Identity papers, lamas’ books, and the magical essays of Lenin: literacies of desire and exclusion in Nepal

Abstract

Attempting to harness the powers of literacy to improve his standing and opportunities in rapidly developing Nepal, Dil Bahadur Tamang, an ambitious uneducated man of the hill village of Charigaon, instead encounters a most unexpected book of power and magic. This article tells the story of his encounter and of my own attempts to understand it. What is it about a book of essays by Lenin that makes it magic? Village resources for interpreting the significance of written materials include secular, Nepali-language schooling with its contexts of development, bureaucracy and state power; Tibetan Buddhist textuality with its ritual and lamaic authority; and the seemingly effortless literacy of foreigners -as well as a variety of less obviously related domains such as street magic, love curses and possession. In the end, however, the major power that literacy carries into Dil Bahadur's life is its power to exclude him.

‘She read me a prayer and I read it back to her’: Gagauz Women, Miraculous Literacy and the Dreaming of Charms

“…The close link between magical, religious and healing power and the written word has been highlighted by anthropologists in diverse cultural contexts (Bloch 1998;Jacobson 2012;Tambiah 1968). In the Gagauz culture, this relationship has a particular resonance as the practice of charming and the activity of reading are semantically linked through the verb okumaa, which means both to read and to charm (Çobotar and Dron 2002).…”