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Page 3
“...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 ownership
practices - a reckoning that has affected
how household members interact, often in
unpredictable ways.
Keywords:...”
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Page 4
“...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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Page 7
“...to pay his brother off. The
last time we talked, Sanjay said he would start building in
December 2017.
In the case of 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...”
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