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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 5
“...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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Page 6
“...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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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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Page 10
“...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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Page 11
“...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...”
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