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Page 3
“...disaster
and state neglect. In this article, I draw on
observations from Kutang and Nubri in the
mountains of northern Gorkha District to
argue that neither of these descriptions is fully
accurate. Even in this remote and inaccessible
area, much was being done in the aftermath
of disaster, and a great deal of this activity
diverges, in multiple ways, from the notions
of spontaneous egalitarianism that are often
associated with 'resilience'
I describe the fraught politics involved in
distributing relief aid in a village where the local
government has been non-existent for years;
the active positioning of new political players on
the local scene; and the economic inequalities
that can arise from unlucky positioning along
geological fault-lines, a recently booming
tourist economy, and the specificities of
the Nepali government's post-disaster
compensation schemes. This article sketches
out the anatomy of disaster 'aftershock' as a
political environment rife with opportunity,
bias, and unintended...”
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Page 4
“...reconstruction with a total
lack of reconstruction. Due to the very tangible, infrastruc-
tural challenges involved in getting assistance into the
area, northern Gorkha was often described as a place ‘not
yet reached’ by aid. There was some truth to this claim, of
course. The mountainous environment did provide major
obstacles to the distribution of relief materials. However,
this condition did not equate with inactivity and the lack
of reconstruction. In fact, in an area where the presence
of the state has always been rather thin, a combination
of local initiative and transnational non-state networks
had immediately been mobilized to raise funds for relief
56 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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Page 5
“...that we understand what has happened and what
is to be done’ (Simpson 2013: 267, see also Simpson and
Serafini 2015). Hence, while the PDNA and mainstream
cause-and-effect approaches provide a convenient baseline
for the international relief industry, they obscure a good
deal of what is actually going on.
As a consequence, a multitude of less formalized initia-
tives, such as those in northern Gorkha, tend to either
disappear from view or, if they appear, be read through
the lens of grassroots resilience. However, as this article
describes, such initiatives do have consequences, and there
is a lot more to reconstruction and compensation than the
reestablishment of a status quo ex-ante or ‘building back
better’ than mainstream approaches to disaster relief seem
to indicate.4 What I suggest is that the aftershock moves
things around in much less predictable ways than what
is imagined here. Disasters do not provide clean slates.
They are substantially shaped in the image of the societ-
ies...”
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Page 6
“...moment
of stocktaking. Thus, what I write here is more a critique
of false certainties and clear-cut causalities than an
assertion of a new argument set in stone. What I empha-
size is the fluidity of the aftershock as a transformative
political-economic environment.
Relief and the Politics of Distribution: 'It's All Logistics'5
Disasters are made to appear as logistical problems
which demand intervention and legitimate tres-
pass. (Simpson 2013: 266)
Post-disaster environments can produce a resource
bubble where the ‘need to spend’ and to display efficiency
to donors may easily override concerns with coordina-
tion, local ownership and genuine needs in the name of
relief (Stirrat 2006). In northern Gorkha, from early on
relief efforts were framed largely as a technical matter
and spoken about in terms of terrain, infrastructure and
the possible ‘throughput’ of resources. While these were
obvious and legitimate issues in a Himalayan environ-
ment, they largely overshadowed other social and...”
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Page 7
“...both costly and
inefficient. Hence, the priority for people in the area was
not the usual relief materials, but was in fact the reopening
of the trail.
The distribution of the relief materials that did trickle
into Bihi, loaded into small helicopters was a complicated
political affair. With local elections suspended for almost
two decades, no formally legitimate local bodies existed to
which to turn. In this vacuum, a local leader and former
VDC head had, it was persistently rumored, made Bihi into
his own little fiefdom, ‘eating’ development funding chan-
neled through the state administration and controlling
local politics with a heavy hand. However, at the time of
the earthquake, he was hospitalized in Kathmandu and
thus out of touch with what was going on in Bihi. With no
formal structures of authority in place and the old leader
out of the village, the distribution of external resources for
relief called for local institutional innovation.
When we arrived, an ad hoc group of Bihi locals...”
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Page 8
“...of shifting
the trail—which was made with reference to logistics and
safety and pushed through under the urgency of post-di-
saster relief—held the potential for massive unintended
consequences in relation to the local economy. As an
up-and-coming tourist area, the Budhi Gandaki river valley
has seen rapid investment in tourism infrastructure over
the past 6-7 years. The realignment of the trail would
mean that a great deal of people who had spent all their
savings and taken loans to build tourist lodges on the
western side of the river in anticipation of a future rise in
tourism would now be by-passed. And with a government
compensation scheme purely focused on damaged houses,
the economic loss of these people was not accounted for.
For a while, it looked like this would be the consequence,
but by November 2016, the old trail was back in use. To the
relief of local small-scale tourism businesses, trekkers and
locals alike seemed to have deemed the safe, high trail too
cumbersome to use...”
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Page 9
“...merit’s National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) moved
slowly towards the distribution of reconstruction funds
they were steeped in political infighting, and other orga-
nizations took the opportunity to scale up their operations
in northern Gorkha—among these Christian organiza-
tions such as World Vision, Christian Relief Services,
and Mountain Child. When I visited in November and
December 2016, the resource influx and need to spend was
tangible. Christian Relief Services tarps were piled high in
many houses; World Vision had just completed the distri-
bution of Nrs. 45,000 in cash to each household throughout
the area; and Mountain Child had established a pre-school
in Samagaon and were working on the reconstruction of a
school in Ghap.
For these organizations, the earthquake had provided a
major opportunity. As the founder of MC candidly stated in
an appeal for funding shortly after the earthquake, the sit-
uation provided ‘an unprecedented opportunity to unfold
God’s pervasive grace...”
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Page 10
“...New opportunities emerged in Kathmandu, too. Sonam,
out of whose office we began coordinating relief to
northern Gorkha quickly after the disaster, is now heavily
involved in reconstruction work. Sometime after the
earthquake, he registered the relief network we had estab-
lished as a fully-fledged NGO.12 While Sonam was already
running a successful trekking business before the earth-
quake, the aftershock has placed him in a unique position.
Educated as an emergency architect from a European
university, and with extensive experience in activism
for the protection of cultural heritage in the mountains,
Sonam has become a crucial figure for reconstruction
projects in northern Gorkha and beyond. In January
2016, his office was overseeing the reconstruction of six
schools and health posts northern Gorkha—some with full
responsibility, others on a consultancy basis. By November
2016, several additional projects had been included in
the portfolio. Sonam is now renting the office across the
hall...”
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Page 11
“... Cohen and
Werker 2008, Mochizuki et al. 2014).
3.
(accessed on March 13, 2017).
4. (accessed on March 13,
2017).
5. Title from Nepali Times blog post: (accessed
on March 13, 2017).
6. Korf et al. 2010.
7. For a short ethnographic description of relief
distribution in Bihi see (Bennike 2015a).
8. (accessed on 13 March,
2017).
9. , (accessed on March 13,
2017).
10. The appeal is accessible here
(both accessed on March 13, 2017).
11. In 2016,1 was quoted salaries between Nrs...”
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Page 12
“... South Asia
Bulletin 13 (1 & 2): 45-58.
Sander, Catherine, Kimber Haddix McKay, Angjuk Lama,
and Pralhad Dhakal. 2015. Pro-Government’ Is Not ‘Pro-
Corruption’ in the Aftermath of the Nepal Earthquakes.
Anthropology News 56 (6).
Simpson, Edward. 2013. The political biography of an
earthquake: aftermath and amnesia in Gujarat, India. London:
Hurst.
Simpson, Edward, and Michele Serafini. 2015. The
Neoliberal Aftershock. Himal Southasian, 12-52.
Stirrat, Jock. 2006. Competitive humanitarianism: relief
and the tsunami in Sri Lanka. Anthropology Today 22 (5):
11-16.
Tamang, Seira. 2015. Dangers of Resilience. The Kathmandu
Post, May 25.
64 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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