Cultures of expertise and ethnographic testimony: a multi-disciplinary approach to Newar Buddhist intellectualism

Ethnographic writing is what anthropologists do. But interlocutors? This paper develops a response to intellectual projects encountered in the field that come uncomfortably close to the ethnographer's own terrain. By engaging with these intellectual projects on their own terms, I argue that Buddhist Studies offers models for the anthropologist of Buddhism to better approach textual cultures of expertise and intellectualism. Likewise, ethnographic engagement offers opportunities for Buddhist Studies to expand the scope of intellectual practices, especially who gets to count and how. Instantiated through reference to para-ethnographic writings and my own fieldwork on domesticity within Newar Buddhist cultures of expertise, I offer a methodologically plural and dialogical approach that emphasizes the complexity and perplexity of any iteration of a text or performance of an interlocutor.