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Accepted Paper:

Uncertain infrastructure and everyday life in contemporary rural Nepal  
Bicram Rijal (Simon Fraser University)

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my doctoral research, this paper explores how new infrastructure and infrastructural uncertainty correspond to the social and embodied experiences and the emergent values of everyday life in contemporary Nepal.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on emergent sanitation and transportation infrastructure in contemporary Nepal, this paper explores what it means to build the toilet and have a motor road to the different actors, including the Nepali state, NGOs and rural people. The paper explores why and how people come to value or devalue certain ways of being in the context of the advent of new infrastructure and its uncertainty. It deals with the intersection between materiality and sociality mediated by infrastructure and explores uncertainties of infrastructure and social life as moments of temporality. I contextualize my research in post-earthquake Nepal and ask what happens when new infrastructure is built, existing infrastructure is damaged, or the ongoing building of an infrastructure project is suspended not just for days and weeks, but for many months. Further, I explore how material and infrastructural uncertainty corresponds to the social and embodied experiences of everyday life. In this paper, I demonstrate how attention to infrastructure and its temporality helps ethnographer understand the different layers of everyday life, including its contingency, vulnerability, precarity and uncertainty. As such, I ask the following questions: Why is focusing on infrastructure "valuable" for anthropologist? What are the different ways in which uncertainty—both infrastructural and social—becomes both a part of and disrupts the rhythm of everyday life? And, what is it like for an anthropologist to create an ethnographic value within the context of uncertainty, instability and precarity?

Panel P27
Anthropologies of uncertainty
  Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -