1 Chapter 19 Tamang Gendered Subjectivities in a Migrating World Kathryn S. March This paper explores the continuities and transformations wrought in Tamang systems of sex and gender by the recent extensive wage outmigration, mostly of men. That is, it is about what is happening to the material prospects for Tamang men and women, as well as in Tamang constructions of gendered value. Although both men and women are experiencing dramatic experiential changes, the greater challenges to self-worth are confronting women, whether they are left behind in the villages, migrate halfway to live in Kathmandu, or travel themselves to work and live internationally. As these women and men reconfigure their resources—both economic and social—and as they reinterpret what it means to face these changes, the model of Tamang gender— which is animated by reciprocal and mutually complementary obligations—informs their choices and their understandings of them. The most sweeping strokes of this paper, then, presume to describe the intertwined gendered subjectivities of Tamang men as providers of the basic sustenance for their family line and of Tamang women as generators of future increase, growth and prosperity, in what I call the ‘Tamang co- parcener model of gender’ as I found it in the 1970s and 80s. Then, the village of Mhanegang, northwest of Kathmandu, was, as David Holmberg (1989) 1 described it (borrowing from Geertz) “involuted” (1963)—closed, involuntarily but self-protectively, upon itself. With the mid-1980s began an explosive out-migration, primarily of men, who, in the case of Mhanegang, because they had largely not participated in the older migrations to India or into the Gurkhas nor even in the eastern Nepal trekking business, went directly to the Gulf, to Southeast Asia, and beyond. In spite of being the main out migrants, however, my research suggests that, viewed through the lenses of this Tamang co-parcener model, these Tamang men continued to be able to see what they were doing as valuable in familiar ways, that is, enduring whatever hardships were required to sustain their families, albeit by sending home wage remittances rather than by farming. It is the women’s sense of self that, I will argue, has been most deeply challenged by these changes. Women’s experiences of migration can be parsed into three major categories: (1) those women left behind in the rural subsistence village with very young children and elderly parents-in-law; (2) those women who moved with school-age children to Kathmandu so that they could enrol in private schools there; and (3) those women who themselves migrated internationally, with or without their husbands. 2 In all three cases, they are no longer doing the kinds of things that their foremothers prepared them for and through which they would have expected to craft a sense of themselves as honourable women. For some, these challenges appear to be too much. Some are, in fact, quite broken and virtually paralyzed by them, confined to rooms in cities and to lives they do not 1 To whom my debts are inestimable. 2 It is possible that this might be two separate categories—(1) those migrating alone and sending remittances back and (2) those migrating with their husbands and children—but their numbers are currently too small to document such a claim.