This book is based on eleven months of field research conducted between 2007 and 2010. Carrying out this research was not easy. The study of practices located on the borders of the law is in itself challenging. Working in a politically troubled region adds further difficulty. The research was done on a very low budget. Finally, it was ‘partisan research’: I conducted it all without an official research permit.

During those years I was in Golok for several months at a time or twice a year. With each visit I felt increasingly at home. I was visiting the same settlements, mountains and valleys. The unmapped space from before the research became zoomed-in and revealed its details in high resolution, becoming my place too and turning me into a sort of local patriot. A similar process occurred in my contacts with people.

The repetitive character of my research resembles what Helena Wulff calls ‘yo-yo fieldwork’ (2007: 139); it comprised a series of comings and goings between my home country and Golok and between different locations within Golok. These repeated visits were valuable: with each one I gained credibility in the eyes of my informants, who grew familiar with me and my work. I observed changes in people's biographies and their reactions to new developments. And they could do the same: my biography was evolving too. Thanks to the changing circumstances under which we met every year, neither side of this contact was frozen in time, stopped at a certain biographical point. Repeated encounters added movie-like motion to a series of still images. We became for each other lines and processes instead of fixed points, even if endowed with a personal identity.

Being in Golok, I lived quite a normal life alongside the other people there. In Domkhok I did what my hosts did and helped – for better or worse – in their pastoral and domestic work. I milked yaks, tended livestock, collected dung for fuel, dug caterpillar fungus, cooked, babysat children. In Dawu I engaged in daily town life: I performed kora around the monastery, ate in the most crowded eateries, spent hours on the main square or at the market.