Your search within this document for 'Reconstruction' resulted in seven matching pages.
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“...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 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...”
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“...results of this survey, I selected 25 households to re-interview. From that smaller cohort, I selected 10 households to interview repeatedly over the course of the upcoming year. I also conducted interviews with local government officers and higher ranking officials involved with the reconstruction effort, researched government surveys and relief money distributions in Patan, and conducted open-ended, infor- mal ethnographic participant-observation with residents in Patan whose houses had been damaged or destroyed. In addition to the Patan-based work, between January and October 2016,1 made frequent trips up to a town in Rasuwa where a local young Tamang man, currently living in Kathmandu, was leading a reconstruction effort funded by European Private Citizens. In Rasuwa, I conducted regular interviews with members of the 22 households whose homes were being rebuilt, attended village meetings and spent time at the construction sites. All my research was conducted in Nepali, though in Patan I...”
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“...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; March 1998). Steven M. Parish has explored how Newar kinship constitutes interwoven systems of moral obligation, sentimentality and cultur- ally specific theories of shared substance (Parish 1994). Laura Kunreuther...”
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“...margins, it did give the family a valuable credit stream. As such, he could ‘borrow’ from his wholesalers by taking home both their profit and his own. However, such informal loans were limited to no more than NRs. 200,000 (roughly $2,000 USD) at any given time. The family helped run the store, and his wife also did some household sewing jobs for extra cash. Beyond the shop, his maternal cousins on his mother’s side were 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...”
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“...exactly was Sanjay’s brother’s responsibility to the house. For his part, Sanjay believed his brother had a respon- sibility to help rebuild, stating that since Sanjay and his father had saved to buy this house over twenty years ago, it was only fair that Sanjay’s brother, now an adult, should contribute to its reconstruction. Consequently, Sanjay proposed to his brother that they should work together to rebuild, constructing the house as two vertically arranged flats, one for Sanjay, his wife, his daughter and their parents and one for Sanjay’s brother’s nuclear family. Each apartment would have its own kitchen, but they would share the same stairway. Such an arrangement would have honored his brother’s desire for his 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...”
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“...e. 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. Even though her plot was in the city, it was not near a major road, meaning that a bank would hesitate to take it as collateral. She felt she was unable to afford the pay- ments anyway. Local cooperatives would take such land as collateral, but they offered extremely high interest rates, which were roughly 16% around Patan. However, Sapana had inherited another piece of land from her natal family, roughly 445 square feet west...”
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“...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 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...”