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“...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: kinship, informal economy, land tenure, disaster
research, economic anthropology.
HIMALAYA Volume37,Number2 65...”
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“...daughter decides to move into her
uncle’s house rather than into a shelter with her mid-
dle-aged mother, thus leaving her mother scrambling
to find financial capital in order to rebuild and reunite
her family.
I have selected these three stories for the way they draw
attention to how household members manage kin social-
ity and finance through the careful management of time,
and how the earthquake has interrupted this process.
I revisit Meyer Fortes’ theorizations of amity, time and
household development to argue that household recon-
struction should be seen as a moral project, an attempt to
actualize the virtues of kinship by engaging with economic
systems. My research was based in Kathmandu and a town
in Rasuwa with close economic ties to the capital - both
places where these household economic systems are often
formalized. Thus, I argue that these stories can be viewed
as attempts by their protagonists to embed kinship virtues
within the rationalized worlds of state and private bureau-...”
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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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