Beyond Institutional Separation

Educational Migration, Kinship Transformation, and Transcultural Identity among Himalayan Youth from Mustang and Dolpo, Nepal

Resumo

The article describes the lived experiences and structural practices associated with educating children and youth from the Himalayan borderlands in environments that are foreign to them, across different cultures and national contexts, and far from their ancestral communities. These experiences shape the construction of the modern transcultural identities of young people who have grown up under these conditions. They constitute a new, self-fashioning group. The article draws on observations made during ethnographic fieldwork in India and Nepal between 2004 and 2009, as well as an analysis of social media and “insider” ethnography—a method that I employed between 2004 and 2022. My research focused on a selected group of young people from Bön families.