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Paper short abstract

The paper explores continuities between three projects of impossible lives in Nepal: Maoist revolutionaries during the civil war, Christian converts, and irregular migrants to the USA who finance their journeys through debt. How disparate are these projects and the 'dreams' underpinning them?

Paper long abstract

This paper explores three models of ‘living for the future’ in the former Maoist base-area of Nepal: youth who joined Maoist guerrillas during the war of 1996-2006, recent converts to Christianity, and migrants who have embarked on perilous journeys to the USA via South America - the journeys that took up to year and cost up to to 60,000 USD. I suggest that it is the dialectic between a powerful vision of a future and an acute sense of disillusionment or ‘existential dissatisfaction’ (Jackson 2011) in the present that makes people embark on these seemingly disparate projects. By providing a long-term vision of the future and a new meaning to people’s lives, all of the three projects, however different their ultimate goals might be, allowed the followers to experience ‘existential mobility’ (Hage 2006), overcome the impasse in the present, and ‘move forward’ in life. By ‘evacuating the near future’ (Guyer 2007) and by emphasizing the long-term horizons of either building a ‘new’ egalitarian society in a country with rigid social hierarchies (Maoists), attaining a ‘new life’ (Christians), or pursuing the American Dream, indexed by permanent settlement one of the so-called ‘big countries’ (migrants), these projects fostered new type of subjects – the ones who are happy to sacrifice the present and the ‘near future’, kinship ties and familial resources, for the sake of long-term, often utopian future.