Finding and Making a Mess. Illegible Fieldnotes, Wayward Translations, and the Undecided Archive of Newar Religion

This talk is about what happens when those who are involved in Newar religion co-produce an environment that is neither ordered nor disordered, yet as if both calling for order and accepting what may seem like the absence of order, its inhabitants being both troubled by it and yet willing to go with the flow. Sharing moments in which it remains undecided when and how the mess happed and who caused it, only knowing that both my research partner and I are involved in it, I will talk about the relation between conversation and note-taking (interview), the suspension of understanding in the heterolingual (translation), and the interruption of the textual by the material (manuscripts). I want to talk about how in the period of engagement something else emerges that is neither order nor its other, but which may be better understood as a situation that is suspended and still open.