This paper explores 38 years of association and collaboration with Ngyema Karma Himdung in the genesis of ethnographic projects related to the western Tamang of Nepal. During this time, Tamang people have moved from the peripheral position of a degraded population to a dynamic presence in contemporary attempts to construct a ‘new Nepal’ and our work was structured in these transformations. I seek to point out how ethnographic agency paradoxically depends to a significant degree on the suspension of that very agency to the agency of others, including assistants, and how ethnographers and the communities among whom they live are in turn caught up in encompassing contexts where agency is always constrained in transforming culturally embedded structures of power. I conclude with discussion of the multiple institutional and ethical constraints at play in the question of recognition of field assistants.
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