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“...The Maintenance of Virtue Over 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...”
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“...Introduction
This article explores how Nepalis have worked towards
being able to afford the reconstruction of their houses
after the Nepal earthquakes in 2015. It presents the stories
of three informants, two in Kathmandu and one in Rasuwa
District. As of March 2017, when this article was com-
pleted, not one of these three informants has managed to
begin building, yet that does not mean that nothing has
happened. Rather, for all three informants, the time since
the earthquakes has been one of great activity as each has
worked with, or against, their kin, in order to make recon-
struction economically feasible. In this article, I explore
how post-disaster financial pressures have changed both
household composition and each individual’s own expe-
rience of kin and family. In doing so, I examine how the
virtues of kinship are actualized in financial practices, and
what happens when that actualization fails.
I arrived in Nepal in January 2015, prepared to research
household economies, land...”
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“...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
jewelry since he was in his late teens, but...”
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“...time, mythic time, astrological
time...these and other temporalities each with its
own rhythm and mood, wind their ways through
Yolmo days like an array of differently paced time-
pieces on show in a busy clock shop. (2003: 49)
While I agree with Desjarlais’ assessment, one must ask:
how can such a diverse array of temporalities become
organized into something coherent? Judging from the
above case, one important technique stems from how
temporalities are inscribed into material things—e.g. into
houses or into land deeds—and what moral weight these
inscriptions are given. It may seem strange that I am focus-
ing here on the land deed in a rural area of Nepal where
bureaucratic documentation is often quite weak. However,
it must be remembered that this document’s moral weight
came in part from how it indexed the moment when
Lhakpa’s uncle was given this land as part of his inheri-
tance. Without this memory to anchor the document, it
would arguably have had less impact. However, the reverse...”
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