Tobunken Seminar: “Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal”

We are pleased to announce that the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo will be hosting a lecture by Dr. Jeevan R. Sharma on "Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal." The seminar will be conducted on a 'hybrid' basis.

To attend the lecture, please register using the following form before noon, July 25.
https://forms.gle/jCHG5c3UYx4K9Fjr5

Please make sure to register in advance, even if you wish to attend in person (no in-person attendance without registration). Online participation may be requested if the number of in-person participants exceeds the capacity of the meeting room.

Date and time: July 26, 15:00-17:00, JST

Venue: Large meeting room (3rd floor), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo/Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Jeevan R. Sharma

Title: Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal

Language: English

Abstract:
Nepal has been undergoing tumultuous socio-political and economic changes since the 1950s. At the macro-level, politically, Nepal has leapfrogged from a feudal, hierarchical monarchy to a republican order that has attempted to engrain ideas of human rights, equality and inclusive citizenship. Economically, there has been a gradual shift in the political economy of rural livelihoods with the commodification of land and labour, the widespread flows of cash and financialisation and extensive out-migration, with the countryside deeply penetrated by the ideas as well as the material aspects of development, market and modernity. What does it mean to talk about change, ransformation and transition in Nepal beyond its stereotypical image of fatalism and immobility? How are powerful historical processes experienced and negotiated in Nepal? How might we assess the paradoxical effects of these transformations in people’s lives and livelihoods, both in terms of expanding ideas of rights and freedom while also producing vulnerabilities and precarity?

Drawing on insights from field research carried out in Nepal since 2004, this talk engages with these questions and considers whether and how Nepal’s political economy might have been transformed since the 1950s while situating these changes in Nepal’s modern history and its location in the global economic system. First, this talk assembles and builds on the scholarship on Nepal from a multi-disciplinary and synoptic perspective. In doing so, there is an attempt to go beyond the sedentary, immobile, fatalist and romanticised narrative of Nepal that has remained dominant in orientalist scholarship on the country.
Second, focusing on local discourses, experiences and expectations of transformations, this paper draws our attention to how powerful historical processes are experienced and negotiated in Nepal and assess how these may, at the same time, produce ideas of equality, human rights and citizenship, while also generating new forms of precarity.

Jeevan R. Sharma is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in South Asia and International Development at Department of Social Anthropology, the University of Edinburgh.

Contact: nawa[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Co-organized: Regular Research Project "Reconsidering Anthropological Studies in the Northern Part of South Asia", IASA; and Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), the University of Tokyo