南アジア・インド洋世界研究会

South Asia and Indian Ocean Study Group, along with KINDAS Seminar, KINDAS Group 2, and Nepal Academic Network (NAN), are pleased to announce the following seminar.
All are welcome!

Date and Time: December 6th, Friday 13:00-16:00
Venue: Kyoto University, Yoshida Main Campus, Research Building #2,4th Floor, AA447
    Map: http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/access/campus/map6r_y.htm
     (No.34 on the map)

1. "Conservation, Poverty and Cultural Survival:　The Experiences of Indigenous Rana Tharus community in Far-western Nepal"

    Christie Lai Ming LAM, Assistant Professor, Osaka University

2. "Losing Faith? The Origins and Consequences of Development Dysfunction in Nepal: American aid to education, 1953-1959"

    Jeremy Rappleye, Hakubi Scholar, Kyoto University

Contact: Tatsuro Fujikura fujikura[at]asafas.kyoto-u.ac.jp

1. Conservation, Poverty and Cultural Survival: The Experiences of Indigenous Rana Tharus community in Far-western Nepal by Christie Lai Ming LAM, Cultural Anthropologist Assistant Professor, Osaka University

In the last few decades conservationists, policy makers, and social scientists have become increasingly interested in studying the human effects of biodiversity conservation. These concerns have driven new conservation initiatives in developing countries since the 1990s, such as community-Based Management, Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, compensation-based resettlement programs and recent Community Conserved Areas. These initiatives aim to increase the benefits for the local communities through the establishment of Protected Areas (PAs). While involuntary resettlement remains a common strategy to preserve the natural environment, it is still believed that these resettlement programs focusing on economic compensation can well mitigate livelihood losses. This explains the rapid increase of PAs worldwide particularly in developing countries.

In this presentation, using my ethnographic study of a displaced indigenous community known as Rana Tharus in far-western Nepal, their experiences provide us two insights on the relationships between conservation, poverty and cultural survival. Firstly, I argue that displaced Ranas suffered from landlessness, inadequate agricultural production and food insecurity. This led only to further impoverishment. Moreover, displacement also led to serious household partitions. This severely damaged the patrilineal kinship relationships that had traditionally been a major source of informal security for Rana households, both economically and socially.
Secondly, I argue that policy-makers’ belief that the social impacts of dislocation can be properly mitigated by economic-focused resettlement programmmes alone is a myth. They have ignored the close relationship between place, social networks, livelihoods and cultural practices.

To conclude, Ranas’ experiences demonstrate that PA is not only a highly ecologically valued place but it is also a rich site of economic production and social relations. These complex social networks played a critical role in maintain Rana livelihoods and cultural practices which policy makers should not neglect. The study also indicates that if the displacement is truly unavoidable for conserving biodiversity, more comprehensive rehabilitation polices are needed.

2. Losing Faith? The Origins and Consequences of Development Dysfunction in Nepal: American aid to education, 1953-1959 by Jeremy Rappleye

This presentation presents initial reflections on a much larger project seeking to understand the origins of ‘development’ in Nepal in the 1950s. It shows the logic, assumptions, and tensions behind US development assistance, focusing on the work of a team of educational ‘experts’ from the University of Oregon that arrived in 1953. Led by Hugh Wood (whose name even today remains synonymous with the work of the Nepal Educational Planning Commission) the Oregon team was initially lavishly funded and given free reign to ‘develop’ a modern education system in Nepal. However, tensions soon began to develop between the Oregon team and the United States Overseas Mission (US State Department) over the very purpose of ‘development’. By early 1958, amidst the rising temperatures of the Cold War, these tensions erupted into an open conflict within the American mission itself.
Crucially, this clash brought about a fundamental change in ‘development’, arguably producing most of the patterns of development dysfunction that continue in Nepal right up to the present. In line with other scholars who view ‘development’ as particularly Western ‘faith’ (Rist, 1997) and a once powerful, but now waning narrative myth whose ability to transform global inequalities into a temporalized historical sequence (Ferguson, 2005), the presentation closes by asking the question: to what extent has ‘faith’ in development been lost in Nepal today? What are the consequences?