Paper short abstract:

This paper examines debates over democracy and development in Nepal, both before and after the People’s Movement of 1990. Arguably the micro-ethnography of democratic process in Nepal is only now achieving the level of precision of Adam Kuper’s study of Kalahari village politics published in 1970.

Paper long abstract:

The study of democracy and democratization has been re-discovered by anthropologists in recent years. Adam Kuper, who began his anthropological career with a study of a local democracy, can and should serve as an example of the committed, but none the less scholarly, study of democratic ideas in practice. This paper examines the ways in which development and democracy have developed in Nepal both before and after the 'first Andolan (people's movement)' of 1990. Early ideas of democracy focused on village communities and the idea of consensus, and the Panchayat system (1960-1990) imagined the nation as a hierarchical and consensual democracy, a village writ large. Modern ideas of development and democracy focus more on the 'empowerment' of marginal and 'backward' groups. Either way, development in practice is in large part a question of the performance of democracy.