Domestic archives: Memory and home in Kathmandu.

Abstract

This dissertation, <italic>Domestic Archives: Memory and Home in Kathmandu </italic>, examines the relationship between sentiments, cultural memory, and politics in contemporary Kathmandu. Set during the tumultuous decade after the reestablishment of democracy in 1990, the dissertation looks at several ideologies that inform the way the past is constructed in contemporary Kathmandu, ranging from <italic>bikas</italic> (progress, democracy) to the popular interest in narrating one's own history and heritage. Recent debates in the city about the possibilities and limits of the current democracy are often articulated through the language of sentiment and deploy other stories about the cultural, national, or personal past. The chapters discuss four different domestic archives: the Kathmandu FM radio, a proposed reform for inheritance law, an urban practice of visuality and remembrance, and the discourse of history and heritage. While domestic archives draw on the categories of knowledge and sentiments produced by state archives, the primary agents of domestic archives act outside of the state. Each of the domestic archives I examine here creates narratives about the past and sentiments like nostalgia, loss, love, and dispossession that carve boundaries between different urban publics. The domestic archives examined in the dissertation, then, work in two directions: They point to the way the domestic world is archived, through laws, popular written narratives, photographs and saved objects in the home, as well as the way the categories of state archives are domesticated in everyday social relations.