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“...Time: Notes on
Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal
Andrew Haxby
Although it is banal to say the series of
earthquakes that hit Nepal in Spring 2015 will
radically change the country, what this change
will consist of still remains undetermined.
As many earthquake victims learn to make
do in broken houses, tents, or corrugated tin
structures, post-earthquake Nepal seems held
within a frustrating stasis, wherein temporary
hardship is often impossible to distinguish from
lasting consequence. Yet this sense of stasis
is in part misleading. While the act of building
remains slow, households who lost their homes
have been scramblingto rethink their financial
futures in order to afford reconstruction.
In doing so, many earthquake victims have
begun to enact changes in their households,
accelerating divisions and unearthing tensions
that had hitherto been allowed to lie dormant.
Revitalizing Meyer Fortes' classic discussions
of amity and the development cycle, I introduce
the stories of...”
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“...highlighting different aspects of the polit-
ical economy with which earthquake victims have had to
contend. In the first story, two Newar brothers, who were
already estranged before the earthquake, separate their
family estate instead of sharing the financial responsibility
of reconstructing their natal house. In the second story, a
young Tamang man’s parents are evicted from his uncle’s
land where they’ve been living for seventeen years so that
the uncle can rebuild a house for his nuclear family. In the
third story, a teenage daughter decides to move into her
uncle’s house rather than into a shelter with her mid-
dle-aged mother, thus leaving her mother scrambling
to find financial capital in order to rebuild and reunite
her family.
I have selected these three stories for the way they draw
attention to how household members manage kin social-
ity and finance through the careful management of time,
and how the earthquake has interrupted this process.
I revisit Meyer Fortes’ theorizations...”
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“...termed “the axiom of
amity” (1969: 219-249). For Fortes, this sense of amity was
the central virtue by which kin conducted their sociality.
Though ultimately too abstract and too rooted in Western
ideas of biological kinship to carry the theoretical weight
Fortes had intended (Yanagisako 1979), the notion that
interactions between kin should be rooted in fiduciary
cooperation and positive sentiment remains compelling.
Indeed, if there was a consistent theme throughout all my
interactions with earthquake victims, it was how a moral
desire to express and embody a trusting, generous, and
loving nature towards one’s kin—particularly those with
whom one lived and ate—deeply influenced decision-mak-
ing during reconstruction.
Numerous ethnographies of Nepal have stressed the
moral nature of kinship. Both Kathryn March and David
Holmberg frame Tamang kinship within the moral-
ity of exchange between brothers and sisters, with
sisters/wives embodying the intermediacy between
patricians (Holmberg 1989;...”
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“...Case 1: Rebuilding Fraternity
Sanjay is an upper caste Newar man, middle-aged and
father of one. Before the earthquake, Sanjay lived in a
four-story house with his wife, his teenage daughter, his
mother, and his father. The house was over one hundred
years old and represented traditional Newari architecture:
low-ceilinged rooms with dark wooden beams running
across the top, unfired ‘raw’ brick walls, carved wooden
windows and a steep wooden staircase zigzagging up the
house’s center to the top floor where the kitchen was
located. Like many houses in Patan, this one had survived
Nepal’s last large earthquake in 1934. Now, however, the
front wall was beginning to separate from the house, and
large cracks had formed throughout the upper floors.
When I met Sanjay, he was living across the street from
this house in a three-room rental with his wife, daughter,
and aging parents, paying NRs.10,000 a month while trying
to figure out the next step.
His finances were limited. He had been making silver...”
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“...Sanjay, the financial pressures of reconstruc-
tion instigated a moment of reckoning between himself
and his brother regarding their mutual amity. In this way,
the earthquake managed to accelerate household pro-
cesses that were already in the midst of happening—not
so much rerouting the paths of household development as
pushing them faster into the future. This has been quite
common since the earthquake. Yet this acceleration of
household development was not always because of the
financial pressures that the earthquake wrought. In some
cases, the material destruction of the house itself was
enough to alter the unity of the household, as we will see
in Case 2.
Case 2: Imprinting Memory
Lhakpa was a young man in his early thirties, unmarried
and living in a rented room in a roadside town in Rasuwa.
At the time of the earthquake his parents were living in
a small village across the river, where the reconstruc-
tion project to which I alluded in the Introduction of this
article was taking place...”
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“...Indeed, everyone I talked with in this commu-
nity took seriously the fact that Lhakpa’s uncle owned
this land, saying that it was his to use however he wanted.
Still, in the period between when Lhakpa’s uncle moved
home and when the earthquake struck, no discussion
was had over when Lhakpa’s parents might have to leave.
Lhakpa and his elder brother—who had been working in
the Middle East—had bought land behind his uncle’s house
in order to build a small house for themselves and their
parents. However, the land hadn’t been transferred into
their names, nor had they begun saving for construction.
Indeed, according to both Lhakpa and his uncle, if the
earthquake had not happened, Lhakpa’s parents would not
have had to move to Kathmandu.
Why did the earthquake change this living arrangement
so dramatically? Likewise, why did Lhakpa so willing
acquiesce to his parents’ eviction? Future arrangements
notwithstanding, it was unclear to me why Lhakpa’s
parents couldn’t be invited to live with Lhakpa’s...”
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“...fell,
everyone quickly pivoted to seeing Lhakpa’s uncle’s claim
as superior, including Lhakpa himself.
For Lhakpa’s parents, then, the house’s materiality acted as
a management technique for the morality of past claims,
organizing them into a kind of ad hoc hierarchy. However,
the house is not just past-oriented; it can do the same
work in managing the future of a household as well. In
particular, its role as a household’s central asset makes it a
fundamental part its financial plans. When the earthquake
transformed the house into a liability, it shuffled the hier-
archy of assets in the imagination of household members,
creating new relationships between the parts of the family
estate and its members. In Case 3,1 show how this shuffling
has created an almost impossible financial dilemma for
one woman, putting the reconstitution of her household’s
amity beyond reach for the foreseeable future.
Case 3: Attempting to Sell
Sapana is a middle-aged Newar woman living in Patan,
married with one teenage...”
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“...(They haven’t given us anything). According
to both her and her neighbors who were also living in this
temporary shelter, her relationship with her husband had
been strained from before the earthquake, with him often
spending long periods in Dholaka despite no immediate
need to do so. Indeed, the ‘us’ in the above quote seemed to
refer to her and her daughter only.
Even more than Sanjay and Lhakpa, Sapana’s finances
were extremely limited. She worked at a small phone shop,
though not her own, earning NRs 5-6,000 a month, while
her husband did not seem to contribute any financial help
to her household. Several years before the earthquake she
had a job working as a seamstress for a local cooperative,
but had to quit that job when her mother became sick with
cancer. Her mother died before the earthquake, by which
point Sapana’s finances were depleted. Now she had only
NRs 5,000 in an account at a cooperative. Her daughter had
a volunteer job at an NGO dedicated to women’s economic
and social...”
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“...nagging question of what
has changed since the earthquake, and what historical
shift has the earthquake truly brought about. There is, of
course, no clear answer to this question, as we—unbeliev-
ably—are still within the early times of reconstruction.
When I left, the mood in Nepal was deeply cynical; most
people I talked to believed that corrupt government forces
had hijacked reconstruction. Indeed, part of my motivation
to focus this paper on the question of time stemmed from
how much waiting has happened since the earthquake. Yet
this might just be how long reconstruction takes. Nepal’s
National Reconstruction Authority has set its goal at five
years, and according to a World Bank official in charge
of its reconstruction effort, most rebuilding happens in
the second and third year after the earthquake. Either
way, those wanting to know what has changed should be
prepared for more waiting. In a comparable case, after the
Gujarat earthquake in 2001 many of the larger societal and
economic...”
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Page 12
“...Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pradhan, Rajendra. 2007. (Rule of) Law, Justice, and the
Legal Process: A Case Study of a Land Dispute in Nepal.
Studies in Nepali History and Society 12(2): 283-320.
Parish, Steven M. 1994. Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City:
an Exploration of Mind, Emotion, And Self. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Sakya, Anil. 2000. Newar Marriage and Kinship in
Kathmandu, Nepal. PhD diss., Brunel University.
Simpson, Edward. 2013. The Political Biography of an
Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia In Gujurat, India. London:
Hurst & Company.
Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property
and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Yanagisako, Sylvia. 1979. Family and Household: a Review
of the Anthropological Literature on Domestic Groups.
Annual Review of Anthropology 8:161-205.
74 HIMALAYA Fall2017...”
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