Hiding in Sight: The Eco-social Rhythms of Women's Worlds in Small Town Nepal

The article explores intersecting conceptual and physical fields through an ethnography of acts of lukne, or hiding, performed by women during seasonal grass-cutting excursions in a small town located in Nepal's Far Western Tarai. Women's physical work performed in agricultural fields, and especially grass-cutting excursions, afforded possibilities for women to construct private worlds as spaces of female agency. As the article unpacks the locality's gendered environments and explores the eco-social rhythms that shape women's movements, it simultaneously grapples with the place of hiding in women's daily activities and in the interplay between agricultural and ethnographic fields. In doing so, it reflects on the ecology underlying ethnographic practice and the hidden worlds of women's fieldwork, and engages fields as moral and material spaces mediating relationships between ethnographic practice and the intersubjective worlds built by ethnographers and people in places of research.