Articles

• Sherry B. Ortner

  The Making and Self-Making of "The Sherpas" in Early Himalayan Mountaineering
  This article, which is part of a larger project on the Sherpas' relationship to Himalayan mountaineering across the 20th century, examines the ways in which the Sherpas in the early decades of mountaineering came to stand out from the other groups, and the ways in which the idea of "the Sherpa" came to be almost synonymous with skilled mountain portering. The answers to these questions, in turn, are tied up with theoretical issues of representation, and of the construction of identities, which I explore in the course of the discussion. My strategy is to assume that sahib representations of Sherpas always told at least partial truths. The sahibs' mistake - common to both mountaineers and anthropologists in many cases - was to essentialize and genericize, to assume that what they were seeing was true of all Sherpas, perhaps because of Sherpa "culture", or because of their innocent "pre-modern" condition. In contrast I seek to understand the differences and inequalities in Sherpa society that allow us entree into what is, in essence, the heart of the question: why did Sherpas climb at all? Why did Sherpas join in the sahibs' game, a game in which they placed themselves in both physical danger and social subordination? The answer lay in prior structures of inequality from which they sought some escape and redress. Far from being innocent pre-moderns, the Sherpas came from a complex social order in which mountaineering labor, however dangerous and "low", figured as the answer to pre-existing problems.
  pp. 1-34
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• Jagannath Adhikari and Hans-Georg Bohle

  Rural Livelihoods at Risk: Determinants of the Abilities of Nepali Hill Farmers to Cope with Food Deficiency
  Rural households in Nepal are following multiple survival strategies to cope with the growing livelihood insecurity in villages that has resulted from ongoing unsustainable economic, ecological and social development processes. Even though livelihood insecurity includes many aspects food insecurity, the focus of this article, is arguably the most fundamental. Vulnerability, in this instance, implies the exposure to the risk of not having enough food, and the lack of coping capacities. For this research done in several villages of Kaski district in central Nepal, we first hypothesized that the extent of access to resources would determine the vulnerability of households since resources like land and livestock are important for food production. Hence food self-sufficiency was taken as the proxy for access to resources in this study. But the field data collected for this study showed that food self-sufficiency alone was not a sufficient criterion to determine vulnerability to food deficits. The data hence called for an analysis of the relationship of vulnerability to different types of assets broadly defined. Our analysis shows that personal assets (health status, skill and physical power or fitness) were by far the most important factors in helping the households to cope with food deficiency. Other types of assets, although examined casually, were also found to affect food security, but their effect was much less than that of personal assets. As the effects of various determinants of vulnerability differ in extent in different areas depending on geographical location as well as political, socio-economic, and cultural conditions, a universal predictive mechanism for food shortage is difficult to build.
  pp. 35-86
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• Mark Liechty

  The Social Practice of Cinema and Video Viewing in Kathmandu
  This paper outlines the history and sociology of mass media consumption in Kathmandu. Focusing on electronic visual mass media - commercial cinema and video - the paper analyzes viewership patterns in terms of age and gender, as well as how media consumption is tied to projects of produing class dinstinction. It concludes with a discussion of middle-class media consumers' stated preference for "realistic" media products, and the role of a discourse of realism in naturalizing middle-class cultural values.
  pp. 87-126
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• Mahesh Maskey

  Jan Andolanmaa Chikitsakharu: Smritimaa Korieko Euta Andolan-katha [Medics in the People's Movement: A Movement Story Inscribed in Memory]
  Written by a participant and organiser this essay, both memoir and social history, details activities of medical professionals during the People's Movement of 1990 which overthrew the Panchayat system in Nepal. The essay takes readers from the days of preparation to provide medical care for protestors prior to the commencement of state-killings, through the responses of the medical community when faced with the unanticipated: corpses of unarmed protestors gunned down with hollow-point bullets. These included black-band protests, strategic withdrawl of services, direct appeals to the prime minister, and efforts to preserve medical evidence of state-killings. The essay provides a close-up view of the difficulties of organising across political divides and in a context of intensive state suppression of protest. Attention to the role of the Nepal Medical Association provides valuable lessons about both the difficulties and effectiveness of using professional organizations as a medium for challenging state legitimacy. Differentiation of the challenges faced by medics at the government hospital and at the university hospital also give readers insight into the ways in which the state may use its power over livelihoods to attempt to neutralize professionals as a force and the variety of responses to such challenges. Beginning with a meeting of the NMA some years after the People's Movement, the essay also urges readers to reflect on how the solidarity and social responsibility that emerges in moments of crisis can quickly be dissipated. Various documents from the medics' movement are appended.
  pp. 127-179
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• Pratyoush Onta

  A Suggestive History of the First Century of Photographic Consumption in Kathmandu
  This article is a suggestive history of photographic consumption in Kathmandu. I begin with a short section that discusses the first photographers in Kathmandu. The following sections highlight both the varieties of and meanings in photographic consumption by the residents of Kathmandu for about a century between the early 1860s and the end of the 1950s. I argue that photographic consumption up to 1910 was an exclusive prerogative of the ruling Ranas. After the establishment of local studios in Kathmandu around that time, the exclusivity of this consumption practice was broken and Kathmandu's proto-middle class began to seek photographic portraits of itself. Once cameras became portable and affordable to members of this middle class in the 1920s, photography gradually became a part of the self-representing practices of this class. This practice began to assume normalizing proportions after the end of the Rana regime in the early 1950s.
  pp. 181-212
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