Earthquakes, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions are prime examples of an unruly environment. The 9/11 (18/09/2011, 18.10 IST) Himalayan earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale had its epicenter in the Kanchenjunga Conservation area on the border of Sikkim in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Southern Tibet. The devastation of their dwellings, the destruction of many sacred landscapes and their monasteries is something the affected locals are neither going to ignore nor forget. The lamas and shamans residing in the earthquake affected areas regard the recent earthquake to be a serious message about unsustainability of mega hydropower projects, a response to willful desecration, and a sign of resistance to being colonized. Some sites of my doctoral fieldwork conducted in 2001-02 were devastated and wiped out by the 2011 Great Himalayan earthquake. The…

Decentralized planning has been an important agenda in view of growing concern for decentralization and governance all over the world.  Nepal has been practicing decentralization for decades since 1960s under different political regimes. However, there are critiques that it has been more political rhetoric than the transformation of traditional centralized governance system into participatory local self-governance. Amid such critiques for a long time; Nepal introduced Local Self Governance Act (LSGA), 1999 to address the increasingly challenging issue of decentralization and to institutionalize local self-governance in the country. One of the important responsibilities devolved to local bodies namely District Development Committee (DDC) in Nepal through the LSGA, 1999 is the formulation and implementation of District Development Plan.  Though there are number of studies laden with experts’ own views on decentralization and…

This paper examines the celebration of Dashain, the most celebrated Hindu festival in Nepal, by the Buddhist Tamang people of Kavre district. Many ethnic activists and scholars argue that Dashain and its patronizing by the state is a continual process of creating Hindu cultural hegemony in Nepal. Since the early 1990s, indigenous and other non-Hindu groups have also ‘boycotted’ Dashain as a way of resisting the Hindu state and reclaiming their distinct cultural and religious identities. However, many indigenous and non-Hindu groups such as the Tamangs of Kavre district continue to celebrate Dashain as one of their own cultural events.  In this paper, I focus on the ways in which the Tamangs of Kavre areas have indigenized the Dashain festival, and how they debate about the festival. Drawing on the…

Rape has been a common way of victimizing woman or men in the world physically, mentally as well as socially with sexual abuse. It is not a new phenomenon, however. There has been a generation being raped in the history in the various parts of the world. Considering past as past and moving on in the present, there are rapes every now and then around the world. Of course some are reported and hundreds of them or even thousands of them go unreported. Those unreported are never heard and a sheer silence always covers the victim and the victimizer remains free. But what about those reported rapes? There is a lengthy process when you consider reporting rape. A woman especially when she reports of rape has to undergo various kinds…

It is well known that the study of ‘other culture’ constitutes the crux of what we know as comparative sociology and social anthropology. As such, the focus on the other society or for that matter the insistence in cross-cultural comparisons or explorations of a new culture was not unknown to Indian sociology and social anthropology. Earlier generation Indian sociologists/ social anthropologists like G. S. Ghurye and K. P. Chattopadhyay have made some notable contributions by making cross cultural comparisons in their studies. A handful of later generation Indian sociologists/ anthropologists have also made some pioneering efforts in this regard. However, compared to the volume of sociological/ anthropological researches those have a focus to India, the number of studies focusing foreign country as their subject matter or field is negligible. In…

This paper presumes that language can be a significant factor in shaping the courses of belongingness. Arguing as such it attempts to provide an overview of the contemporary linguistic situation in Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas with a significant poser: as to whether language can yield multiple modes of belonging for the same linguistic group at different intervals of time. As is well-known Darjeeling-Sikkim region falls within the geographical limits of the Eastern Himalayas which can again be conceived of as a ‘cultural area’ distinguishable by a single cultural criteria i.e. Nepali language. Conceiving Darjeeling-Sikkim region as a distinctive cultural space within this broad culture area (distinguishable on the basis of the predominance of Nepali language) of the Eastern Himalayas and drawing experiences from contemporary realities of neighboring countries like Nepal and Bhutan…

My paper examines the intersection between structural violence, health, healthcare and the daily lives of women living in the mountain villages of Jumla.  Structural violence, a theoretical perspective first described by Galtung (1969) and recently championed by Farmer (1996; 2004), is a contested frame for understanding the causes and effects of poverty and social injustice on the most disadvantaged (Schleper Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). However, the framework of structural violence has rarely been applied to Nepal and the usefulness of the concept has not been adequately evaluated (Basnyet, 2015; Kohrt, 2009).  In particular, the voices of women engaged in subsistence agriculture, living outside district capitals have been absent.  Women living in remote areas, burdened by life and work, can be invisible to researchers leading to unhelpful generalisations about their capabilities,…

In post-conflict Nepali society, death is discussed particularly in subjective terms, depending upon the context in which one died where Maoists war equated death with sacrifice. This equivalence was made explicit in the various practices, such as the conventional understanding that death on the battlefield does not pollute the relatives as death normally does (Lecomte-Tilouine 2006). The meaning of a human life was principally focused on death. However, the meaning of death is discussed in contrasting terms when it came to guerrilla fighters in the Maoists conflict. Death was discussed by guerrilla fighters in the context of a political and social movement. The Maoists’ propaganda discourse discusses it as death soaked with the blood of the martyrs, from which the soil germinates, and power grows (Lecomte-Tilouine 2006).  Consequently, while the…

The earthquake of April 2015 and the numerous aftershocks had severe impacts in most of the central hill districts of Nepal including the capital, Kathmandu. With months after the major quakes and recurring aftershocks, every individual, however difficult, is trying their best to shift towards normalcy. In this quest towards coping the stress brought about by the earthquake are also the street children. The global literature of natural hazards suggests that the children are one of the most vulnerable groups during the time of calamities. It is also observed the number of street children shoots up after such disasters. Like in any other unplanned city and highly unequal society, in Nepal too the street children are present in all the major urban centres. Being one of the byproducts of uneven…

It is often argued that women candidates are less competent than their male counterparts and hence only few women candidates are listed in a party list for the electoral competitions (Paxton & Hughes, 2007, Philips, 1991; Tamale,1999). The reasons behind that are resource differentials between male and female. Male are more resourceful than female.  The resource differentials can be level of education, income, and property ownership. Therefore, gender quotas are provided for women to encourage and ensure women’s equal participation in the politics – parliament, cabinet and political parties. The electoral statistics of Nepal – election result 1991, 1994, 1999 and a couple of Constituent Assembly (CA) Elections  2008 and 2013 suggest that despite resource differentials between men and women,  women are equally competent as male candidates if they are…