Dear all,

I've got lots of exciting stories to send you from the field, so I'm going to break them up and post them over the next few days, including the story explaining why I've returned to Kathmandu so early. I'm sorry that it's been so long since I've posted, emailed, ect, but I have absolutely no internet access in the field, so I hope you'll all forgive me.

For me, the most exciting thing from the field was the amazing work I was able to get done. While I've been laboring away in Kathmandu as diligently as I can, I easily accomplished just as much work in one day in the field as I would have in a whole month in Kathmandu. Of course, that's largely because my timing was just right for this trip. I arrived shortly after a wedding which the whole village was still buzzing about and several women were just begin to weave new bonas (the traditional womens' garment of the Dhimals, the community that I work with) to replace those they'd given as gifts. So while I haven't gotten any hands on experience to date, I was able to observe all but one minor step of the weaving process and while there's still a lot of deeper digging to be done, the technical aspects of my project are coming along much more quickly than I had expected. Which means, I'm one happy anthropologist!!

While I spent a good deal of time in the field, most of the work was concentrated in a short two day period where I was able to sit with one woman for most of the process. To my delight, even though weaving is a long and labor intensive process that largely can be done by a single woman, it seems to provide a good excuse to gossip and many men and women came to visit us at the loom and chat. I can tell already these sessions at the loom are going to teach me about a lot more than just the technicalities of weaving, and I'm very excited to spend more time sitting with the women in several of the communities and waiting to see what else I can learn.

I'm going to post a picture or two of the weaving process in the slideshow, and I'll post again soon about some of the more fun and interesting things about my time in the field, but now it's getting late! I love and miss you all and I hope you all had wonderful holidays!



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My Very Happy Birthday

Dec 16th

Dear All,

Right now, I’m writing to you from the airport in Kathmandu. Today, I’m heading back to the field where I will be staying for a few weeks. I’m so excited, but I’m also terribly nervous, as this is my first solo flight. That’s right, I’m going all the way to the field and staying there without my trusted companion Dai. Of course, everything has been arranged so that the trip will be as easy as possible and people are meeting me each step of the way. Still without Dai, it’s a totally different experience. And though I’m very nervous, the amazing day I had yesterday is carrying me through nicely. Which brings me to why I’m writing today. I wanted to thank you all for the many birthday wishes you sent my way and I wanted to tell you about the wonderful day I had.



Because I am so spoiled, my birthday really began the night before. But one of my few American friends here in Nepal invited me out as she’d noticed it was almost my birthday on Facebook (thank you Facebook). But I had no idea what a good friend I really had when I first accepted her invitation. She asked me to meet her at a Japanese restaurant near our homes and when I arrived she informed me that in addition to being a great restaurant, the place also has a wonderful traditional Japanese hot spring bath. So before I knew it, I found myself in a steaming hot bath in the middle of a bamboo garden, sipping green tea, and chatting with my friend. When we had cooked ourselves completely, we headed back inside for a warm bowl of Udon, next to a cozy fire. It was a wonderful birthday gift.

Then I went home and was fortunate enough to catch my mom, my dad, and my youngest brother at home through Skype. I always love to hear voices from home, even if it is only on the computer. After chatting for awhile, I headed off to bed, but to my surprise, bday wishes from the Nepali side started popping up on my phone just minutes after the midnight hour. By the time my alarm went off at 7 am, I already had a handful of sweet b-day texts.

Of course, birthday mornings aren’t really all that different from other mornings, so it still took me awhile to pull myself out of bed. But after awhile, I managed it and I headed over to Didi’s house. We had planned a big b-day bash with Dai’s side of the family, so we had a lot of work to do. Didi and Dai had decided we would have a strictly “American” menu, which ended up requiring a lot of shopping (The average Nepali menu just has no appreciation for cheese.)

Since I was feeling a little bummed out about officially being a year older, the motorcycle ride to the grocery store and the bakery seemed like just the thing. And to my delight, as we were driving around we passed a signboard, which made me laugh so hard I forgot all about being old. The signboard showed 5 or 6 handsome guys wearing surgical masks, and scrub shirts, but since the ad was for Jockey, all of the “doctors” pictured were in their underwear. I don’t know why it struck me as so funny but something about a poster full of half naked men in the middle of Kathmandu hit my funny bone just right.

After that shopping was a breeze, though getting it home was another story. I ended up carrying 20lbs of groceries in one hand and balancing the cake in the other as Dai navigated past the traffic, dogs, cats, cows, and children that occupy Kathmandu’s streets. I like to think I managed it with style too, but maybe that’s all in my head.

Once home, we all set to work cooking. We ended up with lasagna, salad (a rare treat because raw vegetables are often unsafe for foreigners to eat), mashed potatoes, and stuffing. I considered mentioning what an unusual “American” dinner this was, but I decided to run with it. After all, it was all yummy.

At about 6 o’clock, we finished cooking. A minute later, the power went out due to load shedding. For those of you who haven’t heard about load shedding, load shedding means that for 45 hours a week (this has since increased, we now have 18 hours without power a day) homes in Kathmandu lose power in order to conserve energy. There isn’t enough power to go around, so we all lose power, different parts of the country at different times, in order to share the burden. But the load shedding schedule is published in the newspaper, so we had planned on a candle-lit birthday. Dai had asked everyone to bring a flashlight with them and by the time all the guests had arrived, the apartment was pretty well lit.

All in all, we had 21 of us packed in to our little front room, and there was barely enough food, let alone cake (which was chocolate and just like home!) And to my surprise, though Dai had told all our guests this was a no gift event, there were quite a few really sweet gifts. Didi and Dai said it’s because everyone in our family loves me so much. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know I sure love all of them. It had been a bit tricky in the morning, being away from home and all, but sitting there in the dark with everyone, listening to my older brothers and my brother in law telling stories and watching the faces of my family as they laughed along made me so happy. By the time everyone gathered around to sing me happy birthday I was glowing.

But I’d be lying if I said the presents weren’t fun too! :) I got two that I really loved. The first was a small cell phone case, which I adore because my 9 year old niece brought it for me. The other, my favorite, was from my dear friend. He brought me the field notebook I’m writing in now. And while I hope to fill this notebook with more fieldnotes than blog posts, I was just so thrilled with it I had to write in it right away. And since I’m technically in the field, I better get to writing up the days notes on the next page. I love you all and whether you knew it or not, we were together on my special day yesterday!

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Book Review: The Will To Improve

Dear all,

I’ve just finished a fantastic book, and in order to keep my writing skills sharp, I’ve decided to write a review for you all. For those of you who are not anthropologically inclined, parts of the review may seem very boring or technical, and for that I do apologize. Still, I encourage you to read it (or at least to skip to the end) because the book has left me with some big questions and as always, I’m dying to hear what your thoughts are. (What can I say? I’m addicted to the opinions of the many brilliant folk I’m fortunate enough to know. Can you really blame me?) So, on to the review!




The Will To Improve
Governmentality, Development , and the Practice of Politics
By Tania Murray Li
Published by Duke University Press, 2007

As the subtitle states, Ms. Murray Li’s work focuses on the immense realms of Governmentality, Development and Politics, taking as her specific focus several communities located in the Central Sulawesi Highlands in Indonesia. Her work begins with a discussion of the concept of Governmentality, which she grounds very firmly in Foucalt’s theories. While Murray Li devotes a great deal of technical discussion to this term, (a choice I will discuss in more detail below), I feel a basic concept would have sufficed for her discussion, and would have made this work more accessible to a broader audience. Very simply, following Foucalt, Murray Li holds that government is concerned with ensuring that the behavior of its subjects conforms to a “right” way of doing things which will lead to a very specific set of goals. The sum of these goals, is a utopian or “good” society in which the government needs only to provide minimal direction (as opposed to continuos direct intervention). She goes on to point out that this definition of government also applies to the way most development programs function, and thus labels development programs as functioning under an idea of Governmentality. (Murray Li, pg 5-6)

With these concepts in place, she goes on to discuss the history of development in her fieldsites from both official government bodies and development programs. As she describes it, Murray Li’s fieldsite is made up of several distinct communities, all of whom are currently plagued by problems of landlessness, poverty, and inter-community conflict. According to Murray Li, the Central Sulawesi Highlands have also been the sites of countless development and improvement projects for over 200 years. As the discussion of this history unfolds, several trends begin to emerge.

The first trend Murray Li elucidates is the way in which different programs overlap and intersect, producing unexpected and often, negative consequences for the very communities these programs were designed to help. The most striking example of this is related to the history of relocation of certain communities and the effect on livelihoods and perceptions of indigineity that resulted. Murray Li explains that in the earliest phases of development, the Dutch government resettled villagers from the highlands to the lower hills, in order to bring them closer to infrastructure benefits (like roads) and to enable them to take advantage of new agricultural techniques which were more economically beneficial, techniques like cacao farming. But resettlement proved difficult, for a host of reasons, ranging from insufficient land to epidemics caused by the villagers’ lack of immunity to the strains of diseases found in their new home. However, the government continued the practice of resettlement in the face of these challenges, right up until a new concern emerged, bio-conservation. As bio-conservation became a national agenda item, and international donors pressured for the creation of a protected national park, the government and development institutions began new programs. Eventually, a park was established, after which villagers were denied access to the land they had originally been relocated to, instructed not to practice the farming techniques that were previously encouraged (as they were deemed environmentally unfriendly), and often denied the status of indigenous people because they had not occupied an ancestral homeland from time immemorial (a major condition of indigineity in development definitions of the term). Yet despite the fact that many of the conditions the new development agenda sought to correct were in fact created by previous development initiatives, the new development agenda stated firmly and repeatedly, that it was the behavior and practices of the villagers which needed to be rectified. The resulting hardships for villagers, including an increase in landlessness and poverty, continue even today.

The second trend, which was of particular interest to me, was the way in which development discourses defined and reshaped the structure of communities. Repeatedly, development agendas took the stance that a “traditional” community structure existed within these villages, which would be conducive to the goals of development programs, but which needed to be guided or perfected by outside “experts”. Not only did this supposition rest on some very outdated ideas of “traditional villages”, many of which can be directly traced back to old ideas about the “Noble Savage”, but they also neglected the agency of the villagers. The programmers assumed that the villagers would use the new skills and ideas provided them in exactly the way the developmental institutions had intended them to, which rarely proved to be the case. This point was most clearly demonstrated in the section, “The Case of Katu”. (pg 145). This section discusses how a particular community facing eviction from their land in order to facilitate the creation of the State Park used their new understandings and abilities to successfully lobby against eviction. The Katu community used their knowledge of NGOs and development discourse to enlist the help of a non-park affiliated NGO to produce a variety of documents providing technical information on the sustainability of their farming techniques, documenting their history in that particular area, and even producing GPS maps detailing the land they were currently occupying. Rather than recognize the agency and legitimacy of the Katu community’s activities, even as they had conformed to the technical processes of development, the pro-park NGOs and governmental organizations assumed the Katu had been manipulated and encised by outside sources. In the end, the Katu were allowed to remain in the park on the grounds that they had sufficiently proved themselves to be indigenous, but other communities were not afforded similar treatment.

I found the work to be enormously insightful and the critiques of development to be particularly enlightening, however, I should acknowledge my own previous bias in this regard. As I find myself continually surrounded by the hundreds of development projects and agendas here in Nepal, I have struggled with an uneasiness with the entire process, and in many ways, I felt as though this work pointed concretely to ideas I’d only begun to flesh out. Murray Li dedicates a large portion of the book to discussing the most basic premise of development, what she terms the trustee - ward relationship. She describes this relationship in this way, “The will to empower others hinges upon positioning oneself as an expert with the power to diagnose and correct a deficit of power in someone else.” (pg 275) Personally, I find this position to be untenable. As Murray Li points out, life is messy and complicated, and even should one attain a level of expertise in a particular area, it would take a lifetime of study to be an expert in all of the relevant fields for even the most basic of development programs. From her research, Murray Li points repeatedly to specific real life examples of how development programs create numerous difficulties and conflicts at the same time they work to rectify others.

However, I do have two critiques of the work. Though I found the work to be a strong academic piece, I felt it lacked ethnographic richness. The communities Murray Li worked with were portrayed as largely homogeneous groups rather than a defined set of individuals, and her sparse use of quotes and individual narratives made the communities seem voiceless in the work overall. Murray Li also neglected to discuss her own positioning within the communities in which she worked, and it was unclear how her own biases and positioning affected the information she collected. Lastly, I was irked by the style of her writing, as she often began and ended chapters with dry lists of what was or would be discussed. Overall, I felt these defects made her work less accessible to a larger audience, which is a great loss considering the importance and validity of many of her critiques. I was also left feeling a bit concerned, because though she had stressed again and again the importance of recognizing agency in these communities, the lack of strong ethnographic writing made the work seem as though once again, these communities were being spoken for by an expert outsider.

But let’s move away from this academic discussion for a minute, so that I can share with you all some of the questions that this book left me with. As I mentioned above, here in Nepal, development seems to be everywhere. In fact, I’ve even done some low-level work on a development project since I’ve arrived, and I foresee requests to do more. But development programs leave me feeling awfully queasy. As the book points out, ideas about the need for development are stubborn in the face of failure. There is a general sense of “yes, the system is flawed, but we can’t just give up.” And it would be difficult to argue that these programs are anything but benevolent in their overall aims. But I’m still left wondering, how can the many sad and injustice circumstances in the world be improved, and who really ought to make the necessary changes? As an anthropologist, I’m firmly opposed to the idea that an individual from one community has the right, or even the necessary knowledge, to tell another community how they ought to live or behave. But as a human being, I feel that we all have the responsibility to help each other and make the world a better place. As of this moment, I’ve come up with no solid answers. For the time being, I simply watch uneasily as my friends and colleagues pursue their various agendas.

Another major challenge I’m facing right now, is how to make sense of differences and perceived “inequalities” without constantly relying on value statements. As I travel back and forth between villages and Kathmandu, and eventually, the US, the people I meet are eager to characterize certain settings as “advanced”, “forward”, or even “good”, while others are “backward”, “not nice”, ect. And while I try to shy away from these types of judgements in my own thinking, sometimes it’s very difficult. There have been times when I’ve tried to convince a villager that I find their community to be very nice, but at the very same time, I’m lamenting the loss of my laptop, or counting the days until my next hot shower. At one point in time, I was anxious to convince my friends in the villages that their way of life was just as good as life in the city, with all its amenities. But even that line of thinking has it’s downfall, as it effectively freezes them in their current way of life, and denies them access to commodities, comforts and ideas which may be highly desirable to them. So how can I fairly balance an appreciation for village life with an appreciation for their right to want something else, and at the same time, remain sensitive to the fact that many villagers have internalized the idea that “village life is bad and city life is good”, an idea ushered in by so many well meaning development workers?

Sigh, well at least my work continues to make my brain tickle, even if I can’t answer every question I ask. It’s just one of the many joys of anthropology I suppose! :)

Love you all!



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