Background:Suicide occupies an ambiguous, politicized, and morally fraught space at the nexus of violence, voluntary death, and murder. Although largely absent from the cultural anthropological literature, recent suicide scholarly inquiry has raised deep questions about human nature, culture, and sociality. Such investigations have exposed important heterogeneity in local discourse of suicide, shaping different moralities, perceptions, and justifications for suicide deaths. Such discourse shapes the ways the living ascribe motivation and meaning to certain. Research from anthropology and allied fields indicates that predominantly western archetypes of psychopathology, which underlie suicide categorization in health systems, may distort important socio-contextual factors contributing to suicide. Recently, the World Health Organization estimated Nepal to have the third highest female suicide rate in the world, and ranks eighth highest overall. However, little research has explicitly with…

Though it is banal to say the series of earthquakes that hit Nepal this last spring will radically change the country, what this change will consist of still remains undetermined. As government-led reconstruction efforts meander forward with little noticeable effect, and as many earthquake victims learn to make do in broken houses, tents or corrugated tin structures, post-earthquake Nepal seems held within a frustrating kind of stasis, wherein temporary hardship is often impossible to distinguish from lasting consequence. Yet this sense of stasis is in part misleading. While the act of building houses remains stymied for many, reconstruction has nevertheless radically changed the relationship between everyday life and bureaucratic documents. This, I argue, is an effect of major importance. While historically the relationship between everyday life and bureaucratic documentation—including land…

Nepal is the third poorest country in Asia according to the World Bank’ standards, and the one with a wide gender gap (World Economic Forum, 2013). Therefore, the country has become a priority in the cooperation intervention, particularly in the scope of girls’ and women’ education. With a schooling enrollment tax below 70% and a 10% gap regarding gender, UNICEF has prioritized Nepal as the 25 most needed countries of intervention. Following a classical approach to development, access to schooling is understood as a basic tool for measurement as well as to promote gender equality, in line with most international programs (UNESCO, 2000; United Nations, 2010; World Economic Forum, 2013). Other critical approaches question currently used global and homogeneous indicators to conceptualize and measure inequalities and its policies, as well…

Taking the writings of three literary figures in mid twentieth century Nepal, this paper shows how a close reading of literary texts allows us to access the constitution of particular kinds of selves at a particular historical moment. Drawing on the literary texts of Balkrishna Sama and Laxmi Prasad Devkota, and Bisweshwor Prasad Koirala, well known figures in Nepali literature, the paper asks, how do these writers write about the the becoming of modern middle class Nepalis within their texts? The attempt is to suggest that different levels of mediation with notions of respectability, progress and nation are at the heart of the literary projects of these authors. The historical conditions that pushed for self-reflection, self-definition and readjustment of ideas of the self in Nepali literature were perhaps greater exposures…