Paper short abstract:

This paper will reflect on my long-term fieldwork in the village of Thabang, which was hailed as the Maoist capital during the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006) and explore how the conflict radically transformed Nepali society within a period of less than a decade.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will reflect on my long-term fieldwork in the village of Thabang, which was hailed as the Maoist capital during the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006) and describe how the conflict radically transformed Nepali society within a period of less than a decade. It will explore how the spatial and temporal dimension of Nepal’s civil war – the creation of the guerrilla enclaves which functioned as a parallel state and the exceptional nature of wartime when different rules apply (apaddharma)– came together in transforming people’s everyday lives, normalizing previously transgressive norms, such as beef-eating and inter-caste commensality, and reconfiguring the ways people act in and think about the world. By focusing on the relational side of war – kinship ties between ordinary villagers and guerillas, fraternal bonds within the Maoist Movement, new solidarities that cut across caste and gender divides, and the new divisions across ethnic lines – the paper will show that the social processes and relationships through which the Maoist mobilization/project became possible outlived the war, leading to profound social change in post-conflict Nepal.

The paper will suggest that social change in Nepal came about not so much as a result of war, but rather in the process of war, with the praxis of revolutionary modes of sociality and ‘embodied change’ being key to understanding how social change came about. Rather than being simply a result of the Maoist ideology, it was the embodied experience of new ways of acting during the war – relating across caste, gender and generational divides, enforced as part of the exceptional times of war - that transformed people’s consciousness, their subjectivities, and their everyday praxis.