Meanings of locality and notions of development in a Nepali village.

Abstract

This thesis examines how notions of development are ascribed with meanings of locality in a village in Nepal. The fieldwork was carried out in a village in Parbat district in the Western Hills of the country, among an ethnic group called the Gurungs. I discuss how the village is constructed as a place through certain practices and narratives in which it is placed in opposition to some external referents. One of these referents is the Nepali nation state and its employment of ideas of development in its effort to achieve national integration. Another set of referents is the networks of kin living in the towns or abroad and the flow of goods and images which reaches the village through these networks. The Nepali word for development, bikaas, has multiple and contextual meanings and sums up much of what is being dealt with in the text. Bikaas connects the village with national and international realities and discourses, it is an important key for understanding the Nepali link between national integration and progress, and is also conceptualised and used by the villagers in their understanding of the outside world as well as in local practices and relationships. Making use of the theoretical framework of Appadurai, I argue for an analysis of the village as a "multiplex interpretive site". This implies for an analysis of the village as constituted in a set of various but interlinked contexts. The village is constituted as a place in the intersection between several systems of communication. The chapters in the thesis deal with these different systems and the various ways in which they are related to the notions of development and the meaning of the village as a place. The flow of goods and images that reach the village through relatives in the towns as well as through labour migrants home on leave, are seen to serve a double purpose. On the one hand they reproduce local notions of the prosperity of life outside the village, on the other hand the migrants and their goods are incorporated in local systems of reciprocity and distribution and prove important in the maintenance of locality. The production and maintenance of locality is further analysed through the activities of a local institution called mothers' groups. These groups work with local development projects, but do also prove to be important in the production and reproduction of local knowledge and community. The work of these groups exemplifies how global flows, of images as well as goods, are received and interpreted locally.