A House Divided: Land, Kinship, and Bureaucracy in Post-Earthquake Kathmandu

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes changes to the administration of the family estate in the Kathmandu Valley caused by the aftermath of the Great Nepal Earthquake of 2015. A rapidly urbanizing city in a predominantly agrarian country, Kathmandu has experienced massive expansion as immigrants from across Nepal purchase farmland on the city’s periphery for residential homes. This urban growth is transforming land’s traditional value as the material basis for kinship, its rising market and financial values threatening to turn land into simply another economic asset. When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, this transformation was interrupted, but not for long. Faced with the task of rebuilding their damaged homes, earthquake-effected families were forced to engage more deeply with state and financial bureaucracies—applying for loans, submitting to government surveys, enrolling in aid programs—and with their kin networks, calling in obligations, honoring responsibilities, and negotiating with family members over the future of their family estate. In this way, the value of both land and family were called into question.

I use post-earthquake reconstruction as a lens to explore this transformation of land value and kin relationality, tracing the strategies families used to manage their estates while under significant financial pressures. Key to my discussion is the mediation between bureaucratic forms of ownership and informal modes of land management used by families, one that centered on the family’s legal land title. Land in Nepal is owned at the family level, so that all members of the legally-defined domestic group have a right to an equal share of the estate. Despite its intent to mimic agrarian ownership practices common among South Asian joint families, bureaucratic documentation of family ownership rarely matches actual practice because, in order to avoid intra-kin tensions, most families prefer informal divisions built into the structure of the house itself, such as multiple kitchens and separate entranceways. This tension between kin and bureaucratic practices shapes land administration throughout Kathmandu, affecting the structure of both the land market and private finance. Yet it was a manageable tension, that is, until the earthquake forced families to update their land titles in order to access government aid, a process that led many to reevaluate their relationships with kin.

To explore this tension between informal kin management of the family estate and bureaucratic ownership of land, this dissertation is organized around the analysis of the common land transaction types found in Kathmandu. Chapter one explores land’s valuation throughout Nepal’s history. Chapter two explores land sales, in particular the role of informal brokers in the land market. Chapter three discusses the collateralization of land and private finance more generally. Chapter four delves into household economic practices, which inform family land management. Chapter five discusses the process of dividing land among family members, while chapter six explores how this process changed in the aftermath of the earthquake. Finally, chapter seven examines the state’s verification of earthquake victims, and the role landownership played within their procedures. Throughout this dissertation, I suggest that land administration in Nepal depends on a strategic balancing between the creation of coherent economic transactions on the one hand, and the maintenance of ambiguity in regards to individual and segmentary claims to the family estate on the other, a balancing engaged in by families, private financial institutions, and the state.