"If Each Comes Halfway": Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal (review)

"If Each Comes Halfway": Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal makes a valuable contribution to the ethnomusicological literatures on Himalayan musical culture and on women and music. Kathryn March's studies of Tamang song grow out of her primary pursuit, which is ethnographically to "meet" Tamang women of the Stupahill area, northwest of the Kathmandu Valley. To do this, she conversed with them, lived with them, invited them to tell their life stories, and explored and elucidated aspects of culture that come to the surface in the telling of these stories. As Tamang women narrate, and as they converse and interact with those present during the telling, they often shift into song. These songs enhance and deepen the act of narration, focus the attention of the listener, and connect personal anecdotes to shared Tamang cultural experience. In addition, songs figure prominently in the life stories themselves, as narrating women make references to songs that have been sung at particular moments in their lives, such as during festival courtship rituals or while experiencing suffering or grief. March examines these song contexts and their meanings and functions in her ethnographic elucidations of the narratives. The book and field recordings—several of which are reproduced on an accompanying CD—open up important dimensions of Tamang women's musical lives that have not previously been documented or studied.

The book is organized around the life stories of five Tamang women, which March has translated into English with great care. Into the unfolding narratives, March interjects rich information on and analysis of several aspects of Tamang women's cultural lives, elucidating kinship, poetry, songs, festivals, domestic life, wealth, funerals, herding, weaving, cooking, singing, courting, and marrying, in order to elaborate on and more fully explicate events and references. In this way, she allows the Tamang women to structure and organize the book's ethnographic presentation of Tamang culture. March notes that, to the Tamang woman with whom she worked, the ethnographic project was an opportunity to make a detailed, enduring record of their lives, so that their children and grandchildren could know what life was like for them (5). In fact, children were also present during the actual tellings of many of the life stories presented in the book. And to some extent, we, as reader/listeners, are invited to learn about Tamang lives, culture and songs in somewhat the same way as do Tamang children, who are an intended audience of the book. March's book is an ethnographic exemplar in terms of the deep care and respect with which she treats the people whose lives and songs she studies. She returned to the field several times for clarifications of her translations and interpretations. She carefully sought out the opinions of Tamang women on which photographs to select. She also solicited their opinions on how the book should be organized and edited.

The songs recorded on the CD, together with the book translations, constitute a step forward in our collective scholarly documentation of Tamang musical culture. Songs encountered in the tellings of this book include bomsang laments; festival responsorial songs, origin (namtar) songs; and songs about cooking, weaving, herding, love, life, and death. March did much of her fieldwork in 1976 and made most of the recordings in 1977, and her book provides a valuable record of Tamang lifeways that have since changed considerably. Particularly remarkable is her recording of a lengthy bomsang lament by the late Setar Tamang, the only female shaman in the region during the period of study (track 8). In the book March provides accounts of Tamang festival courtship songs, in which young Tamang women and men competitively sing to each other and exchange objects at festivals...