In the last decade, indigenous peoples’ claims of territoriality and political autonomy have become one of the most contested political agendas in Nepal. Indigenous peoples’ movements for federalism based on ethnic identity, territory and history have heightened a distinct sense of “geographical imagination” (Harvey, 2005) among indigenous communities.  At the community level, people’s sense of place, their locally embedded practices of place-making such as rituals and place-names, and peoples’ understanding of their historical relationships with their territories have acquired new meanings and political significance. In this panel, we will draw on historical and ethnographic analysis to discuss the emerging practices of territoriality and indigeneity, particularly in the contexts of the post-April 2006 political transformations towards inclusive democracy and federal restructuring of the nation-state.  We bring ethnographic cases from the hill…

This panel situates instances of knowledge activities in the historical interstices of change in Nepal. From the initiative in the late Rana period to establish a university, to the circulation of research in the immediate post-Rana period to the creation of the “sikkimization” concept during the political turmoil of the mid-1970s, these papers seek to expand upon common-held assumptions of specific historical activities.  Through historically based analyses with analytically divergent lenses, these papers reengage with history in the interstices of change to bring to the fore a fresh re-examination of their implications.   

Susan Boser This study seeks to describe the functioning and challenges experienced by local government officials during Nepal’s efforts to transition into democracy, particularly as it relates to marginalized groups’ access to civil liberties and opportunities. Nepal is striving to establish a democratic government in part by creating a federal structure with a three-tiered administrative system of governance (UNFPA Nepal, 2012.)  Since the end of the 30-year panchayat system of government, the multiple political parties in power have been deeply divided regarding how to draw geopolitical boundaries for representation, given the implications these decisions have regarding political and economic rights of the various groups (von Einsiedel, Malone & Pradhan, 2012.).  The rhetoric and ideals of the conflicts and the periodic steps toward democracy create hope in the people.  Yet in…

Binayak Sundas The political history of the Himalayan region has demonstrated that states in the region were more prone to political fragmentation rather than consolidation and expansion. The various historians of the region have cited several reasons for this, the terrain, lack of resources, succession disputes which when combined with the terrain complicated the matter etc. Thus in the early 18th century the entire Himalayan region was littered with several small states. The state of Gorkha was one of these several small states, struggling against one another. In the latter half of the 18th century it began a process of expansion which culminated in the creation of an empire which was in size and in the multitude of people that it ruled over, unprecedented in the region. The traditional historiography…

Swagat Raj Pandey and Sanjay Sharma The transition of Nepal from a Hindu Kingdom to a secular republic is believed to have institutionalized the religious freedom in the country. Earlier, individuals, including animalists and naturalists, who did not opt for any specific religion were by default regarded as Hindus curtailing their individual choice of religion.  Of various religions practiced in Nepal, Christianity is one. Because of a lot of factors fostered primarily by evangelism, the number of Christian converts here is ever growing. While there were only 31,280 reported Christians in the 1991 census, this number increased to 101,976 in 2001, and in 2011 it reached 375,699. Furthermore, the existing literature on the issue of religious conversion suggests that individuals from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, Dalits and Janajatis are mainly changing…

Austin Lord This paper blends a theoretical framework for understanding social and spatial change in areas affected by hydropower development in Nepal with ethnographic accounts of diverse ‘lived experiences’ of hydropower development in the watersheds of the Trishuli and Tamakoshi rivers. Discussing hydropower development in terms of the turbulences and negotiations that mark its fluid boundaries this paper poses a series of open questions about shifting patterns of work, mobility, access, and aspiration which are emerging in ‘developing’ watersheds. This analysis focuses on the different ways in which livelihoods and socialities are implicated within the processes, practices, and logics of hydropower development – within complex flows of labor, capital, imagination and power that support the transformative projects of Nepal’s evolving ‘hydroscapes’ (from Swyngedouw 1999). As hydropower development intensifies and proliferates…

Michael Baltutis The Nepalese Indra jatra, the autumnal festival of the Hindu god Indra, is the mul Jatra (root festival) of the city of Kathmandu. The origins of this festival lie in the Sanskrit texts of classical India: the epic Mahabharata (most likely its first appearance), the dramaturgical Natyashastra, the architectural Samarangana Sutradhara, and the royal-astrological Brihat Samhita. Rather than simply describing the festival, and certainly more than interpreting the festival as an occasion that peacefully brings together all of its participants, these texts use the Indra festival as a literary trope that indicates socio-political change and innovation. The contemporary Nepalese iteration of the festival is no different. The 1768 performance of the festival serves as the performative backdrop for the successful incursion of Prithivi Narayan Shah into the Kathmandu…

Bryony Whitmarsh This paper focuses on a particular time (the post-monarchy Nepali present) and site (the Narayanhiti Palace Museum) that I believe offers a compelling space for understanding the negotiation of Nepal’s recent past, thereby revealing as much about the Nepal of which it forms a part as the Nepal it institutionalizes – the on-going transition from royal to republican Nepal. The Palace Museum means different things to different groups of people and key objectives of my research are to identify these claims, how they are formed and the reasons for their existence. I propose to use the following definitions from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, 48) to discuss three different registers of meaning of the Narayanhiti Palace Museum. The first, the museum as 'a vault, in the tradition of the royal…

Ang Sanu Lama  Although community forestry (CF) in Nepal has been considered a successful program in terms of improving forest conditions, supporting forest-based livelihoods and enhancing local level community engagement, its exclusionary outcomes have been well documented. However, more focus has been given to the socio-cultural, economic and institutional factors at the community level as the causes of exclusion of women, Dalits, people living in poverty, and ethnic minorities. These marginalized groups are seen as being excluded from benefit sharing and decision making in CFUG as a result of community level elite capture and socio-economic attributes of marginalized groups themselves. Thus CF policy guidelines see Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) as the main actors in addressing exclusion. Although recent studies have looked at the impact of external actors, power relations,…

Katsuo Nawa In this paper I describe and analyze several basic elements of rituals among Rangs in Byans, Far Western Nepal and adjacent regions, focusing on three different named gestures or bodily movements carried out very frequently in their 'rituals'. Rang traditionally lives in several Himalayan valleys in Darchula District in Nepal and Uttarakhand in India, and is officially recognized as an adivasi janajati in Nepal. Though it has been considerable amount of discursive and practical transformation in various aspects of their rituals within last fifty years from the Panchayat era to the age of samabeshikaran, my focus here is on what Rangs have done in their 'rituals' despite, and in relation to, these changes. As far as I know there is no Byansi word for 'ritual' in general. Rather,…