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Page 5
“...shaken and scared,
like everyone else. I needed to figure out what had hap-
pened and what was going on. Once my fears subsided,
I contacted some friends from my ongoing research on
tourism development in northern Gorkha. They were in
Kathmandu, and were already in full swing, calling friends
and relatives. In some places phone connections were
gone, in other places they had never been established,
but here and there, my friends were able to receive news
from the area. Working out of Sonam’s trekking agency,
we began collecting information more systematically.
Over the following six weeks, we worked closely together.
Realizing we had the best information about this remote
area available at the time, we created online spreadsheets
with organized and updated information about the seven
Village Development Committees (VDC) in the Manaslu
Conservation Area (MCA). Through our connections in
the area we tried to match local needs with the inflow of
HIMALAYA Volume37Number2 57...”
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Page 6
“...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 political
concerns among many of the responding actors. Although
the past half century of Nepali history vividly attests to
the fact that ensuring a fair and productive distribution of
foreign development resources is a massive challenge rife
with the potential for persistent unintended consequences
(Pigg 1992; 1993; Bista 1991; Fujikura 2001; Bennike 2015b),
in the aftershock of disaster all concerns with the issues of
‘giving’ seemed suddenly to have been swept away.6 The
urgency and moral imperatives of post-disaster human-
ism superimposed flat, universal notions of suffering (and
resilience) onto a political and social landscape that was, if
anything, even more complicated than before the...”
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Page 7
“...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 had
emerged to take charge. Formed partly...”
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Page 9
“...been erected just after the earthquake so that
this part of the river valley was also, now, connected to
the outside world via cheap and accessible mobile phones.
Many of these development projects had been planned
well before the earthquake, but had suddenly been
accomplished in the rush of reconstruction work after the
earthquake. Furthermore, villagers themselves had pri-
vately chosen to utilize some of the cash distributed after
the earthquake to fly CGI sheets for roofing and toilets
in by helicopter and some were planning to spend the
expected government reconstruction funds to build small
‘home-stay’ houses for future tourist.
The aftershock also reverberated in local politics. One
villager, rumored to have been associated with the heavy-
handed rule of the past, had emerged as the de-facto
leader of development initiatives in the village. He told me
how Bihi used to be regarded as a bad, less developed place
compared to most other villages in the area. Now, it was
going to be different...”
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Page 10
“...position in
the aftermath. Others might be bypassed by the new trails
of development or fall between the cracks of compensation
schemes. Disparate factors such as religion, occupation,
education, language skills and social networks—even local-
ity during an earthquake—can affect this. As scholars and
interested observers of Nepal and the Himalaya, we need
to pay close attention to these processes and their poten-
tially unequal outcomes in the years to come.
In high Himalayan places such as northern Gorkha District,
the aftershock of disaster is interacting with existing
processes of change in multiple, open-ended ways. As
many other ‘poor’ countries across the world, in the past
years Nepal has been betting heavily on tourism as a route
to economic development (GoN 2009, 2010). However,
plummeting tourist numbers after the earthquake are
now highlighting the vulnerability of tourism as a route
to economic development. Over the past decade, the
Manaslu circuit in northern Gorkha has been...”
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Page 11
“... Day. Himal
Southasian.
Bennike, Rune Bolding. 2015b. Textbook Difference: Spatial
History and National Education in Panchayat and Present-
day Nepal. Indian Economic and Social History Review 52 (1):
53-78.
Bista, Dor Bahadur. 1991. Fatalism and Development: Nepal’s
Struggle for Modernization. Madras: Sangam Books Ltd.
Childs, Geoff H. 2004. Tibetan diary :from birth to death and
beyond in a Himalayan valley of Nepal. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Cohen, Charles, and Eric Werker. 2008. The Political
Economy of “Natural” Disasters. In Working Paper: Harvard
Business School.
Dixit, Kunda. 2015. Operation Mountain Express. Nepali
Times, 19-25 June.
Fujikura, Tatsuro. 2001. Discourses of Awareness: Notes
for a Criticism of Development in Nepal. Studies in Nepali
History and Society 6 (2): 271-313.
GoN. 2009. Tourism Vision 2020. Kathmandu: Government
of Nepal, Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation.
GoN. 2010. Nepal Trade Integration Strategy 2010.
Kathmandu: Ministry of Commerce...”
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Page 12
“...Toward
a broader understanding of macroeconomic risk and
resilience. Climate Risk Management 3: 39-54.
Nelson, Andrew. 2015. Classquake: What the global media
missed in Nepal earthquake coverage, accessed 8 March.
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Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 1992. Inventing Social Categories
through Place: Social Representations and Development
in Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (3):
491-513.
Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 1993. Unintended Consequences: The
Ideological Impact of Development in Nepal. 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...”
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