Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how, after the Nepali Earthquake of 2015, families in Kathmandu used financial procedures to imagine new futures wherein they could reconcile with their estranged kin. In doing so, families repurposed the prepacked futures built into such procedures to create new modes of hope.

Paper long abstract:

It is often argued that formal ownership--and the financial procedures that require it-- cannot be reconciled with the modes of property management that communities and kin groups utilize. Instead, these two approaches to property are often portrayed as contesting, with the family management practices resisting formal documentation. While this argument has been instrumental in broadening understandings of possession and ownership, this paper complicates this formal/informal dichotomy by exploring how, following the devastating Great Nepal Earthquake of 2015, families in Kathmandu used state bureaucracy and formal financial tools to not only rebuild their homes but also to create new hope for familial unity. After the earthquake, the Nepali state—and by extension national financial institutions—privileged proof of formal landownership in their distribution of reconstruction aid and loans, making undocumented landholding arrangements amongst kin. This decision disqualified the property claims of numerous Nepalis, creating conflict across Kathmandu as kin were forced to explicitly agree upon who owned what parts of the family estate before approaching the state and banks for financial aid. My paper examines how, in the midst of such conflicts, Kathmandu families used bureaucratic procedures to create new, more hopeful futures in which family members could eventually reconcile. In doing so, groups of kin managed to repurposed affordances built into financial documents, integrating their own sense of family into the pre-packaged modalities for financial aspiration and economic possession that formal finance and ownership offer. I explore both how this integration transformed finance and family in Kathmandu.