Through painting, drawing, and text, this book explores the existential trajectories of young people in Nepal as they fight against domestic hierarchies and gendered politics in the context of their daily lives. Building on three women’s real-life stories collected through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it portrays intimate dimensions of domestic relationships and the ways these experiences lead to the construction of an idealised past and a dreaded – as much as sought – future. In so doing, the author approaches the characters’ personal journeys as micro-processes of social change and moral self-making, which unfold through inter subjective processes.

Paola Tiné (Palermo, Italy 1991) is a practising artist and a researcher in social anthropology. As an artist, she is interested in the intersections between art and ethnography and how these contribute to understanding broader issues on what it means to be human. Her doctoral research involved in-depth data collection in Nepal (2018-2019), where she investigated domestic transformations and how these are influenced by and at the same time contribute to a local ethos among middle-class families in the Newar town of Bhaktapur. Her first monograph based on her doctoral dissertation Modern Dharma: Seeking Family Well-Being in Middle-Class Nepal is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. For her experimentations between art and social enquiry, she was the recipient of the 2018 ‘Prosser Award for Outstanding Work by Beginning Scholars in Visual Methodologies’, and her art book She Fell and Became a Horse: An Experiment in Ethnofiction, was awarded the 2023 ‘Rieger Award for Exceptional Graduate Student Work in Visual Sociology’, both by the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA). Since 2024, she has been a Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (New Zealand), where she teaches Medical Anthropology and Visual Anthropology.