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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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“...WeHelpNepal, Temba Lama and all the members of the Langtang Management & Reconstruction Committee, NayanTara Kakshyapati Gurung and the Himalayan Disaster Relief Volunteer Group, Amchi Tenjing Bista and the Lo Kunphen School, Brigid McAuliffe and Patti Bonnet of PictureMeHere, Bob Chapman with Friends of Nepal, Jake Norton, Tim Gocher of The Dolma Fund, Jonas and Elsa Haeberle at OM Nepal, Pasang Bhutti, Bob and Vera Bonnet, Liesl Clark, Steve Marolt and Aspect Solar, Amuda Mishra at the Ujyaalo Foundation, the team at Semantic Creations, Rajeev Goyal at Phulmaaya Foundation, Bimal Karki, Ben Ayers, Tracy Joosten, Rachelle Brown and Diane Schumacher, Mahohari Upadhyaya, I

Nepal, Robert Soden, Lauren Gawne and Ningmar Dongba, and Roshi Joan Halifax. The authors are also deeply grateful for the counsel and friendship of senior academic colleagues. This includes, but is not limited to, Sienna Craig, Ken Bauer, Kathryn March, Emily Yeh, Geoff Childs, Carole McGranahan, Heather Hindman...”

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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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“...tance and the centralized interests of the Nepalese state, shifted attention away from the rest of Nepal and helped obscure chronically unequal patterns of vulnerability and the systems of structural violence that helped create them (Farmer 2011). As other scholars have suggested, it is these underlying patterns of inequality that reproduce the unevenness of disaster (Hewitt 1983; Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 1999; Tamang 2015; Ghale 2015). While reflecting on our own roles and engagements, we also address the politics of representation that shaped our ability to act as an advocate for disaster victims (Schuller 2014) and to acknowledge the asymmetries of mobility, access, and language that at times privileged our voices over Nepali voices (K.C. & Shakya 2015; Redfield 2012; Sheller 2016). While we did not ourselves respond to a ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski 1999) in the wake of the earthquakes in Nepal, we did in many ways become media- tors in the relations between suffering Nepalis and people...”
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“...When the earth shook on April 25th 2015, both of us were in Nepal conducting academic research,4 and were impli- cated in the unfolding disaster in a deeply embodied way. Like many across Nepal, we too struggled to seek safety, to locate friends and loved ones, to locate other people, to gain information, to establish contact, to understand what had just occurred and what might occur next, and to grieve. And then, like many others, we tried to determine where help was needed (where, what kind, by whom?) and how to help directly and effectively. Having witnessed the destruction firsthand, having spent years working in Nepal prior to the event, and having many friends in earthquake-affected areas, we felt a visceral and personal compulsion to respond. In many ways, choosing to act was part of our own processes of sense-making in the face of extreme uncertainty, a way to channel our anxieties and concerns into what we hoped was right action. In the sec- tions below, we provide some background...”
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“...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, we began considering our own interventions to help fill them. We reached out to a variety of contacts involved in different kinds of disaster relief efforts, within and beyond Nepal. In an attempt to better understand the ‘information architecture’...”
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“...or four NGOs in the early weeks while others failed to attract any attention—partly the result of spatial biases in communications infrastructure. Within many villages, chronically marginalized sub-populations, like single-women and dalit (‘untouchable’) families, were often subordinated or excluded from locally-facilitated distributions of relief supplies. These problems of optics and micro-politics repeated themselves in fractal patterns across Nepal. Upon arrival in Syabru Besi, the market center of Upper Rasuwa just 10 miles from the Nepal-China border, we began talking with people who had descended from the surrounding hills seeking support, and both gaps and overlaps in relief distribution became even more evident. Rumors and expectations suggested the opening of the roads to larger vehicles and the imminent arrival of significant humanitarian relief, but at the time of our Figure 2. Map of Rasuwa District made available by the UN Logistics Cluster that was used to orient and coordinate...”
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“...arrival, very little international support had yet reached this part of the district. Instead, relief supplies came from various small groups like ours: including teams from Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Kathmandu, volunteer youth groups on motorcycles, and trekking agencies whose porters hailed from Tamang villages nearby. In the days and weeks to follow, we encountered a number of disaster response teams from Nepal and across the globe, each arriving with strikingly different agendas and knowledges. Some were exceptionally well equipped but lacked essential information on what was needed where, and by whom. In contrast, others arrived with a calcu- lated strategy to focus their operations in Rasuwa for the long term—explaining that they chose Rasuwa precisely because other districts were already considered ‘crowded.’ Here we witnessed a glimpse of patterns that would later resemble what others have described as ‘competi- tive humanitarianism’ (Stirrat 2006), as different actors and...”
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“...article represents a preliminary attempt to consider our own practices of post-disaster engagement and our own multiple commitments to Nepal in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes—to illuminate processes of engagement that are not often described in detail, to articulate a kind of engagement that we conceive of as multiple. Importantly, despite our ongoing work in Nepal, we do not personally identify as ‘scholar-practitioners,’ ‘activist academics,’ or even ‘engaged scholars.’ Why do we reject these cate- gories? Because, as we have suggested, the practice of meaningful post-earthquake engagement does not imply a professional orientation to humanitarian action, and because many of the most important things that a ‘scholar’ can do in the post-disaster context are not necessarily ‘activist’ (or even directly ‘academic’). Rather, we suggest that our work in Nepal and the nature of engagement is more than that, or rather that it is both that and more—it is multiple (Mol 2002). Becoming Rasuwa Relief...”
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“...critical dialogue about the posi- tions and values of social scientists in the wake of disaster continues in Nepal (i.e. K.C. & Shakya 2015; Hindman 2015; McGranahan 2015). In recent years, several workshops and events focused on patterns of engagement in post-earth- quake Nepal have been held at academic conferences (for example, the ‘Nepal Earthquake Summit’ at Dartmouth College, February 2016) and new solidarities focused on knowledge-sharing and collaboration are emerging (such as the recently established ‘Nepal Geographers Association,’ April 2017). Lessons learned from these kinds of collaborations and dialogues have the potential to contribute to planning efforts for disaster-risk reduction and preparedness efforts in Nepal, across the Himalayan region, and beyond. Importantly, the project of multiple engagement is not simply a reflexive academic exercise. The people of Nepal face protracted conditions of extreme vulnerability and a profoundly uncertain future. In the face of ever-present...”
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“...research in Nepal focuses on the social, economic, and environmental effects of infrastructure development, the formation of infrastructural publics and imaginaries, and perceptions of risk and uncertainty. His current project analyzes the reconfiguration of imagined futures and economies of anticipation in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes. Austin holds a Master of Environmental Science 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...”
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“...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) remained...”
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“...Life: Negotiating Culture and Development in the Nepal Himalaya. Leiden: Brill. Lord, Austin. 2014. Making a ‘Hydropower Nation’: Subjectivity, Mobility, and Work in the Nepalese Hydroscape. HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 34 (2): 111-121. ------. 2015. Langtang. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. (accessed on November 30, 2016). ------. 2016. Citizens of a Hydropower Nation: Territory and Agency at the Frontiers of Hydropower Development in Nepal. Economic Anthropology 3 (1): 145-160. Magar, Santa Gaha. 2015. The Tamang Epicenter. Nepali Times, 10-16 July 2015. Malkki, Liisa. 2015. The Need to Help: the Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press. March, Kathryn S. 2015. My Village in Nepal is Gone. Cornell Chronicle: Ithaca, NY. April 30, 2015. McGranahan, Carole. 2015. Gone: The Earthquake in Nepal. Savage Minds. Published Online April 30, 2015...”
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“...ty-in-rupture> (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. nepal-s-earthquakes> (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 Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stirrat, Jock. 2006. Competitive Humanitarianism: Relief and the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. Anthropology Today 22(5): 11-16. Streep, Abe. 2015. Nepal’s Aid System is Broken. So These Lifesavers...”