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“...Revitalizing Meyer Fortes' classic discussions
of amity and the development cycle, I introduce
the stories of three informants who attempt to
maintain the virtues of kinship in spite of the
financial pressures they bear. I also explore how
their actions reflect a reckoning between legal
ownership and everyday household ownership
practices - a reckoning that has affected
how household members interact, often in
unpredictable ways.
Keywords: kinship, informal economy, land tenure, disaster
research, economic anthropology.
HIMALAYA Volume37,Number2 65...”
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“...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 of amity, time and
household development to argue that household recon-
struction should be seen as a moral project, an attempt to
actualize the virtues of kinship by engaging with economic
systems. My research was based in Kathmandu and a town
in Rasuwa with close economic ties to the capital - both
places where these household economic systems are often
formalized. Thus, I argue that these stories can be viewed
as attempts by their protagonists to embed kinship virtues
within the rationalized worlds of state and private bureau-
cracy. I conclude by questioning how these attempts might
be changing our existing understandings of kinship in
post-earthquake Nepal.
Amity and Time
To what ends do households plan their financial futures?
What are they hoping...”
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“...of factors and events outside of
what is generally thought of as the household’s physical
interior. In urban areas, such as Kathmandu, and even in
the town in Rasuwa I frequented, these other factors can
include tuition fees for private or public schools, land
purchases within a chaotic market, loan payments, hosting
regular feasts for extended kin, and remittances sent from
family members working abroad. All these events work
along regular or semi-regular timeframes, each constitut-
ing an economic cycle of its own that must be brought
into sync.
From this perspective, the earthquake can be viewed as a
massive interruption to the temporalities that households
must manage. Given that the house is often the central
asset of a Nepali family as well as the spatial nexus for its
organization and sociality, its destruction has created a
cascading effect as household members struggle to reor-
ganize their lives in order to rebuild. Practically speaking,
this has meant taking out bank loans, paying...”
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“...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 empowerment, volunteering as a teacher in
rural areas south of the city. The daughter was given a
stipend of NRs 8,000 each year, though more importantly
the NGO had promised to cover her expenses should she
decided to study in North America. However, Sapana was
unable to cover the remaining expenses, and so her daugh-
ter was not able to take advantage of this opportunity.
By Sapana’s own calculation, reconstruction would cost
her over NRs 2,500,000—far more than she could afford...”
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“...case of
Sapana, however, no such tipping has occurred. Rather,
despite having won her case, and despite having the land
deed to her name, she remains unable to exercise her legal
right in regards to her property, due primarily to the local-
ized actions of her relatives.
Local actors’ ability to thwart legal ruling—even in
Kathmandu—has been well established (e.g. Pradhan 2007).
It is interesting, however, that this assertion of localized
authority should occur as part of a failure of household
economic planning. Part of the shift in favor of bureau-
cratic authority has been due to the necessity to engage
bureaucratic processes and their contingent temporalities
in order to create a coherent financial future. In the case
of Sapana, this has meant capitalizing on her legal right
to dispose of her land in the present. Her failure to do
so—or one could say her opponents’ continuing success in
stopping her—reflects the extent to which the successful
engagement of bureaucracy remains dependent...”
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“...Andrew Haxby is a PhD Candidate in the anthropology
department at the University of Michigan. He is a past
Fulbright scholar to Kathmandu, and holds an MFA in creative
writing from the New School. His area of interests include:
economic anthropology, debt, shamanism, Christianity,
semiotics and ethics.
The author thanks the University of Michigan, the Wenner Gren
Foundation, and the National Science Foundation for their support,
without which this research would not have been possible. The
author also thanks his advisors, Tom Fricke, Stuart Kirsch, and
Matthew Hull, for their guidance on this project and on this article.
Endnotes
1. Both gold and stocks can also be used as collateral,
though few people own enough of either to collateralize
large loans. For land, according to government regulation
a borrower can receive loans no larger than 60-66% of the
collateral’s fair market value.
2. See (Desjarlais 2016: 7-16) for full discussion of the term
‘fashioning.’
3. There are close ties between...”
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