Paola Tine’s artbook She Fell and Became a Horse: An Experiment in Ethnofiction is an experiment in interpretative ethnography through ethnofictional means of representation. Through painting, drawing, and text, and with the accompaniment of local music, it explores the existential journey of three Nepali women as they fight against domestic hierarchies and gendered politics in the context of their daily lives. By building on their real-life stories collected through long-term data collection, Tine proceeds to paint and tell other tales that originate from insights emerged from our ethnographic encounter. She focuses here on conflictual domestic relationships and on the ways these lead to the construction of an idealised past and a dreaded – as much as sought – future.
In so doing, Tine approached these women’s experiences as micro-processes of social change and moral self- making, which unfold through intersubjective processes.
With its recent civil war, a devastating earthquake, the increase in outmigration, and the spread of education and media following a century-long dictatorship, Nepal is the ground of accelerated social change which can be vividly seen at the household level. Negotiating the moral basis of relations between self and family, and self and society in a context of rapid socioeconomic change is a pressing challenge for virtually all of the Kathmandu Valley’s new and aspirational middle-class families.
Nonetheless, it is a topic that has, up to this point, received no sustained ethnographic documentation or analysis. In covering this gap, Tine’s work holds theoretical and empirical significance as it invites reflection on the intersections of ethnography, fiction, and art to enhance ethnographic knowledge of people’s imagined world in the context of social change in Nepal and South East Asia more broadly.
Tine’s book is inspired by previous ethnofictional works such as No Fixed Abode, by Marc Augé and Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan by Vincent Crapanzano. In contributing to this scholarship, and through the sustained combination of ethnographic enquiry and visual production at all stages of the research process – from inception to the analysis of the data and the final expression of insights – this work enhances both the theory and practice of visual sociology. The creation of a storyboard, followed by the placing of several layers of acrylics, oil sticks, and oil paint on different surfaces over an extended period of time, contribute to conveying a sense of the layered construction of the self as a complex process underlined by conflicting pressures, roles, expectations, duties, and individual dreams. These visual mechanisms compel the reader to adopt an alternative gaze on the intricacies of these women’s lived experiences and to focus on the process of becoming experienced by the characters as they make sense of the past and imagine the future.
