In the midst of reading The Ends of Kinship, I received several emails from my local Institutional Review Board office asking for a review of my outstanding research projects. The renewal of my approval raised questions about when my project would end and how the locations of my data collection might have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The administrator was perplexed that my study was still “open”—that I was still collecting data. Sienna R. Craig's book is a beautiful demonstration of the challenges and joys of never-ending ethnographic worlds, where the personal, public, political and professional are able to inform each other, creating a much richer study and a richer life. Research for The Ends of Kinship bridges different places and times. Demonstrating a lifetime of collaboration helps readers understand unevenly connected worlds linked to, but not bounded by, the Mustang District of Nepal.

Like Craig's 2012 book Healing Elements,Footnote ¹ this book resists the pedestrian forms of literature review, data analysis, footnotes, and even facts, noting that fiction can often capture greater truths. Rather than applying theory to data, Craig finds new ways of knowing through understanding Indigenous scholars and concepts to reflect on this moving world, particularly the concept of khora. This idea of circumambulation and circulation, as both an action and a way of being, allows Craig to escape presumptions about migration as a singular event and more a way of connection, rather than disconnection. Whether the khora takes place around a Buddhist stupa or from Jackson Park to Kathmandu to Mustang, readers learn about the social connections established and the challenges that are produced by these circles.

In a moment when normal is unsustainable, many scholars are reflecting on how to retain rigor and an ethical stance—whatever these might mean—while using this crisis as an opportunity to explore new modes of fieldwork and writing.Footnote ² Each chapter of Craig's book experiments with the opportunities and limitations of fieldwork and writing culture, utilizing fictional short stories, narrative ethnography, as well as poetry and art. Other than a brief mention of this in the introduction (p. 11), and the very short introductions to each chapter, Craig performs this creative way of anthropological writing rather than including long diatribes about the hows and whys of this approach. This allow readers to experience the effects of this style, and explicit discussion of these influences is exiled to the end of the book (pp. 241–61).

Drawing on Craig's decades of research on maternal health in the Himalayan region, including her own, The End of Kinship follows a life-cycle pattern, from pregnancy and birth to death and rebirth. As she notes, this approach, and even kinship itself, is often treated as passé (pp. 255–56), yet these “old-fashioned” topics are combined with the creativity and ambition of creative writing and fiction. This approach is a brave one but also demands certain levels of privilege—The Ends of Kinship is not a model for a scholar's first book.

Using compelling characters, Craig is able to open the black box of migration, showing circulations, physical and psychic, through and beyond New York and Nepal that involve and create larger communities. Woven within these connected stories are the bureaucratic challenges of navigating the social lives of papers that make kinship understandable in the United States and Nepal, as people seek to make claims to place and identity. In “Paper and Being,” Craig explores how a nineteenth-century inheritance document takes on new meaning, as documentation and land title become important strategies to navigate twenty-first-century struggles. Although this section is one of Craig's short stories, in the appendix, readers see how this narrative is underpinned by Nepal's marginalization of minority ethnicity populations, a global fetishization of Tibet, and the challenges and limits of establishing claims of not-so-flexible citizenship. The parallel ethnographic chapter, “Bringing Home the Trade,” explores the expectation that people who migrate “make papers,” establishing an avenue for others to follow as well as returning value to Mustang. Alongside economic capital, Craig discusses the cultural capital that migrants navigate as they respond to different racisms in at home and abroad. In this section, and the book as a whole, Craig expertly walks alongside her collaborators, lamenting a loss of “tradition” while seeking to avoid blind nostalgia.

One of the many values of The End of Kinship is that it can be read by different audiences. Very accessible for undergraduates in anthropology, Asian studies, or Asian American studies, this book also presents an important model for how we might engage in ethical and practical ethnography in the twenty-first century. It offers scholars a model for acknowledging our many debts in creating books that list only one author, but depend upon many writers, in a way which adds to the argument rather than unread acknowledgments. The world can benefit from the care that Craig prescribes in this book: for her subject, her readers, and herself.