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“...homes,
and livelihoods—far beyond their access to electricity.
Whereas professionals use models to project the structural
integrity of dams and potential earnings from electricity
sales, the people living in close proximity to hydropower
projects have no way to calculate and manage the ‘risks’
that these interventions will mean on the ground.
Socially Organized Denial
The slow government response to the 2015 earthquake in
Nepal threatens to exacerbate social inequality, alter com-
munity structures, and generate new patterns of economic
and social conflict. How is it that this major catastrophic
event has failed to cause a strong response from the hydro-
power industry? What can explain the disjuncture between
lived experience and public concern? What can we say
about the prevailing opinions about seismicity that existed
prior to the 2015 earthquake and continue to neutralize
or muffle a stronger outcry for stricter regulations on
hydropower development? To discuss this issue, we engage
what...”
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“...development and downplaying the inherent risks
makes ‘sense.’
Risk and Uncertainty
In his essay, ‘The Cultural Nature of Risk,’ Asa Boholm
rhetorically asks what social anthropologists can contrib-
ute to risk research. His answer is: context (2003:174). He
roots his conclusion in a discussion of Mary Douglas and
Ulrich Beck, who differ in how they regard the need for
an analytic distinction between traditional and modern
models of risk. For Douglas and other cultural theorists,
Boholm writes, “explanations in terms of‘risk’ in modern
society are understood to fulfil the same social function as
explanations in terms of destiny, supernatural agency, or
broken taboo in traditional societies” (2003:165). In other
words, for cultural theorists, risk, like taboos, is subjec-
tively chosen and culturally constructed to exert social
control over a population, thus eliminating the need to
analytically separate the concept of ‘risk’ from the concept
of ‘taboo.’
Beck, by contrast, posits risk as...”
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“...to gathering
investment funds” (Tsing 2000:118). When you trace out
the string of people who desire hydropower to arrive as a
business, who want certain returns, who want discussions
of risk circumscribed to the topic of guaranteeing profit,
you can understand how they could be convinced to deny
serious credence to possible earthquakes. It doesn’t fit
the narrative.
The private hydropower narrative sells images of illu-
minated rural homes, children studying late into the
evenings under lamps, social programs sprouting up from
fully-filled government coffers, and urban homes stocked
with modern appliances, surging to life, at any time of day,
with the press of a button. Nature must be ‘made into loot,’
and Nepal is told it’s not water but money that pours down
its rivers, unrealized and wasted. This conjuring trick has
its roots in notions of frontier culture, asking participants
to see a landscape that doesn’t yet exist, the same way that
the US gold rush invited white immigrants to envision...”
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“...withstand a
major earthquake. On the other hand, civil society and
anti-dam activists cannot marshal an opposition to dam
construction in seismic zones beyond supposition. That
is, having little evidence for their position, they can only
warn about the danger of dam breach as a possibility
rather than a likelihood. In Nepal’s energy-starved, devel-
opment-seeking context, theirs is indeed a weak position.
Through local employment, electrification, improved
infrastructural access, and possible local social devel-
opment, hydropower projects may open up exciting
potentialities for local communities. Recent project devel-
opment agreements, such as the one for the Upper Karnali
Hydroelectric Project, have the availability of shares for
affected people written into the terms of the contract. In
some parts of Nepal, share options in hydro projects have
attracted high levels of interest from local small-scale
investors (ShareSansar 2016).
But, communities around these proposed dam sites will
also have...”
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“...Press.
Pangeni, Rudra. 2016. Damaged Hydropower Plants
Yet to Bounce Back. Republica, April 18. (accessed
on April 29, 2017).
------. 2015. Earthquake Damages Over Dozen Hydropower
Projects. Republica, May 5. (accessed on
April 29, 2017).
Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 1992. Investing Social Categories
Through Place: Social Representations and Development
in Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34
(03): 491-513.
------. 1993. Unintended Consequences: The Ideological
Impact of Development in Nepal. South Asia Bulletin
13 (1&2): 45-58.
Pokhrel, Rajan. 2015. At Least 56 Settlements to be
Relocated. The Himalayan Times, June 30. (accessed on April 29, 2017).
Rai, Om Astha. 2015. Back to the Dark Age. Nepali Times...”
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“...Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-
Kerjan. 2015. From Nepal Quake, Lessons for the U.S.
Philadelphia Inquirer, April 27. (accessed on
April 29, 2017).
World Bank. 1964. The Economy of Nepal. Washington DC:
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/
International Development Association.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes: an Invitation to
Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
------. 2002. The Elephant in the Room: Notes on the
Social Organization of Denial. In Culture in Mind: Toward a
Sociology of Culture and Cognition, edited by Karen Cerulo,
21-27. New York and London: Routledge.
HIMALAYA Volume37,Number2 25...”
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