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“...HIMALAYA, the Journal of the
Association for Nepal and
Himalayan Studies
Volume 37 | Number 2
Article 12
December 2017
Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple
Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal
Austin Lord
Cornell University, al947(a>cornell.edu
Galen Murton
James Madison University, galen.murton(a)colorado.edu
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya
Recommended Citation
Lord, Austin and Murton, Galen (2017) "Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal,"
HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 37 : No. 2, Article 12.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/12
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Macalester College
Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the
DigitalCommons(2)Macalester College at DigitalCommons(2)Macalester
College. It...”
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“...Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-
Earthquake Nepal
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to all those who contributed to and supported the
work of Rasuwa Relief. First and foremost; we would like to acknowledge our founding team members at
Rasuwa Relief: Bob Beazley, Bikram Karki, Sneha Moktan, Arya Gautam, Prasiit Sthapit, Upasana Khadka,
and Lakpa Sherpa. This is an incredible group of people who volunteered hundreds of hours, and made
Rasuwa Relief possible. As our efforts evolved, many others joined our team and made important
contributions, particularly Nathaniel and Amanda Needham, Jennifer Bradley, Rabi Thapa, Johanna Fricke,
and Prakriti Yonzon. Our work with Rasuwa Relief prompted many meaningful collaborations with a variety
of different individuals and institutions. While there are perhaps too many to name, we would like to thank
DROKPA, Mojgone Azemun and Avaaz.org, Bodhi Garrett and Craig Lovell of WeHelpNepal...”
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“...Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple
Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal
Austin Lord
Galen Murton
In this article, we reflect on the multiple
nature of our engagements in the wake of
the 7.8m earthquake that struck Nepal on
April 25th 2015. Specifically, we trace the
events, experiences, decisions, positions, and
processes that constituted our work with
a post-earthquake volunteer initiative we
helped to form, called Rasuwa Relief. Using
the concept of multiplicity (cf. Mol 2002),
we consider the uncertain process by which
Rasuwa Relief began to cohere, as a collective
of diverse efforts, interventions, projects,
and commitments, and how Rasuwa Relief
was continually and multiply enacted through
practices of engagement. As a collaborative
effort that coordinated and consolidated many
of our post-earthquake interventions over a
period of two years, Rasuwa Relief was always
in a state of becoming.
This process of becoming, we suggest, indexed
and informed the multiple ways that we...”
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“...On Being Multiple
In the wake of the earthquake that struck Nepal on
April 25th 2015, we helped to form a volunteer disaster-
response initiative that we called Rasuwa Relief. Like the
countless others who attempted to help at this time, we
never expected to be directly involved in humanitarian
‘relief work.’ However, our embodied experiences of the
earthquake and our deepening relationships within Nepal
compelled us to reorient ourselves in relation to the
disaster. Amid the uncertainties of the aftermath and still
trying to process our own lived experiences, we began,
like many others, to act in multiple ways. We hoped that,
but were often unsure if, we could become helpful. In early
May 2015, we formed Rasuwa Relief and made an informed
decision to engage in new ways, and to sustain and
elaborate these engagements as the aftermath unfolded
around us. As a collaborative effort that indexed a variety
of different post-earthquake orientations, understandings
of disaster, and expressions...”
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“...struggled to navigate the uncertain
terrain of post-earthquake Nepal. We tried to help while
slowly learning how to do so, acting first based on a kind
of reflex and, later, more reflexively. While working with
Rasuwa Relief, we were constantly attempting to balance
a variety of commitments to diverse kinds of people,
places, principles, and positionalities: that is, we were
always multiple.
Uneven Narrations of Disaster
Disaster response efforts, humanitarian or otherwise, are
often shaped and adapted in relation to particular pat-
terns of ascertainment and narration, fueled by a sense of
urgency and rupture. In the aftermath of disaster, dif-
ferently positioned narrators seek to frame the disaster
and to reinterpret the relationship between a cataclysmic
event and the latent crises or vulnerabilities that preceded
it (Hewitt 1983; Das 1996). Reflecting on the different
narrations (and narrators) circulating in the aftermath of
the 2001 earthquake in the Indian state of Gujarat, Edward
Simpson...”
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“...visits to the camp to
provide relief materials and to talk with community
members. After less than 48 hours in Kathmandu, Austin,
grew frustrated with the uneven impacts and optics of the
disaster (cf. Shneiderman & Turin 2015; Nelson 2015) and
wrote the following statement on social media:
To be clear: Kathmandu is not just a pile of rubble.
Don’t believe the hype. Without dismissing the very
real needs of some people, the damage is remark-
ably, fortunately, and unexpectedly limited com-
pared with the possibilities and most importantly
with other parts of Nepal. I say this because most
current international media continues to reinforce
longstanding spatial biases: that there is Kathman-
du, Everest, and the rest of Nepal, only vaguely
referenced or understood... [yet] the rest of Nepal
is where the problems post-earthquake are most
pressing, where little attention has been given to
the conditions of marginal Nepalis, and where help
is greatly needed in the immediate [...] I say this...”
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“...well aware of
legacies of social and spatial exclusion experienced by
Tamang populations in Rasuwa who had been subject to
centuries of marginalization, corvee labor, and the codified
caste-based discrimination of the muluki ain (Holmberg
1977; Campbell 2013). The earthquake hit Tamang com-
munities across northern-Nepal particularly hard (Magar
2015),6 compounding everyday vulnerabilities, especially
in Rasuwa, where 82% of the district population identi-
fies as Tamang (Ghale 2015). The uneven impacts of the
earthquakes on Tamang populations led some to relocate
the event around a ‘Tamang epicenter’ (Magar 2015) or to
interpret the disaster as a ‘Tamsaling Tragedy’ (Holmberg
& March 2015). In the immediate wake of the earthquake,
Tamang communities in Rasuwa and ethnic minorities
(janajatis) in other regions remained heavily underserved
and overshadowed by greater attention to other more
visible and politically-connected areas.
As we worked on determining the contours of the gaps
in Rasuwa...”
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“...public statement via social media. Like
many others who have found themselves at the frontiers
of disaster response in the 21st century, we launched a
crowd-funding campaign to support our initial efforts.
We had become a diverse collective of nine people [see
Acknowledgments], and we called ourselves Rasuwa Relief.
Disaster & Unevenness in Rasuwa
Heading upstream along the Trishuli River with our fellow
volunteers during our first major relief mission on May
10th, we could see that the impacts of the earthquake
and the unevenness of response remained profound. The
floodplains outside the market town of Betrawati at the
border of Nuwakot and Rasuwa had been transformed
into a tangle of IDP camps and emergency medical facil-
ities, where dozens of NGO tents with competing global
logos clustered into new enclaves of triage—a place where
the international humanitarian community was both
needed and conspicuous. And yet the further one trav-
eled northward into the hills of Rasuwa, relief units and...”
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“...Kathmandu and
Langtang—that our commitment to informed action and
to being co-present was an important ethical decision.
Furthermore, these firsthand experiences gained while
attempting to do ‘relief work’ had shown us that our situ-
ated knowledge of Rasuwa was valuable in multiple ways.
Put differently, we saw that an academically and ethno-
graphically informed understanding of post-earthquake
locations as more than just ‘dots on a map’ allowed us to
“act productively as brokers between multiple actors”
(Shneiderman 2015:1). Thus, as the terms of our volun-
Figure 3- At the time of the
73 magnitude earthquake
that struck on May 12,2015,
our team of volunteers was
in Rasuwa distributing solar
panels, tarps, and other relief
materials. Here two volunteers
watch as dust rises from the
valley below immediately after
the shock.
(Lord, 2015)
HIMALAYA Volume37,Number2 93...”
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“...Displaced survivors from
the Langtang community gather to
perform funerary rites at Phuntsok
Choeling Monastery in Kathmandu
in June 2015, forty-nine days after
the earthquake. This Tibetan
Buddhist monastery also served as
their displaced persons camp.
(Lord, 2015)
Figure 5- In October 2015, Rasuwa
Relief team members and
collaborators walk through the
upper part of Langtang village,
which was leveled by the blast
from the avalanche (visible in
the background). During this
trip, we conducted a detailed
damage assessment that would
help facilitate the process of
resettlement and reconstruction.
(Lord, 2015)
teerism began to change following the second earthquake,
we made a multiple commitment to continue our work,
amid and despite the confusion.
Engagement and Praxis in the Post-Earthquake
Landscape
For two years after the earthquake, we worked as Rasuwa
Relief on a variety of different projects—ranging from
interventions focused on immediate humanitarian relief
to collaborative community-based...”
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“...understand these
projects as part of a larger commitment to polyvocality in
the wake of disaster—providing space for at-risk commu-
nities to describe their own conditions of vulnerability
and narrate their own process of recovery (Schuller 2014;
Liboiron 2015; Gergan 2016).
Through Rasuwa Relief, we also undertook a social media
campaign that we hoped would provide insight into the
situation ‘on the ground’ in Rasuwa and promote greater
understanding of the social and political complexities of
the earthquake aftermath. With these efforts, we tried to
focus attention on the socially constructed dimensions of
Figure 8. In March 2016, Amchi
Tenjing Bista administers
care to an elderly woman with
chronic health problems in the
village of Gatlang. These mobile
health camps allowed a team of
amchi (practitioners of Tibetan
medicine/Sowa Rigpa) to treat
over 1,000 patients in Upper
Rasuwa.
(Lord, 2016)
96 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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“...groups, such as
persons with disabilities, and to include or represent mar-
ginalized voices. Through this work, we sought to critique
and counter the kind of official representations of disaster
that “are dominant to the point of ubiquity” (Liboiron
2015:147) and that reproduce the uneven delineation of
certain ‘acceptable’ risks in Nepal. While constructing
these critical narratives, we tried to limit the effect and
affect of our own mediations and focused on promoting
the voice and agency of earthquake-affected Nepalis over
our own.
However, while this approach was inflected by the ethics
of social science, it was neither completely objective nor
apolitical. In fact, and especially with respect to Rasuwa,
we acted specifically and intentionally to make certain
people, places, practices, processes, and pasts more visible
than others—to draw attention to certain needs still
unmet, like pervasive struggles with mental health, and
to explicate the complex process of reconstruction (and
its politics)...”
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“...allow political theatre or instrumental
narratives of‘resilience’ to obscure the lived struggles
of Nepalis (Tamang 2015; Leve 2015), nor can we tolerate
the common practice of “planning to forget,” as Simpson
has described (2013). As Mark Schuller has argued while
reflecting on his own positions and commitments in
post-earthquake Haiti, “We have a responsibility to learn
from our collective mistakes, to understand how the
system is maintained and can change, and make the most
effective use of the life stories, frustrations, injustices,
and analyses that people entrust to those of us who are
“insiders without” (2014: 412). Multiple engagements are
needed in post-earthquake Nepal and in other post-di-
saster contexts, to combat confusion and amnesia with
clarity and an informed will to remember the patterns of
inequality and structural violence that shape and inten-
sify disaster. With these theoretical frameworks and our
own imperfect experiences in mind, we call for a greater
focus on multiple...”
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“...from Yale
University and a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College.
A portfolio of his visual work focused on Nepal can be found
at .
Galen Murton is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison
University with teaching responsibilities in the Geographic
Sciences Program. He completed his PhD in the Department
of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder (2017).
His dissertation examined the social and geopolitical
impacts of infrastructure projects in High Asia with a focus
on road developments between China and Nepal. His next
project, Road Diplomacy: China in South Asia, is supported
by a Marie S. Curie Action Individual Fellowship based at
Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2018-19.
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to all
those who contributed to and supported the work of Rasuwa
Relief. First and foremost, we would like to acknowledge our
founding team members at Rasuwa Relief:...”
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“...4. At the time of the earthquake, both authors were U.S.
Fulbright Scholars in Nepal, conducting research on
infrastructure development, mobility and social change.
For more information on our scholarly contributions see
Lord (2014; 2016), Murton (2015; 2017), or Murton, Lord &
Beazley (2016).
5. More than 300 people lost their lives in the Langtang
Valley on April 25th, including 175 Langtangpa.
Unfortunately, more than two years after the earthquake,
some of the bodies have not yet been recovered from the
Langtang avalanche zone.
6. For example, Tamang communities make up only
5.8% of Nepal’s population yet an estimated 34% of total
earthquake casualties were Tamang (Magar 2015). See also
Thapa (2015).
7. At this point in the ‘Emergency Phase,’ most large NGOs
were still establishing logistical supply chains (with the
exception of a few with air assets) and mobilizations by
the Nepalese state (with the exception of the Nepal Army,
which focused on search and rescue and evacuation
operations)...”
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“...from the Nepal Earthquake.
Savage Minds. June 5, 2015. earthquake> (accessed on
November 30, 2016).
Holmberg, David H. 1977. Order In Paradox Myth, Ritual
And Exchange Among Nepal’s Tamang. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Holmberg, David H. and Kathryn S. March. 2015. Tamsaling
and the Toll of the Gorkha Earthquake. Hot Spots, Cultural
Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. earthquake> (accessed on November 30, 2016).
Ingold, Tim. 1993. The Temporality of the Landscape. World
Archaeology 25 (2): 152-174.
Kargel, J. S., G. J. Leonard, D. H. Shugar, U. K. Haritashya,
A. Bevington, E. J.Fielding, and E. Anderson. 2016.
Geomorphic and Geologic Controls of Geohazards
Induced by Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. Science 351
(6269), aac8353.
K.C., Gaurab and Mallika Shakya. 2015. A Disciplinary
Earthquake. The Kathmandu...”
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“...Haiti after the
Earthquake. American Anthropologist 116 (2): 409-412.
Shakya, Mallika. 2015. The Question of Locality in
Rupture. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October
14, 2015. (accessed on November
30, 2016).
Sheller, Mimi. 2016. Connected Mobility in a Disconnected
World: Contested Infrastructure in Postdisaster
Contexts. Annals of the American Association of Geographers
106(2): 330-339.
Shneiderman, Sara. 2015. “Dots on the Map:”
Anthropological Locations and Responses to Nepal’s
Earthquakes. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website,
October 14, 2015. (accessed on November
30, 2016).
Shneiderman, Sara and Mark Turin. 2015. Nepal’s Relief
Effort Must Reach the Rural Poor. The Globe and Mail, April
27, 2015.
Simpson, Edward. 2013. The Political Biography of an
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