Women in 'New Nepal'

Women in 'New Nepal'
Author: Seika Sato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000859061

This book brings rarely voiced lives and experiences of women in Nepal to light and combines rich ethnography with discourse analysis. Multifaceted and critical, the volume situates its narrative in the profoundly transformative period after the turn of the century when ‘New Nepal’ was rising on the horizon and sheds light on Nepali women’s experiences in multiple sites, crossing class and ethnic lines. It is based on extensive fieldwork among women domestic workers, construction workers, street vendors, women from the indigenous community of Hyolmo, and others. Mainly through an ethnographic approach, the author explores Nepali women’s experiences on the ground, mostly situated in classed, ethnic, or other socio-cultural peripheries in Nepali social landscape. Through the unusually intimate narrative on these women from the global south, who are still prone to be cast into a deeply colonial, simplistic image of ‘victimized women’, readers will get a nuanced perspective of the multidimensional diversity among these women as well as a sense of kinship with oneself. The book will be invaluable for researchers and students of gender studies, global south studies, development studies, cultural anthropology/ethnography, Nepal studies, and feminist geography. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, policymakers, and those with an interest in global gender issues.

Patrons of Women

Patrons of Women
Author: Esther Hertzog
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2011-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1845459857

Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

"If Each Comes Halfway"

Author: Kathryn S. March
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501728458

For twenty-five years, Kathryn S. March has collected the life stories of the women of a Buddhist Tamang farming community in Nepal. In If Each Comes Halfway, she shows the process by which she and Tamang women reached across their cultural differences to find common ground. March allows the women's own words to paint a vivid portrait of their highland home. Because Tamang women frequently told their stories by singing poetic songs in the middle of their conversations with March, each book includes a CD of traditional songs not recorded elsewhere. Striking photographs of the Tamang people accent the book's written accounts and the CD's musical examples. In conversation and song, the Tamang open their sem—their "hearts-and-minds"—as they address a broad range of topics: life in extended households, women's property issues, wage employment and out-migration, sexism, and troubled relations with other ethnic groups. Young women reflect on uncertainties. Middle-aged women discuss obligations. Older women speak poignantly, and bluntly, about weariness and waiting to die. The goal of March's approach to ethnography is to place Tamang women in control of how their stories are told and allow an unusually intimate glimpse into their world.

Beyond the Next Village

Beyond the Next Village
Author: Mary Anne Mercer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-05-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1647423449

Beyond the Next Village is Mary Anne Mercer’s memoir of discovery, growth, and awakening in 1978 Nepal, which was then a mysterious country to most of the world. After arriving in Nepal, Mercer, an American nurse, spent a year traveling on foot—often in flip-flops—with a Nepali health team, providing immunizations and clinical care in each village they visited. Communicating in a newly acquired language, she was often called upon to provide the only modern medicine available to the people she and her team were serving. Over time, she learned to recognize and respect the prominence of their cultural beliefs about health and illness. Encounters with life-threatening conditions such as severe malnutrition and ectopic pregnancy gave her an enlightening view of both the limitations and power of modern health care; immersed in villagers’ lives and those of her own team, she realized she was living in not just another country, but another time. This unique story of the joys and perils of one woman’s journey in the shadow of the Himalayas, Beyond the Next Village opens a window into a world where the spirits were as real as the trees, the birds, or the rain—and healing could be as much magic as medicine.

Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal

Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal
Author: Punam Yadav
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317353900

The concept of social transformation has been increasingly used to study significant political, socio-economic and cultural changes affected by individuals and groups. This book uses a novel approach from the gender perspective and from bottom up to analyse social transformation in Nepal, a country with a complex traditional structure of caste, class, ethnicity, religion and regional locality and the experience of the ten-year of People’s War (1996-2006). Through extensive interviews with women in post-conflict Nepal, this book analyses the intended and unintended impacts of conflict and traces the transformations in women’s understandings of themselves and their positions in public life. It raises important questions for the international community about the inevitable victimization of women during mass violence, but it also identifies positive impacts of armed conflict. The book also discusses how the Maoist insurgency had empowering effects on women. The first study to provide empirical evidence on the relationship between armed conflict and social transformation from gender’s perspectives, this book is a major contribution to the field of transitional justice and peacebuilding in post-armed-conflict Nepal. It is of interest to academics researching South Asia, Gender, Peace and Conflict Studies and Development Studies.

Heir to a Silent Song

Heir to a Silent Song
Author: Barbara Nimri Aziz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2001
Genre: Women
ISBN:

On the lives and works of Yogamāyā, 1860-1941 and Durga Devi, 1918-1973, women social reformers from Nepal.

Planning Families in Nepal

Planning Families in Nepal
Author: Jan Brunson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016-03-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0813578647

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. Promoting a two-child norm, global family planning programs have disseminated the slogan, “A small family is a happy family,” throughout the global South. Jan Brunson examines how two generations of Hindu Nepali women negotiate this global message of a two-child family and a more local need to produce a son. Brunson explains that while women did not prefer sons to daughters, they recognized that in the dominant patrilocal family system, their daughters would eventually marry and be lost to other households. As a result, despite recent increases in educational and career opportunities for daughters, mothers still hoped for a son who would bring a daughter-in-law into the family and care for his aging parents. Mothers worried about whether their modern, rebellious sons would fulfill their filial duties, but ultimately those sons demonstrated an enduring commitment to living with their aging parents. In the context of rapid social change related to national politics as well as globalization—a constant influx of new music, clothes, gadgets, and even governments—the sons viewed the multigenerational family as a refuge. Throughout Planning Families in Nepal, Brunson raises important questions about the notion of “planning” when applied to family formation, arguing that reproduction is better understood as a set of local and global ideals that involve actors with desires and actions with constraints, wrought with delays, stalling, and improvisation.

The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes

The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes
Author: Barbara J. Scot
Publisher: Calyx Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"Barbara Scot gives us the Nepal she saw, touched, visited with a feminist's respect for difference. Hers is a tale of sharing, and we are privileged to see through her eyes, understand through her exquisite sensibility."-Margaret Randall "This provocative book deserves attention from anyone interested in cross-cultural communication and the complex issues of development work."- Yoga Journal "Scot's year in Nepal was extraordinary. What she discovered about herself, about Nepal and the Nepalis themselves is beautifully told."- Seattle Times "While Scot never sugarcoats the hardships, she fulfills two of the travel writer's most important tasks: evoking a deep sense of place and instilling in readers a desire to go there."- Booklist The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes is a moving account of a Western woman's transformative sojourn in Nepal. Barbara Scot demonstrates insight into cultural difference while confronting the complex issues of development work and the status of women in Nepal. In vivid descriptions of mountain climbs, moving stories of the Nepalis and the retelling of her personal memories, Scot challenges readers with women's global struggles while nurturing a deep empathy and respect for the Nepali people. Scot updates her travels in this revised edition. Barbara J. Scot is an avid climber, hiker and naturalist. She is the author of Prairie Reunion (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), which received a New York Times Notable Book citation, and The Stations of Still Creek (Sierra Club Books). She lives on a houseboat near Portland, Oregon.

Invitations to Love

Invitations to Love
Author: Laura M. Ahearn
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780472067848

A discussion of the implications of the emergence of love-letter correspondences for social relations in Nepal

Rethinking New Womanhood

Rethinking New Womanhood
Author: Nazia Hussein
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319679007

Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a ‘new’ wave of gender research from South Asia that resonates with feminist debates around the world. The volume conceptualises ‘new womanhood’ as a complex, heterogeneous and intersectional identity. By deconstructing classification systems and highlighting women’s everyday ongoing negotiations with boundaries of social categories, the book reconfigures the concept of ‘new woman’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the intersection of gender, class, culture, sexuality and religion in South Asia. The collection maps new sites and expressions on women and gender studies around nationhood, women’s rights, transnational feminist solidarity, ‘new girlhoods ’, aesthetic and sexualised labour, respectability and ‘modernity’, LGBT discourses, domestic violence and ‘new’ feminisms. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, sociology, education, media and cultural studies, literature, anthropology, history, development studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.