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Page 6
“...what we hoped was right action. In the sec-
tions below, we provide some background on where each
of us was on the day of first major earthquake.
On April 25th, Austin Lord was in the Langtang Valley in
north Rasuwa District, a high-Himalayan valley, home to
a community of culturally-Tibetan pastoralists that is also
considered a popular trekking destination (Lim 2008). At
the exact moment of the earthquake, he was talking to a
local man, now a friend, about a proposed plan for hydro-
power development in the Valley. When the earthquake
struck, landslides and avalanches came down throughout
the valley, including a massive co-seismic avalanche that
began on the southern slopes of Langtang Lirung (7,234m).
This avalanche, which destroyed the entire village of
Langtang and released half the force of the Hiroshima
atomic bomb, caused the single most concentrated loss
of life anywhere in Nepal (Kargel et al. 2016). Austin and
his parents had stayed in Langtang village the previous
night and left...”
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Page 15
“...Austin Lord is a PhD student in the Department of
Anthropology at Cornell University. His 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...”
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Page 16
“...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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Page 17
“...Grassroots Responses to Representations of Superstorm
Sandy, in Extreme Weather and Global Media, edited by Diane
Negra and Julia Leyda, 144-162. London: Routledge.
Lim, Francis Khek Gee. 2008. Imagining the Good 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...”
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