Abstract
This paper analyses fear in a village in central Nepal during the ‘People’s War’. Spanning the years from 1999 to 2008, the paper illustrates how the different phases of the insurgency and individual circumstances resulted in people’s relationship with fear changing over time. By presenting a chronological analysis of fear, the authors draw attention to the interrelationship between fear, temporality and sociality and show that fear is always contextually situated, differently experienced through time and related to personal circumstances. Villagers had strongly developed coping strategies which they drew upon to support themselves and decrease their fear. Some people, however, suffered such a degree of structural violence that experiencing fear was seen as a privilege. Others denied their fear as part of their performance of manliness while others coped by ridiculing fear. Although a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust lingered, most people recovered from the impact of chronic fear. They fully returned to their field and forest work as well as their previous social activities following the peace agreement of 2006.
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Notes
‘Tamu’ is the singular of ‘Tamu-mai’, the term that the people who are better known as ‘Gurungs’ apply to themselves when they speak their own language Tamu Kyui (a Tibeto-Burman language indigenous to the Tamu-mai). As this paper is based on research carried out in a predominantly Tamu village and conducted primarily through Tamu Kyui we use the term ‘Tamu’ throughout. Most conversations in this article took place in Tamu Kyui (and non-English words included in the text are Tamu Kyui unless otherwise indicated). Pettigrew is responsible for translating them into English. Both authors are responsible for translating Nepali conversations into English.
Our work is based on twenty fieldtrips ranging from 2 days to 2 weeks conducted between 1999 and 2008 which builds on Pettigrew’s earlier work which commenced in 1990. For the purposes of analysis, we have broken the conflict into four different periods that we witnessed in the village. Some of these phases correspond to different nationwide phases, others do not.
All personal and place names are pseudonyms. We have chosen to give the village a Tamu Kyui pseudonym rather than a Nepali one, as although official names are in Nepali, all Tamu villages have a Tamu Kyui name that is always used when speaking Tamu Kyui. Certain ethnographic details have been disguised in this piece in an attempt to protect the identity of our informants.
Particularly, in the Gurkha Brigade of the British Army and in the Indian Army. The largest proportions of those outside the country are migrant workers employed in India, the Gulf states, East Asia or South East Asia.
The sai (‘heartmind’) governs emotions, volition and cognition and morality. People talk of having a “full (happy) sai” (sai toba), a “small (unhappy, sad) sai” (sai chyoba), a “crying (unhappy, sad) sai” (sai kroi), a “full (satisfied) sai” (sai mrei). The sai is also the place of memory, thought and competency.
Writing about Northern Ireland Lysaght (2005) draws attention to the interrelationship between political violence, space and fear. In the Northern Irish case relatively safe spaces existed (segregated enclaves). This is in contrast to villages like Kwei Nasa where there were no safe spaces during the insurgency. This significantly contributed to the degree of fear experienced in rural Nepal.
Dhan Kumari, who knows a few words of English, inserted the English words “red army” into this sentence.
Teachers and health workers were vulnerable to threats and intimidation from both sides. Because of historical links between teachers and left wing ideology, the security forces suspected them of being Maoist activists while the Maoists might consider them government spies. Caught between the demands of the Maoists to comply with their requests, and the demands of the security forces not to do so, they faced extreme pressures. Teachers and health workers were required to give a proportion of their salary to the Maoists. How much they gave varied but was often between 5% and 15%. These professionals were frequently reluctant to reveal how much they gave and sometimes denied or downplayed the amount demanded.
This is not the case for people who were deeply traumatised. People interviewed in other villages who were injured in crossfire and were traumatised re-experienced fear in their heartmind each day.
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Acknowledgments
For comments on earlier versions of this article, we are grateful to Brandon Kohrt, Don Messerschmidt, Andrea Nightingale, Alpa Shah and Sara Shneiderman. We would also like to thank the participants of the 2007 British Academy workshop on Everyday Life and Maoist Movements. A British Academy Small Grant awarded to Pettigrew provided financial support.
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Pettigrew, J., Adhikari, K. Fear and everyday life in rural Nepal. Dialect Anthropol 33, 403 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9131-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9131-8