Paper short abstract:

Villagers' reports that the People’s War in Nepal concerned inequalities in other places, replicates their discourses about development and social change also taking place elsewhere. The paper examines public and private faces of rebel visibility, and the perception of insurgent geographies.

Paper long abstract:

"The Gender of the Goat, and Other Insurgent Events in Nepal"

Ben Campbell

The People's War in Nepal has had variable levels of intensity across the country. This paper discusses perceptions from a mountain district that the insurgency has been an event going on elsewhere, at the same as public knowledge and personal experiences do not concur over this. The management of perceptions about the insurgency as having emanated from, and been connected to inequalities about other places, can be partly explained by reference to a set of discourses concerning modernity-driven development and social change, with which village subjectivities have difficulty in finding easy points of identification. Everyday village life belongs discursively at a remove from processes and concerns of power, reflecting the sense of locatedness in conditions of underdevelopment. Certain elements of Maoist class perspectives are even adopted to explain why the insurgency should not affect people of a certain place. The reality is that at other less discursively accessible levels, such as the familial, dramatic events have indeed thrown people into uncontrollable confrontations with security forces, and demands for financial contributions to the rebels. This paper looks at points where the everyday weaves in and out of insurgent scrutiny, and how the masking and unmasking of revolutionary intent is checked for in people's (and animals') movements across perceived insurgent geographies. That the insurgency has occurred in parallel with, and has exacerbated greater labour migration, presents new opportunities for thinking about the politics (gendered, and ethnically regionalised) of locatedness and movement.