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Analyses the impact of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes and the need to understand disasters in their cultural and political context.
List of contents
Part I. Contextualizing Disaster: Preface; 1. Reconstituting pasts and futures: contextual agency in a disaster aftermath Mark Liechty and Michael Hutt; 2. Earthquakes in Nepali history John Whelpton; Part II. Rebuilding Lives: 3. Expertise, labour and mobility in Nepal's post-conflict, post-disaster reconstruction: Law, construction and finance as domains of social transformation Sara Shneiderman, Dan Hirslund, Jeevan Baniya, Philippe Le Billon, Bina Limbu, Bishnu Pandey, Katharine Rankin, Nabin Rawal, Prakash Chandra Subedi, Manoj Suji, Deepak Thapa and Cameron Warner; 4. Labour and the humanitarian present: thinking through the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes Shyam Kunwar, Elsie Lewison and Katharine N. Rankin; 5. Disaster, deceptions, dislocations: reflections from an integrated settlement project in Nepal Jeevan Baniya; 6. Humanitarian responses of I/NGOs after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake: empirical evidence from Gorkha, Sindhupalchok and Southern Lalitpur Amrita Gurung and Jeevan Baniya; 7. Policies, politics and practices of landslide risk management in post-earthquake Nepal: perspectives from above and below Katie Oven, Shubheksha Rana, Gopi K. Basyal, Nick Rosser and Mark Kincey; Part III. Rebuilding Structures: 8. The politics of participatory disaster governance in Nepal's post-earthquake reconstruction Nimesh Dhungana; 9. Changing perspectives on international aid in Nepal since the 2015 earthquakes Shobhit Shakya; 10. Reclaiming heritage: the politics and poetics of Newar urbanism Sabin Ninglekhu, Patrick Daly and Pia Hollenbach; 11. Kathmandu Durbar Square: heritage reconstruction as a political process of negotiating ownership and authority by Stefanie Lotter; Part IV. Building Memory: 12. Cultural heritage display after the 2015 earthquake in Nepal: the architecture galleries, Patan Museum Katharina Weiler; 13. Art as participation, gift and resource: Nepali artists' engagement in post- earthquake Kathmandu Valley Christiane Brosius; 14. Gathering absences and presences: memory work, photographs and affective recovery in the Langtang Valley Austin Lord and Jennifer Bradley; 15. Bhukampa: Nepali recitations of an earthquake aftermath Michael Hutt.
About the author
Michael Hutt is a scholar of Nepali literature who has authored and edited fourteen books and over fifty articles and book chapters on Nepali and Himalayan topics. His most recent book was the edited volume Political Change and Public Culture in Post-1990 Nepal published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.A cultural anthropologist by training, Mark Liechty has been a student of Nepali and South Asian culture and history for more than three decades. He is the author of three influential books on modern Nepal and a founding co-editor of the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society.Stefanie Lotter is Senior Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Summary
Insisting on the importance of fine-grained cultural, political, and historical context, this book dramatically expands the field of knowledge relevant to understanding disasters, their outcomes and appropriate interventions. In so doing, it shows that disaster aftermaths are never inevitable but are the outcomes of situated human agency.
