In Between The Everyday and The Extraordinary of a New Fieldwork: How Christians in Nepal Defy Multiple Classifications

To research Christianity in Nepal is to fall in-between, in-between the scope of research on Nepal and the scope of research on Christianity, where concepts and classifications do not seem prepared to grasp what is happening in the everyday lives of my interlocutors. However, the messiness goes far beyond my own struggles to find the proper theoretical and methodological tools to reach the field. Christianity is still quite new for most Nepalis. For my interlocutors, ordinary life is permeated by the extraordinary as they first encounter Christian teachings and technologies for creating their lives anew. This means that consensus around practices, abstinences, or even the numbers of faithful are difficult to find. This presentation is about the messiness of researching a field that is new to me, that is new for its two parent disciplines, and most of all that is being newly formed by the people who take part in its projects.