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Through an ethnographic narrative, this chapter describes a trip to a rural village in Lamjung district and a dohori singing event that took place there. It introduces the post-conflict temporal context of the author’s research, and situates her as a researcher, a woman, and a student of dohori singing, at the intersection of the professional world of Kathmandu and the particular rural world she was visiting. It provides an account of one rural setting to illustrate how different the reality of various forms of rural life is from the idealized version depicted in commercial dohori, while also showing how these ideal rural settings may be produced through dohori’s poetic conventions. This chapter introduces the expressive conventions of rural dohori singing, through a description of how the author learned them in this village. And it situates them in relation to aspects of caste/ethnicity, gender, political identity, and social status.

Aesthetics · Art · Caste · Context (archaeology) · Ethnic group · Ethnography · Geography · Identity (music) · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Relation (database) · Singing · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies