Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

This presentation explores what extensive wage outmigration has done to love in a community of Western Tamang in north central Nepal, where I have been engaged in ethnographic fieldwork since 1975. Where 66% of working-age men, and an increasing 8% of women, no longer live to work in the village, the transformations are dramatic, not only in economic and public community life, but at the heart of people’s intimate relations--with spouses, siblings, and parents. These changes are, of course, rooted in prior, so-called ‘traditional’, relationship values; they also transform them considerably, but not always in predictable or negative ways.

This seminar will be chaired by Dr Josep Chanza, Geography, University of Edinburgh