Predicaments, Presumptions, and Procedures

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of educational migration and foreshadows its consequences through the case of a mother who struggles to subsist alone in the village while her only son lives far away in a monastery. Following a brief description of Nubri, the fieldwork area in the highlands of Nepal, the chapter outlines a theoretical framework that includes migration as a means to manage family size and composition, social networks that facilitate migration, and cumulative causation that increases the intensity of migration. It concludes by discussing the methods of anthropological demography utilized in this study and the rational for adopting the household as the main unit of analysis.