Understanding the <i>Kichkini</i>

Nature–society and development: social, cultural and ecological change in Nepal

Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Laura M. Ahearn .Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2001. vii. 295 pp., photographs, tables, notes, references, index.

Laura Ahearn, Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 295. Pb $24.95. “Sarita, I'm helpless….” Laura Ahearn begins her ethnography with a love letter, 21-year-old Bir Bahadur's first to Sarita, “whose long, black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye” (p. 3). Ahearn ponders the increasing use of such letters amid changes in literacy and marriage practices, understandings and expressions of emotions, and efforts of the Nepali state and other organizations to develop places like Junigau, the village in which most of the book's action takes place. By the book's conclusion, Ahearn has provided the means to understand the subtle paradox in Bir Bahadur's letter – that he asserts that he is “helpless” at the same time that he initiates an invitation. Ahearn demonstrates in exquisite detail that such expressions must be considered within the wider, shifting context of practices through which they emerge: that which instantiates the expression, literacy in all of its guises, and that which makes the expression meaningful, the emergence of a discourse of development that characterizes people, places, and activities.

The Constitution of Nepal 2015 provides substantial opportunities for women’s empowerment through its provisions for their rights and facilities. This legal framework represents a socio-political shift aimed at development, positioning women’s agency as a critical tool for social change. However, Nepal’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural society presents diversity in women’s socio-economic status and agency across different communities. This paper examines women’s agency and social change in Nepal, drawing on the perspectives of Sen (1999), Bhandari (1993), and Marxist writings. It critically analyzes women’s agency, using data from literature and secondary source. Women’s agency, defined as the freedom to pursue goals and values, is essential for promoting social justice and well-being. Cooperative conflict and perceptions of entitlement within families emphasize the importance of women’s economic independence, education, and property rights. Women’s agency is linked to significant outcomes, including improved child survival, reduced fertility rate, and enhanced socio-economic roles. Nepal’s constitution supports women’s agency through its rights and provisions, contributing to declining gender inequality and improved health and educational outcomes.

Just as dreams have long been associated with the unconscious, ghost stories have often served as forums for otherwise unapproachable issues. This volume brings together a lively selection of ghost stories by women writers, who use the genre to reveal and challenge prevailing cultural discourses on the nature and status of women. Depicting marriage, motherhood, female sexuality, spinsterhood, widowhood, and the intersection of madness and medical practice, the authors displace their critiques of dominant ideologies onto the supernatural, thus shielding themselves from critical recrimination. Their evocative works provide a resource for insights into women's writing and lives. Originally published in popular magazines, the 22 stories in this collection are set in all corners of the United States and were written by a range of authors known and unknown, including Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston. Whether depicting a servant who helps save the reputation of her master's dead first wife, a ghostly mother who haunts a stranger until he agrees to adopt her orphaned daughter, or a ghost who revisits her beloved husband only to discover his long-standing preference for her sister, these tales possess great psychological richness and offer first-rate entertainment even as they explore the social and psychological realities of women's lives. Each story is preceded by a biographical headnote.

The cultural politics of markets: economic liberalization and social change in Nepal – Rankin, Katharine Neilson

In the context of social and educational change in Nepal, this chapter discusses efforts made for institutionalizing pedagogy-driven change to higher education at Tribhuvan University. Describing initiatives for training an increasing number of faculty members across the country, the chapter theorizes "shifts" that must be made in order to implement the semester "system" of education in its true educational spirit, as well as in response to the socioeconomic changes described in the introduction chapter of this book. The shifts we discuss call for greater balance by moving the weight of education from teaching to learning, knowing to doing, written examinations to diversified assessment, degrees to disciplinary identity and professional growth, and changing classrooms to shaping the larger education culture in order to better align higher education with social change and demands. We acknowledge challenges and obstacles against the projects behind this chapter, but we focus on what educators can do, and are doing, with one practical step at a time from where they are, whether they are in the positions of teachers in the classroom or other positions across the institution, including those of administrative, policy making, scholarship and research, diaspora support, and support for a public institution as alumni and citizens. The chapter concludes by highlighting a vision that points to how current efforts could and should achieve new milestones in future years.

In the context of social and educational change in Nepal, this chapter discusses efforts made for institutionalizing pedagogy-driven change to higher education at Tribhuvan University. Describing initiatives for training an increasing number of faculty members across the country, the chapter theorizes “shifts” that must be made in order to implement the semester “system” of education in its true educational spirit, as well as in response to the socioeconomic changes described in the introduction chapter of this book. The shifts we discuss call for greater balance by moving the weight of education from teaching to learning, knowing to doing, written examinations to diversified assessment, degrees to disciplinary identity and professional growth, and changing classrooms to shaping the larger education culture in order to better align higher education with social change and demands. We acknowledge challenges and obstacles against the projects behind this chapter, but we focus on what educators can do, and are doing, with one practical step at a time from where they are, whether they are in the positions of teachers in the classroom or other positions across the institution, including those of administrative, policy making, scholarship and research, diaspora support, and support for a public institution as alumni and citizens. The chapter concludes by highlighting a vision that points to how current efforts could and should achieve new milestones in future years.

This chapter details how the mid-1990s saw a substantial increase in the number of horror films being produced in Asian countries, and in particular Japan and Korea. At the same time, globalisation and the introduction of worldwide distribution channels meant that such films became much more accessible to western audiences, with the surprise success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) bringing Japanese horror into the mainstream of western cinema. Often used to describe genre films from across Asia, so-called 'J-Horror' is now a recognised sub-genre in the west, with a number of scholarly books dedicated to its analysis. Although many of the more recent films feature modern trappings and a preoccupation with technology, they draw heavily from Japan's long tradition of folklore and ghost stories, while stylistically referencing the aesthetics of traditional Japanese theatre. The chapter considers Masaki Kobayashi's Kaidan (Kwaidan, 1964). It traces the evolution of Japan's unique national film industry and examines how cultural differences can affect genre production and consumption.

This paper reports a study investigating hospital nurses' experiences of death and dying. Despite advances in medical science and health care, together with the push towards individualizing approaches to patient care in the developed world, significant variation in the care of dying patients still exists. The international issues relating to differing types of death reveal both its complexity and diversity, with evidence of 'good death' experiences largely focused on hospice experiences, and a lack of research on death in general hospitals. In-depth interviews were conducted in 1999 with a convenience sample of 29 Registered Nurses in the United Kingdom based on their hospital death experiences. Semiotic analysis was used to identify the 'deep structures' that underlie and form part of cultural communication as a way of understanding how nurses made sense of death. Data interpretation was enhanced through the use of a typology of 'good and bad deaths'. The findings suggest that different experiences of death are based on the extent to which nurses were able to exert control over the dying process. The management of death in hospital is a major source of conflict for nurses. Good and bad death experiences were constructed according to their impact on the sentimental order of the ward, the intangible, but real patterns of mood that influenced nurses' feelings. Moreover, good and bad deaths focused less on patients' needs and the dying process and more on the death event and nurses' abilities to manage organizational demands. There is a need to improve communication with patients and families about diagnosis and prognosis to ensure that effective communication takes place and 'blocking behaviour' is avoided. The findings also challenge practitioners to focus attention on death as a process, and to prioritize patients' needs above those of the organization. Moreover, there is the need for guidelines to be developed enabling patients to have a role in shaping events at the end of their lives.

This article examines the establishment of women’s voice and an alternative women’s history in the ghost stories by late nineteenth-century Chinese writer Wang Tao and British writer Vernon Lee. Situating ghost stories as a Gothic mode that offers the marginalized groups, especially women, the opportunity to re-inscribe their voice and subjectivity into a fictional history through the motif of the returning ghost, this cross-cultural analysis proceeds to investigate the possible manipulation and mediation of that gendered voice in the history-making of ghost stories. Continuing the tradition of Chinese zhiguai (namely “the records of the strange”) to fashion an unofficial history of the ghost against the official history of the state, Wang’s two stories of victimized female ghosts centralize the obliterated women’s narration of their own history yet veil the mediation involved in the male historian’s history-making. Reading Lee’s ghost story “Amour Dure” as a meta-critique of the kind of history-making through ghost-making exemplified in Wang’s tales, the article argues that the haunting liminality of the ghost in Gothic ghost stories may offer a better strategy for the marginalized group to re-inscribe their presence into reality than a polarization between official and unofficial histories.

Social and cultural changes in Nepal, including better communication facilities and transport, more urbanization and a rising age at which people marry, have created more opportunities for young people for “dating.” Our qualitative study explores whether the existence of dating cultures influences young people’s sexual behavior in Nepal. Focus group discussions with a total of 75 participants and 31 in-depth individual interviews were conducted among young people in Nepal. Most urban and rural young people liked the dating culture. Although it is a new kind of culture in Nepalese society, it is gaining popularity. The mass media were regarded as encouraging and creating an environment for dating. Most participants believed that dating culture encourages premarital and extramarital sexual behavior. The authors underpin their findings by linking it to the “emerging adulthood” framework. In terms of public health, they recommend that dating practice should be discussed in formal and informal education to promote safer sex.

Sex and marriage manuals contain sexual scripts about female sexuality and the role of women in heterosexual relationships. As attitudes change, new scripts become marketable; and as manuals articulate new scripts, they legitimate a redefinition of women's sexuality and roles. This paper looks at 49 manuals published in the United States from 1950 to 1980. These manuals generally reflect one of three distinct models of female sexuality: different-and-unequal, humanistic sexuality, or sexual autonomy. Each model rests on a different set of assumptions and values, and each has social and political implications. The popularity of the sexual autonomy model since 1975 is particularly noteworthy and provides a basis for potentially radical revisions in notions of women's sexuality. Human sexual experience, like other aspects of life, is organized and understood in terms of a socially constructed reality. That is, the nature and meaning of human sexuality are not selfevident but are historically developed and socially transmitted (Gagnon and Simon, 1973). With regard to female sexuality, such social constructions are sociologically important not only for their role in organizing people's sexual actions but also for their ideological functions. Sexual scripts, and changes in those scripts, both reflect and reinforce the status and role of women in heterosexual relationships as well as in society more generally. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, female sexuality has been defined in ways that connote a sinister or tarnished character. Early leaders in the Church blamed female sexuality (Eve's seduction of Adam) for the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and, ultimately, for the crucifixion of Christ (Queen and Habenstein, 1974:198). Later, during Europe's notorious witch hunts of the 15th-17th centuries, female sexuality was alleged to provide a special link between a witch and Satan - for example, through diabolical copulation (Institoris, 1970). In fact, the only way women could attain marked respect in the eyes of the Catholic Church was by denying their sexuality and becoming a celibate nun. In the 20th century, religious doctrine has become less influential in defining female sexuality in the United States, although its influence is still felt in public debates over abortion, birth control, and public welfare programs (e.g., payments for illegitimate children). Authority has increasingly shifted to secular and scientific sources which provide models of female sexuality to the public through influential and popular sex and marriage manuals. This paper analyzes how female sexuality is portrayed in such manuals published between 1950 and 1980. Concomitant with the resurgence of feminism and a rhetoric of equality between the sexes, we found changes in the sexual scripts used to discuss female sexuality. We identify those script changes and consider their implications for further social change. In so doing, we build on the work of Michael Gordon and his associates, who have analyzed sex and marriage manuals published between 1830

Taking the cultural objects as indexical images and the Mexican storytellers about violence in the recent Mexico, this article pretend to understand the worlds of life inhabited by traumatic experiences and events. No matter what intensive the exhibitory complex of the scenes of "bad death" have been in this country, the case never imagined before is the disturbing effect of a totalizing violence characterized by mechanisms of denial the bereaved of death bodies to bury, and of which the geography of this unimaginable country is a bystander.

Reviewed by: An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality Margaret A. Lowe An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality. By Jill Fields (Berkeley, University of California University Press, 2007. xvi plus 375 pp. $21.95 paperback). In her remarkable book, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality, Jill Fields has written an impressively wide-ranging history. She sets herself the daunting task of exploring "the history of undergarments in modern America both as manufactured objects and cultural icons, intertwining their fabrication and distribution as mass-produced goods and objects of material culture with their construction and circulation as representations of the female body and producers of meaning"(5). And she succeeds. While most historians of fashion, sexuality and the body focus on either consumption or production, Fields studies them in tandem and in a way that never wanders far from critical issues of power. In fact, she argues, in the early twentieth century, a new transnational "fashion-industrial complex" took hold as a result of the second industrial revolution. Just as garment workers stitched undergarments, piece by piece, Fields stitches together a complex, inter-disciplinary secondary literature with disparate and copious pieces of documentary evidence including oral histories, popular movies, fashion magazines, novels, trade journals, advertisements and material artifacts. Amply and beautifully illustrated, it opens with four histories of specific undergarments: drawers, corsets, bras, and black lingerie, then shifts to thematic analyses of advertising, the garment industry, and Christian Dior's New Look, with a closing overview of "feminist intimate apparel art." At times, the breadth of Fields' research and ideas make for difficult going and the overall narrative is a bit choppy, but taking one's time with this book is well worth the effort. Though Fields presents a chronological narrative, each chapter puts forward a complex, self-contained thesis that merits close reading. In the first chapter, "Drawers," Fields explains that in the nineteenth century, when women first began wearing divided garments, open drawers demarcated gender difference (men wore closed drawers) as well as both modesty (open drawers presented no scandal to "passionless" women) and eroticism (once married, sexual accessibility). But by the 1920s, closed drawers became pro forma. Why the shift? Fields, surveying everything from extant undergarments to silent films, argues that modern notions of female sexuality and the New Woman made open drawers risqué. Similarly, in her analyses of "Corset and Girdles," she argues that as twentieth century social changes decreased the "need" for women to wear corsets, manufacturers quickly developed new rationales rooted in science, race and gender in order to protect and advance their profits. Using niche marketing, standardized sizing and corset saleswomen, manufacturers campaigned against the "corsetless evil." Where corsets once stood guard against "moral turpitude," they now offered protection against aging, ill-health, figure flaws and confusion with the uncivilized, "thick" bodies of the racially impure. "Brassiers," which Fields states are "a twentieth century garment," details the evolution of the garment from corset covers and camisoles to the introduction [End Page 793] of cup sizing in the 1930s and the Maidenform padded bras of the 1940s (81). Highlighting the relationship between "pin-up girls," Hollywood glamour and young GIs overseas, Fields argues that brassieres fetishized large, firm, separated, uplifted breasts but with the right bra any woman could wield the "illusionist's power to captivate." In doing so, women won not only male attention but also since eroticism had shifted from "breasts to sweater to glamour," they now had "a method to enhance their power as a force to be reckoned with in themselves" (112). Fields' treatment of black lingerie ranges from a discussion of the historically contingent relationship between nineteenth century mourning clothes, death and sex to a detailed exploration of twentieth century "cultural constructions of blackness, black female sexuality, and black clothing" all to show its specific historical meanings and changes in them over time (133). Several mini-histories could stand alone within this chapter including sections on Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus), the history of black lingerie in popular film, and the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Freud and Bataille, but standing at the center of it all is a provocative discussion of black lingerie's racialized content both in...