chhetri inhabit and dwell in their houses through embodied acts of doing everyday activities with everyday things and doing ritual activities in the domestic mandala. Their acts of dwelling involve both building their houses into an arrangement of domestic spaces that is a microcosm of the cosmos and revealing the fundamental truths of the cosmos and the enigmatic lifeworld of the Householder. Against the background of the house as an auspicious yantra, Chapter 4 foregrounds the mandalic mode of spatiality in domestic activities. I focus upon the location of the kitchen within the domestic mandala and suggest that its centrality arises in relation to three ‘dangers’ external to the domestic mandala: the pollution of lower caste people, the curses of witches and attacks from disembodied ghosts. Inside and outside of the domestic mandala are mutually constituting so that how these exterior dangers are conceptualized and verbalized simultaneously produces the interior of the domestic compound, its spaces and the people who reside in it and vice-versa. In relation to these dangers, domestic space is configured into a series of concentric zones around the kitchen. This concentric configuration is largely the result of the spatial distribution of everyday activities such as women preparing meals and household members eating them and spatial prohibitions on access to people from outside the domestic mandala. ‘It is out of these ordinary activities, carried out without ritual, reflection or fuss and significantly, often by women, that the house [domestic mandala] is built’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1996:65, words in brackets added).
Bringing together Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (1962) and Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977, 1990b), a pervading theme of the chapter is the mutually constitutive relation between body and world. Purity and impurity, concepts and acts that pervade everyday life, are more than a state of the physical body. Not only do purity and impurity affect the patterns of social relations and spatial movement of outsiders in the domestic mandala—what might be called spatial disciplines of the body—they are also the everyday registers of explicit concepts through which abstract and largely unspoken cosmological themes of excessive attachment to worldly diversity (impurity) as well as the dissolution of diversity and detachment from it (purity) are experienced and known in Kholagaun Chhetris’ lifeworld. This means that the activities of everyday domestic life and the places where they take place are multifaceted—corporeal, social and cosmological. As Kholagaun Chhetris move about their domestic compounds, they not only carry out everyday activities—entertaining guests, processing grain, preparing food, eating a meal—but also build their houses into concentric mandalas, produce an embodied, tacit and revelatory knowledge of the enigma of being Householders and turn it into a ‘bodily hexis’, that is, a permanent corporeal disposition of thinking and feeling (Bourdieu 1977:93-94).
In the final ethnographic chapter, I focus on the rites whose performance appropriates the concentric configuration of the domestic mandala. I continue exploring the general theme of dwelling, building and knowing a world through embodied action and spatial movement in the domestic mandala and the particular theme of Kholagaun Chhetris’ abiding concern with the access of impure and dangerous outside beings to the interior of their houses, but now in relation to the in-marrying wives of the men who form the patrilineal core (santān) of the household group. These women, who come from household groups of other Chhetri lineages residing in other villages, are outsiders whose loyalty is suspect and whose female procreative power, shakti, is potentially dangerous. Through marriage they become permanent members of their husbands’ household groups and gain access to the pure and vulnerable centre of their domestic mandalas.
The two-day cycle of marriage rituals involves the participants moving over structured space punctuated by rites. These spatial movements are not merely a neutral backdrop to the marriage rites. In the analysis of the marriage cycle, I trace the movements of the rites within and between the domestic mandalas of the bride and groom and identify how such movement contributes to and depicts the bride’s transformation and her incorporation into her husband’s household group. I also re-emphasis that mandalas are more than spatial renderings of the everyday world and the cosmos; they are revelatory. In appropriating the mandalic character and meaning of domestic space, the performative movement of the rites is a medium—both corporeal and cognitive—through which the transformations of marriage are experienced and understood in terms of Kholagaun Chhetris’ concerns with impurity and danger and with the enigma of a Householder’s life-in-the-world. In this sense, the performance of marriage rituals is another instance of actions-in-the-world being concurrently productive of tacit and bodily knowledge of the cosmos (again cf Bourdieu’s notion of bodily hexis [1977:93–4, 1990b:69–70]).
‘We can know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 1966:4)
This simple statement by Michael Polanyi, chemist turned philosopher, encapsulates an abiding theme of the book and a challenge for anthropology: bringing to reflexive thought and expressing explicitly in an analytic ethnography what he calls ‘the tacit dimension’ (1966) of social life or what I have been calling and will continue to call the ‘lifeworld’. By lifeworld I mean the world of immediate lived experience prior to reflexive thought (see Abrams 1996:40 and Jackson 1996:2), ‘that province of reality in which we encounter, as the condition of our life, natural and social givens as pregiven realities with which we must try to cope’ (Schutz 1989 in Jackson 1996:19). Johannes Fabian made the same point about his ethnography of cultural performances in Zaire: ‘What has not been given sufficient consideration is that about large areas and important aspects of culture no one, not even the native, has information that can simply be called up and expressed in discursive statements’ (1990:6)—they know more than they could tell. So, it is not surprising that Kholagaun Chhetris’ iteration of the cosmos that is their houses—‘the ‘“book” from which [they] learn their vision of the world’ (Bourdieu 1977:90)—and the revelation of its principles that comes from the actions of dwelling in them is largely pre-reflexive and unverbalized. They did not explicitly and spontaneously tell me that their houses are mandalas and that their everyday activities configured them as such; they did not describe practical domestic activities as also cosmological and revelatory; and they did not verbalize their knowledge of the cosmos and the Householder’s lifeworld that they embodied through carrying out these activities in their houses. Instead, ‘this sort of knowledge can be represented—made present—only through action, enactment, or performance’ (Fabian 1990:6). Their houses and the cosmos they iterate are ‘read with the body, in and through the movements and displacements [of everyday domestic activities] which make the space within which they are enacted as much as they are made by it’ (Bourdieu 1977:90, words in bracket added). ‘Moving through ordered space … each person builds up a practical [tacit] mastery of the fundamental schemes of their culture’ (Carstens and Hugh-Jones 1996:64, bracket added).
Polanyi’s approach to this tacit dimension of everyday life informs the way I convey my understanding of the richer, more comprehensive but implicit and embodied ‘personal knowledge’ (1962) of the cosmos and the enigmatic lifeworld of the Householder that Kholagaun Chhetris acquire through their dwelling in a domestic mandala and its everyday explicit meanings. Two of his principles about human knowledge are—like Heidegger’s distinction between and prioritising of praxical over theoretical knowing and Casey’s prioritising of the primordial and embodied experience of place over the abstract concept of space—first, that all knowledge is not and need not be explicit in nature and, second, that tacit knowing through embodied activity is logically prior to explicit knowing through reflexive and articulated thought (Gill 2000:52, 54). The relation between these two forms of knowing is internal and directional; and Polanyi adopts a holistic view of experience in which the tacit and the explicit are—like consciousness and its intended objects—mutually implicating dimensions of knowledge and meaning. While the tacit is out of our ‘focal awareness’ of the explicit meaning and purposes (Polanyi 1962:55) of our everyday projects, it remains in ‘subsidiary awareness’, informing, enriching and enabling these projects and their meaning. Polanyi defines the difference between these two mutually exclusive but praxically fused forms of awareness through the example of driving in a nail:
When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, we attend to both the nail and hammer, but in a different way. We watch the effect of our strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail. Yet in a sense we are certainly alert to the feelings in our palm and the fingers that hold the hammer. They guide us in handling it effectively, and the degree of attention that we give to the nail is given to the same extent but in a different way to these feelings. The difference may be stated by saying that the latter are not, like the nail, objects of our attention, but instruments of it. They are not watched in themselves; we watch something else while keeping intensely aware of them. I have subsidiary awareness of the feelings in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving the nail (1962:55, italics original).
Using Polanyi’s distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness and between explicit and tacit knowledge enables me to bring together two important themes of the ethnography. First, the lifeworld of Kholagaun Chhetris is significantly made up of domestic projects and activities carried out in their domestic compounds. They are able to articulate the practical purposes and meanings of these activities among themselves and did so to me on many occasions. For example, in their movements about the house and the spatial prohibitions (see Munn 2003) limiting access of outsiders to its inner zones that are associated with the handling and preparation of rice in its various forms from unhusked to cooked, Kholagaun Chhetris draw upon the highly developed and pervasive concepts of purity, impurity and the dangers of evil witches and disembodied spirits of the dead. In carrying out these everyday domestic projects, their explicit purposes and meanings—to prepare meals for household members and to avoid the pollution of low caste people, as well as the dangers of witches and disembodied ghosts, by limiting access to the place where the food is prepared and the meals eaten—are in Kholagaun Chhetris’ focal awareness and they are able to articulate and reflect upon them verbally. Second, there are aspects of their domestic projects and activities about which Kholagaun Chhetris have subsidiary awareness but which, to paraphrase from the preceding quotation from Polanyi, guides them in carrying out them out effectively. Again, in the handling, preparation and consumption of rice and the concomitant emplacements in and exclusions of people from particular rooms and areas, they build their domestic compounds into mandalas that spatially iterate the cosmos and at the same time they produce tacit (and embodied) personal knowledge of the cosmos and the enigmatic lifeworld of Householders dwelling in it. They know more than they can tell me.9
Finally, how can I verify that Kholagaun Chhetris produce and gain this personal knowledge of the cosmos that I claim to be describing in this ethnography? Again using Polanyi, verification has the character of internal relations by which experience and knowledge themselves are constituted. In everyday life the process of verification consists of demonstrating tacit knowledge through performing embodied practices, the same process through which it was produced and acquired: we can only verify that we have acquired the tacit knowledge necessary to speak a language by speaking it (Gill 2000:56). So, too, my description of Kholagaun Chhetris’ performance of embodied everyday domestic practices, and the explicit knowledge they verbalized among themselves and to me (another form of embodied practice) about them, is the mode of verification of their tacit knowledge of the cosmos that the ethnography itself transforms into explicit knowledge. As Polanyi writes:
Yet personal knowledge in [our lifeworld] is not made but discovered, and as such it claims to establish contact with reality beyond the clues on which it relies. It commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality. Of this responsibility we cannot divest ourselves by setting up objective criteria of verifiability—or falsifiability, or testability, or what you will. For we live in it as in the garment of our own skin (Polanyi 1962:64, brackets and emphasis added).
Notes
1 The Nepali term ‘ghar’, which I translate as ‘house’, includes both the house structure and the surrounding compound. Unless the context specifically indicates only the building, house will retain the meaning of building and surrounding compound.
2 VDC stands for ‘Village Development Committee’; this is the English gloss for ‘Gāun Bikās Samhiti’, the formal title of government villages.
3 This historical account resonates with the written (Bangśawāli) clan history of the Kholagaun Chhetris that traces their origins to Brahmins from Northern India whose travels took them to the Kathmandu Valley. At the behest of the King, they married pure Chhetri virgins and founded the Chhetri clan whose descendants settled in Kholagaun.
4 Slusser’s (1982) book about the art, architecture and culture of the Kathmandu Valley is entitled ‘Nepal Mandala’.
5 Casey’s approach to space and place challenges Kent’s, whose characterization of architecture assumes that [unbounded] space exists prior to human action upon it.
6 Here I am falling back on what Geurts argues is an arbitrary western sensory order of five senses (2004:4-5).
7 An ‘intentionally inexistent’ entity is ‘an entity that is neither physical nor existentially mind-dependent. The idea of a mermaid is, being an idea, existentially mind-dependent. But the mermaid which is the intention of the idea is neither a physical thing nor is it existentially mind-dependent’ (Nakhnikian 1964:xiv, italics original).
8 Crossley provides a clear discussion, from Ryle’s Concept of Mind, of how seeming cognitive operations of the mind—emotion, perception, understanding—are fully sensuous and implicate the lived body as the mode of being-in-the-world (2001:38ff).
9 There are occasions and events where these more abstract and fundamental principles of the Hindu [tantric] cosmos and the life of the Householder are brought into focal awareness. Usually this happens during extended and/or complex rituals in the form of illustrative homilies and stories related by the presiding Brahmin priest or pundit whose role is to convey to Kholagaun Chhetris accounts of Hindu cosmology as contained in the sacred texts.