Activism as a Moral Practice: Cultural Politics, Place-Making and Indigenous Movements in Nepal.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the everyday and organized ways in which Dhimal, a historically marginalized indigenous people from Nepal’s easternmost lowlands, enact locally embedded and globally influenced indigenous activism to assert their distinct history, territorial belonging, and political autonomy as they participate in the processes of crafting new directions for the making of a ‘New Nepal’ in the post-April 2006 period. Taking ‘place’ as a central analytic in the study of indigenous politics, I investigate how issues of land and landlessness shape Dhimals’ sense of indigeneity, ethnic history, territorial belonging, and their envisioning of the future as ādivāsi in Nepal. In doing so, my ethnography provides new insights for approaching the relationship between Tarai ādivāsi and the land by focusing on the interplay among land, labor, power relations, state-led geographical imaginings, and the role of malaria in mediating relations among ādivāsi, the state, and other social groups, and shaping Dhimals’ historical agency in resisting the extractive Hindu state. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2009 in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, and Morang district, this dissertation moves beyond the conventional emphasis on the organized and contentious struggles in the study of indigenous politics by focusing on how community-making practices related with marriage, village rituals, and place-making become constitutive practices of Dhimal indigenous activism. By demonstrating the centrality of everyday practices in indigenous politics, this dissertation shows how people, located in specific historical-political contexts, transform the global-national discourses of indigeneity and indigenous rights into locally meaningful and relevant political projects through their embedded everyday practices. This analytical focus on locally embedded practices has important implications for understanding how indigenous activism becomes embodied moral practice enacted by people out of their felt sense of responsibility and duty for the social production of their collective self.