An experiment in story-telling: reassembling the house in Ladakh.

In 2013, my friend from previous periods of fieldwork, Deen Khan, suggested we photograph some of his favourite belongings and the few packed-away memories that he had managed to retrieve from one of his stores at the time. Other Ladakhis were puzzled by Deen’s extensive and haphazard collection but he and I made a small ‘storyboard’ from some of the objects, which I explore in relation to Deen’s unfolding biography from 2013-2017. The storyboard, as a collaborative endeavour, becomes a mechanism that foregrounds the material moorings of both biography and ethnography, brings them together in unanticipated ways and illuminates their many connections. In illustration, I show how references to partition drew connections between the state and its frontiers, relations among Buddhist and Muslim Ladakhis, and patterns of familial inheritance.