South Asia Brown Bag Fall 2020
Sympatric Politics in the Nepal Tarai.
Amy Johnson, Anthropology, Yale University.
Contact southasiabrownbag@yale.edu to receive the registration information and the ZOOM link.
In the lead-up to the promulgation of the Nepal Constitution 2015, Nepal’s countryside teemed with contradicting regional and identity-based demands for new federal provinces. In the lowland Tarai of Farwestern Nepal, these territorial struggles brought indigenous Tarai residents, Tharus, and Hill settlers, Pahadis, into direct conflict as each sought to include the Tarai in their vision of a new federal provincial order. Engaging ecological concepts for environmentally-informed political anthropology, this paper examines how competing provincehood movements in Nepal’s Farwest Tarai emerged in relations of sympatry, which is through group interactions within a common landscape. This framing is a departure from environmental anthropology’s political theorizations of the past, which studied political organization through the co-production of social boundaries and geographic/spatial differentiation. The paper will give an overview of the twin emergence of the Akhanda and Tharuhat/Tharuwan province movements and shared grounds of protest in the city of Dhangadhi to address the spatial, social, and ideological overlaps that animated the divergent causes for federal provinces in the Farwest Tarai.