Social Dynamics in Northern South Asia Volume- I Nepalis Inside and Outside Nepal

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Situated in northern South Asia at the interface between different linguistic and cultural areas, Nepal contains huge ethnic, cultural, and socio-political diversity. At the same time, it has had to confront far-reaching social change in an extremely compressed timescale.

This volume attempts to encompass these transformations and the resultant complexity through a series of in-depth case studies.

Part 1 focuses on Pokhara, an important urban hub in west Nepal, and deals with urbanization, evolving ethnic relations, and occupational shifts. Part 2, 'Marriage, Kinship, and Transformation of Intimacy', covers questions of gender, social relations, marriage, drug use, and coping with the Maoist insurgency, in various parts of the country. In Part 3, 'Transnational Links', different chapters cover Gurkha soldiers, tourist developments, migrant workers, and ethnic movements. Part 4 consists of one substantial chapter, 'Nepal as Viewed from the Indian Himalayas', in which Gerald Berreman makes a series of direct comparisons between the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas. This is first of the two volumes entitled Social Dynamics in Northern South Asia.

The volumes bring together scholars from Japan, Nepal, India, Europe, and America in order to deepen our understanding of social change in the region, on the basis of fresh fieldwork reports and new analyses.

Hiroshi Ishii is Professor Emeritus at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He has conducted anthropological research among the Newars, the Parbate Hindus, and the Maithils in Nepal since 1970. He has published Nepal: A Himalayan Kingdom in Transition (1996, with P.P. Karan et al.), and other books and articles in both Japanese and English.

David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls College in the University of Oxford. He is the author or editor of many books on Nepal and Northern South Asia, including Vernacular Religion: Cultural Politics, Community Belonging, and Personal Practice in the UK's Nepali Diaspora (Vajra, 2019), and a special issue of Contributions to Nepalese Studies 46.1: Nepali Dalits in Transition (CNAS, TU, 2019).

In 1997 the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies initiated an academic series entitled 'Japanese Studies on South Asia' under an agreement with Manohar Publishers & Distributors. The initial purpose of the series was (and remains) to introduce the work of Japanese scholars of South Asia to the international academic community. So far, five volumes have been published in this series and the contributors are Japanese authors (previous volumes in the series are listed on the fly leaf). Unlike these previous volumes, the present set, consisting of two volumes, contains articles by scholars from various countries and Japanese scholars make up just half of the authors.

The present volumes (i.e. Social Dynamics in Northern South Asia, Vol. 1: Nepalis Inside and Outside Nepal and Vol. 2: Political and Social Transformations in North India and Nepal) are the outcome of two inter-national workshops held in February and June 2004 at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA or AA-ken), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo. The workshops were entitled `The Dynamics of Social and Political Change in Nepal' and 'Social Dynamics in Northern South Asia' and included ten and twenty-one papers respectively.

This collaborative study began with two institutional research projects, each with around twenty members (all Japanese except for one Nepali scholar based in Japan). In its preparatory stage, seminars were held as part of a regular research project of the Institute of Oriental Culture, the University of Tokyo 'Reconsidering Anthropological Studies in the Northern Part of South Asia' organized by Katsuo Nawa in 2002. In 2003, an ILCAA research project entitled 'Comparative Study of Sociocultural Changes: On Changes in Northern South Asia' was organized by Hiroshi Ishii. David Gellner joined ILCAA as a visiting research scholar in September 2003. The idea of the international workshops emerged during occasional discussions between them. The main aim of the projects was to achieve a better understanding of the societies and cultures of northern South Asia focusing on various aspects of change in the region.

H. ISHII, D.N. GELLNER, AND K. NAWA

When colonial officers and early anthropologists made the first ethnographic observations of the South Asian peoples it was natural for them to think in terms of fixed and long-lasting social units. Today, by contrast, the salient social fact is change — in a variety of forms and directions, both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Hence the umbrella title of the pair of volumes of which this forms a part is social dynamics. The focus here is on the dynamics of social categories,‘ groups, or identities. The contri-butors to both volumes analyse recent changes in the context of study by focusing on one or other concept such as caste, ethnic group (less often tribe), gender, nationality (from the aspect of transnational links), or religious identity. The changing nature of such identities is no less present when various aspects of secular activism are analysed. Even when new forms of identity emerge — such as that of squatter or entrepreneur — older identities, based on caste or ethnicity, continue to play an important role in influencing the way they develop, as chapters 4 and 11 below demonstrate.

Since caste and ethnicity are important in all the contexts dealt with in these two books, since we aim to encourage comparison, and since Nepal and north India differ significantly — despite profound cultural and historical continuities — in the ways in which caste and ethnic group (or 'tribe') are institutionalized, a detailed, if introductory, explanation of these differences is in order and will help to set the scene for the detailed studies that follow.

**Contents and Sample Pages**