Inventing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal

Abstract

Nepal is a predominantly rural nation: Most people live in villages and make their living as subsistence farmers. The Nepalese government, assisted by international donor agencies, administers projects directed at improving the conditions of life for these rural people. Images of villages and village life accompany the promotion of development ideals. Radio Nepal has actors playing the part of villagers in didactic skits aimed at convincing rural people that they should consult doctors for their health problems or should feed oral rehydration solution to children suffering from diarrhea. Schoolbooks contain illustrations of village scenes and talk about village life as they inform children about development programs. When development policy makers plan programs, they discuss what villagers do, how they react, and what they think. Together, these images coalesce into a typical, generic village, turning all the villages of rural Nepal into the village.

Devolution in the Woods: Community Forestry as Hybrid Neoliberalism

“…Although debates continue over what defines community forestry (see Brendler and Carey, 1998), advocates generally emphasize community access to and benefits from protected`natural' areas; local participation in all stages of conservation and management; flexibility, innovation, and voluntary compliance rather than rigid command-and-control conservation strategies; and attention to place-specific conditions and local knowledge. Prominent critical themes include skepticism about the oft-presumed homogeneity, coherence, and benevolence of`local communities', and careful investigation of their relationships to protean and strategic indigenous identities (for example, Agarwal and Gibson, 1999;Brosius et al, 1998;Klooster, 2000;Li, 1996); efforts to clarify the complex and often elided relationships between community control and benefits (Krogman and Beckley, 2002); and unpacking of the conflation and partiality of definitions of`communities of place',`communities of interest', and`communities of identity' (Brown, 2001;Dalby and Mackenzie, 1997;Duane, 1997;Pigg, 1992). Other critical accounts, intensely pragmatic and broadly positivist, focus less on such theoretical nuances and more on the almost complete absence of indicators, monitoring, and outcome assessment in community forestry efforts, raising serious questions about any claims regarding the actual results of such programs (see Dukes and Firehock, 2001;Kellert et al, 2000).…”

Generating power: debates on development around the Nepalese Arun-3 hydropower project

“…The notion of development holds a very peculiar space in Nepalese society. As Stacy Pigg (1992) has convincingly argued, the idea of the post-1960 nation-state of Nepal is inseparable from the concept of development. Bikās operates as a strong marker of difference that separates city from village, elites from poor people and the developed countries from Nepal, thereby producing a multi-fold social map that is essentializing the countryside as a place bound in tradition and ignorance.…”

ICT or I see tea? Modernity, technology and education in Nepal

“…Ironically, there is little empirical evidence to demonstrate that such training yields economic returns or improved employability. Rather, competency in ICT identifies one with a particular set of modernist values that Stacey Pigg (1992) identifies as bikaas (the Nepali word for "development"). According to Pigg, bikaas is both an "imagined national community" and a "compass point according to which socially located people orient themselves" (Pigg, 1992, p. 499).…”