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- Title
Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal.
- Authors
Shneiderman, Sara
- Abstract
What is a house? What about a household? How do they relate to each other? Different answers to these seemingly simple questions lie behind many of the conundrums that Nepali citizens experienced in the process of reconstruction following the country's double earthXuaRes This paper considers whether the widely varying definitions of "house" and "household" used by the Nepali state, the international community, and residents themselves to assess infrastructural loss, identify the citizens who experienced it, disburse private housing reconstruction grants, and implement the material work of reconstruction may in fact be equivocations If this is indeed the case, is bureaucratic practice intended to regulate the earthquake affected house and household—before, during and after the process of reconstruction—a means of translation, negotiation, or something else altogether? Does it bring different worlds into relation, through a shared desire to make something more of this basic unit of material and social structure than the singular name that appears on most land title deeds in Nepal? I explore these questions through ongoing ethnographic research in earthquake affected districts as well as online, to consider how the ontological status of "the house" itself has been reconfigured through the process of reconstruction, along with the political domains in which it is embedded
- Subjects
BUREAUCRACY; HOUSE construction; EARTHQUAKE aftershocks; GRANTS (Money); ETHNOLOGY research; INFRASTRUCTURE (Economics)
- Publication
Anthropological Quarterly, 2024, Vol 97, Issue 2, p253
- ISSN
0003-5491
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/anq.2024.a929489