Kora in Tibetan means circumambulation, while khorwa refers to cyclic existence or the cycle of life—of birth, rebirth, and transmigration. In The Ends of Kinship, Sienna R. Craig merges these concepts of Tibetan Buddhism to offer us the concept of khora, demonstrating migration as a cycle of mobility—with its attendant registers of loss and belonging—and not as a linear trajectory of movement.

The Ends of Kinship is a refreshing mixed-genre narrative about mobility and migration. Craig not only mixes and merges the two writing styles of fiction and ethnography, she also makes the subjects of her ethnographic research come alive, just like the characters in her fictional stories. This is not common in ethnographic literature, although there are ethnographers who have endowed the protagonists of their writings with such character and affective qualities.Footnote ¹ Craig proves that the craft of storytelling can be a rich aid to ethnographic writing. I believe that fiction more than ethnography allows us to write about emotions and subjectivities without revealing confidential information, as fiction can claim that it is not based on any real person or event, while ethnography is never able to make that claim. Stories permit us to share our emotive understanding of the field without being constrained by rigid methodological tools. Many ethnographic musings remain simply that, for it is sometimes impossible to substantiate our insights and intuitions with data. Stories fill in the gap. Eventually, if anthropology is about increasing understanding, fiction can be our ally.

Craig's combination of stories and ethnographic chapters allows the reader to follow the Lobas from Mustang in Nepal on their various migratory routes, but she does this genre mixing thematically, so that we are reminded of Carole McGranahan's insightful comment that anthropologists tell stories to make a theoretical point.Footnote ² Craig tells stories, both fictional and ethnographic, to make certain points that she flags for the reader through the titles of the book's sections. The ethnographies also read like stories, and Craig has deliberately removed footnotes, in-text references, and citations from all the chapters. In a postscript chapter called “Essay on Sources and Methods,” she provides the background to the book and the research projects that took her to Mustang and acknowledges her intellectual debts.

Craig's stories are sensitively written and convey many worlds to the reader—lost worlds of languages (loge), amchis (practitioners of Tibetan medicine), and identities (Loba) as one moves between old and new worlds. Parts one through three narrate different kinds of migration, whether it is women migrating through the care economy chain, youth migrating for education, or men migrating as wage labor to work in factories and construction sites in richer countries. In each part, the stories preface and give a hint of the ethnographic retelling that follows. For example, in part one, the stories of three generations of women and their different reproductive experiences preface the ethnographic chapter about women's reproductive histories in Mustang and the different ways they recount their reproductive losses. Interwoven into these stories is the running theme of migration, of the Mustang women caught in “chains of love,”Footnote ³ or the export of maternal care as women travel from the Global South to be caretakers of children in New York.

Part two is about education-driven out-migration from Mustang to Kathmandu, urban India, or the United States through sponsorships. Here, the story of a girl who was sponsored almost seems to be the fictional account of the true story that follows. A question that comes to mind here is, can sponsors be situated within webs of kinship, and if so, how? Craig defines kinship as the fabric of duty and desire—or, mundanely put, the net of obligations and affiliations that are cast around each one of us through birth and marriage. However, both older and more recent works have reconceptualized kinship to define it not necessarily by blood or affinal ties but through the networks of support that are accrued through common embodied life experiences, such as queerness or disability.Footnote ⁴ I missed seeing that kind of effort in Craig's conceptualization of kinship, which appeared slightly glossed over. A second observation I have has to do with monastic education: does it also present similar opportunities and foreign travel, and is it therefore popular among parents? If the eventual desire of parents who send their children away for education is migration, and education simply appears to be another avenue for moving out, then both monastic and secular education are the means and not the ends.

Part three was most interesting for me, as it talks about the geopolitical impetus for migration. As culturally Tibetan, people from Mustang are marginalized in Nepal, the world's only Hindu kingdom. Following the Chinese takeover of Tibet and the closing of the Nepal-China border, Lobas were reoriented to Nepal and India, and eventually to the United States. Part three highlights the role of the wider forces of nation-state formation, immigration policies of receiving countries, and geopolitical transitions that shape migration patterns in Mustang. It describes how people's identities become attached to paper documents through land deeds, passports, visas, and other legible-making documents as the local economy is increasingly tied to modern national and global networks. The ethnographic chapter illustrates how contemporary migration patterns to India, Korea, and the United States are connected in people's minds with Mustang's history of long-distance trade, so that foreign remittances are equated with the returns of an earlier trade, which is why the former is often termed “bringing home the trade” (p. 103).

Parts four through six present other lesser-known aspects of migration from Mustang, such as dralog (ex-monks) or monks disrobing to get into other professions, working as live-in paid help in United States, and so on, but there is a shift in these parts of the book to intimate personal matters. Part four addresses love, marriage, and sexuality; part five covers experiences of aging, elderly care, and death in home and foreign settings; and part six presents narratives of sacred geography and environmental precarity, earthquakes, and endangered wildlife.

In true anthropological spirit, Craig tries to create theory by using vernacular concepts that are meaningful not just to an esoteric readership but also to the communities that anthropologists claim to represent. Let me circle back to her idea of khora, by which she means both the cycle of routine—of subway travel in New York, work, home, and daily chores—as well as the transformational qualities of the experiences of circular migration and diasporic life, of out-migration and return, and further travel to new and old destinations (p. 9). In describing khora as both cycle and transformation, she evokes for me Victor Turner's notion of this cyclical yet transformative aspect of rites of passage that initiate separation, liminality, and eventual reintegration of members of society as they pass through different life stages.Footnote ⁵ There is no reference to Turner or to pilgrimage in Craig's discussions of mobility, although circumambulation is strongly associated with the same spiritual state of mind that characterizes pilgrimage. Indeed, pilgrimage (and return) has also been defined as having this quality of transformation, even transcendence, that mark rites of passage.

One is hard-pressed to fit this book into the usual category of migration literature, although it addresses the typical questions that guide any such study—remaking home in a foreign country, dealing with issues of belonging, adapting across generations, and so on. The accounts are laced with Craig's own memories of Mustang and her close ties with a place that is her fieldwork home—as I would like to call the field sites where, as anthropologists, we begin ethnographic work, often with fumbling steps, and that continue to dwell in our minds and hearts long after we cease working there. This book has this poignant feel to it, almost as if Craig were revisiting Mustang, her fieldwork home of twenty-five years, by narratively retracing the migratory routes of the people with whom she formed core relationships while in the field.