Your search within this document for 'Nepal' resulted in eleven matching pages.
1 Page 1

“...the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 37 | Number 2 Article 10 December 2017 The Maintenance ofVirtue Over Time: Notes on Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal Andrew W Haxby University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, druhaxby@umich.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Haxby, Andrew W. (2017) "The Maintenance ofVirtue Over Time: Notes on Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal," HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 37 : No. 2, Article 10. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/10 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Macalester College This Perspectives is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons(2)Macalester College at DigitalCommons(2)Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies...”
2 Page 2

“...The Maintenance ofVirtue Over Time: Notes on Changing Household Lives in Post-Disaster Nepal Acknowledgements 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. This perspectives is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol37/iss2/10...”
3 Page 3

“...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...”
4 Page 4

“...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 transactions, and debt in Kathmandu...”
5 Page 5

“...has shown how urban household consumption practices in Kathmandu are aimed towards the moral goal of preserving honor (Liechty 2003). Sherry Ortner built her description of fraternal relationships around internal moral tensions within Sherpa culture (Ortner 1989). Given this wealth of research, it might seem odd for me to use the theories of Meyer Fortes, a British anthropologist who worked primarily in West Africa, to explore kinship in post-earthquake Nepal. However, I believe Fortes’ work, in combination with my reading of the Nepal-based litera- ture, can add to this discussion. Specifically, Fortes’ work helps me to focus on the temporal aspects of kinship and household management, including the way it implicitly views kinship as the maintenance of virtue over time. Fortes’ most famous contribution to anthropology was his reimagining of households as a temporal process, what he described as the developmental cycle of the domestic group (Fortes 1958). In most Nepali ethnic groups, includ-...”
6 Page 6

“...wealthy and generous with their loans, but that wasn’t enough to cover his reconstruction, which he estimated would cost four million rupees. Sanjay knew he would need to take out his first bank loan, but he was deeply apprehensive at the idea, and not just because of his household situation. Retail bank loans in Nepal require a large amount of collateral, by far the most common form of which is land.1 Land and housing in Nepal are jointly owned such that every spouse and offspring still considered part of the natal home (i.e. sons and unmarried daughters) has a legal right to an equal share of the family’s estate (in conjunction with efforts to promulgate a new constitu- tion for Nepal, the legal rights of married women to their natal family’s property is currently ambiguous; however, all lawyers I interviewed said that current court practice does not grant such rights, and thus it would be extremely difficult for a married woman to make a claim if her natal family opposed it.). In order to...”
7 Page 7

“...own ‘house,’ Sanjay said, while also keeping the household legally and geo- graphically unified. Of course, this arrangement would mean that Sanjay’s brother would be responsible for his share of whatever bank loan they took out, a responsibility the brother was not willing to take on. Instead, Sanjay’s brother asked that he be legally separated from the house- hold so that he could receive his legally entitled share of the family estate. What does it mean to legally separate a family estate in Nepal? As shown above, the legal unity of a household is only one of a number of factors that indicate house- hold togetherness and amity. Yet, especially in urban Kathmandu, it is an important one, in part because legal separation is often contentious. Indeed, Sanjay was not misguided when he expressed to me his worry that his conflict with his brother might spiral into a court case, as such cases are common. In her ethnography on urban personhood, anthropolo- gist Laura Kunreuther notes that, though...”
8 Page 8

“...materials offered to build a house only for himself, his wife and children. This forced Lhakpa to move his parents to a rented room in Kathmandu. I never had the chance to meet Lhakpa’s parents. However, I did spend time talking with Lhakpa as well as his younger uncle, and the children of his elder paternal uncle, all of whom still live in this village. Lhakpa’s younger uncle had been living outside of Nepal for almost 20 years, both in India and in Bhutan. Then, the year before the earthquake, his wife had contracted tuberculosis, and he had found her a sanatorium in Kathmandu that would treat her for 20 months at minimal expense. Needing to be close to his wife, and having no money to afford a room in Kathmandu, he and his family had returned to their village only a few months before the earthquake struck, moving into the same house Lhakpa’s father had been living in. The house had been built seventeen years earlier while this younger uncle had been abroad. It was built in three sections...”
9 Page 9

“...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 is also true, meaning the material artifact can also anchor the memory on which a claim is made. So, it was with the house. Though Lhakpa’s parents’ claim was arguably...”
10 Page 11

“...to which the successful engagement of bureaucracy remains dependent on the trust and cooperation between kin. In this light, Sapana’s bitterness to her relations is understandable. Conclusion Underlying this essay is the 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...”
11 Page 12

“...in Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liechty, Mark. 2002. Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. March, Kathryn. 1983. Weaving, Writing and Gender. Man 18(4): 729-744. ------. 1998. Engendered Bodies, Embodied Genders. In Selves in Time and Place: Identities, Experience, and History in Nepal, edited by Debra Skinner, Alfred Pach III, and Dorothy Holland, 219-236. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ortner, Sherry. 1989. High Religion: a Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. 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...”