Description

Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-in-history/history-in-persons, focusing on how individuals and groups as agents both fashion and are fashioned by social, political, and cultural discourses and practices. In this approach, power, agency, and history are made explicit as individuals and groups work to constitute themselves in relation to others and within and against sociopolitical and historical contexts.

Contributors to this volume extend this emphasis, drawing upon their ethnographic research in Nepal to examine closely how selves, identities, and experience are produced in dialogical relationships through time in a multi-ethic nation-state and within a discourse of nationalism. The diversity of peoples, recent political transformations, and nation-building efforts make Nepal an especially rich locale to examine people's struggles to define and position themselves. But the authors move beyond geographical boundaries to more theoretical terrain to problematicize the ways in which people recreate or contest certain identities and positions. Various authors explore how people-positioned by gender, ethnicity, and locale-use cultural genres to produce aspects of identities and experiences; they examine how subjectivities, agencies and cultural worlds co-develop and are shaped through engagement with cultural forms; and they portray the appropriation of multiple voices for self and group formation. As such, this collection offers a richly textured and complex accounting of the mutual constitution of selves and society.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Note on Transcription
Chapter 2 Preface
Part 3 Introduction
Chapter 4 Selves in Time and Place: An Introduction
Part 5 Part I. Personal Trajectories
Chapter 6 Fate, Domestic Authority, and Women's Wills
Chapter 7 Narrative Subversions or Hierarchy
Chapter 8 Contested Selves, Contested Femininities: Selves and Society in Process
Chapter 9 Narrative Constructions of Madness in a Hindu Village in Nepal
Part 10 Part II. Cultural Productions of Identity
Chapter 11 Consumer Culture and Identities in Kathmandu: "Playing with Your Brain"
Chapter 12 Situating Persons: Honor and Identity in Nepal
Chapter 13 Tibetan Identity Layers in the Nepal Himalayas
Chapter 14 Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity and Marriage in a Hod Village
Chapter 15 Engendered Bodies, Embodied Genders
Part 16 Part III. Politicized Selves
Chapter 17 The Case of the Disappearing Shamans, or No Individualism, No Relationalism
Chapter 18 Imagined Sisters: The Ambiguities of Women's Poetics and Collective Actions
Chapter 19 Growing Up Newar Buddhist: Chittadhar Hridaya's Jhi Maca and Its Context
Part 20 Afterword
Chapter 21 Selves in Motion
Chapter 22 Index

Product details

Published Jul 02 1998
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 352
ISBN 9780847685981
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Dimensions 234 x 156 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Debra Skinner

Anthology Editor

Alfred Pach III

Anthology Editor

Dorothy Holland

Contributor

Mary Des Chene

Contributor

Todd Lewis

Contributor

Robert I. Levy

Contributor

Mark Liechty

Contributor

Stan Mumford

Contributor

Alfred Pach III

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