This paper explores the ambivalent relationship between Dalits and Maoists in the Nepali Civil War (1996-2006) using three field studies of villages in western and eastern Nepal. The aim is to investigate whether this period of social upheaval brought about lasting changes in caste discrimination practices in rural Nepal and through this investigation to ask larger, critical questions about the type of transformation achieved by Maoism in Nepal and its relation to the aspiration for ‘modernity’ in subaltern populations.  In order to address these questions three village cases were selected: two in Kalikot District in western Nepal (Malkot and Manma) and one in eastern Nepal (Kubinde in Sindhupalchok District). Malkot was selected because it was a Maoist ‘model village’ during the war period and was well known as a center…

Sikkim, in the Eastern Himalaya, is named ‘sacred land’ (Ti. Bas yul) by the Bhotyas and other sikkimese ethnic groups. And in the West Sikkim, the area is known as Beyül Demojong, ‘the hidden valley of rice’. In my doctoral thesis (Chiron, 2007), I have developed the idea that the patrimonial heritage within the Kaychupalri area of West Sikkim transcends the physical element of property ownership. It also includes the inheritance of the sacred landscape (Beyül Demojong), topography and ecology, and its connotation such as pilgrimage centre.  Vidal de la Blache, a leader of the tradition of Human Geography during the XIX century, once observed that man and his environment are more intimate than a snail and its shell. I want to demonstrate here that the relationship between nature and…

Starting from a concrete episode of my fieldwork, in this paper I try to reflect on how consciousness of death may help us to shed light upon the ways in which people in the Sinja Valley of Jumla District (Western Nepal) include death in life in the attempt to make sense of existence, and in what ways this concretises in everyday life. However, borrowing from Heidegger and the existential anthropology proposed by Jackson, my argument is that worldviews are intrinsically embedded into the domain of lived experience, in which they are generated and upon which in turn they produce concrete effects, and cannot be extrapolated from it as abstract entities. Therefore, showing how it is not about “knowledge” of the world but of “engagement” in it, I move away from the, perhaps,…