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Dissertation abstracts

Amy Leigh Johnson, State Re-Making: Federalism, environment and the aesthetics of belonging in Nepal

Amy Leigh Johnson
Bibliographical reference

Amy Leigh Johnson, State Re-Making: Federalism, environment and the aesthetics of belonging in Nepal, 2020.

Author’s notes

Discipline: Anthropology and Environment
Institution: Yale University
Degree completion: 23 December 2020
Advisors: Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan and Michael R. Dove
Dissertation committee members: Sara Shneiderman, Doug Rogers, and Paul Kockelman

Full text

1In the context of interlocking global and national desires for the revitalisation of the state both institutionally and affectively, this dissertation offers an ethnographic account of contemporary state re-making, attending to the subjective and structural dynamics shaping coupled processes of constitution-writing and federal reforms in post-conflict Nepal. Based on 27 months of ethnographic research in nested sites of re-making in Kathmandu, Dhangadhi and the far western Tarai region, the dissertation examines overlapping efforts to determine boundaries for new federal units and traces the ways in which a wide range of actors – national academics, federalism experts and lawmakers; international constitutional lawyers; regional politicians and activists; and indigenous Tharu and Pahadi settlers – navigated the production of the federal system in reference to entangled pursuits of belonging to landscapes, kin and nation. Drawing on the anthropology of the state, environmental anthropology, phenomenology of place and kinship studies, the dissertation interprets the re-making of the Nepal state in light of emplaced environmental histories, episodic administrative reorganisation and the sympatric movement of peoples across the far western region –elaborating different vantages from which to ethnographically theorise and interpret states in the contemporary era. Through these channels, the dissertation sheds light on the centrality of Nepal’s state aesthetic – signalled by administrative boundaries – to the perennial quest for securing state integrity and the ideal organisation of society. In so doing, the dissertation describes pathways through which subjective relationships to land, people and nation entered into Nepal’s newest state design, generating lines of resonance and dissonance for future untangling.

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References

Electronic reference

Amy Leigh Johnson, “Amy Leigh Johnson, State Re-Making: Federalism, environment and the aesthetics of belonging in Nepal”European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [Online], 59 | 2022, Online since 21 December 2022, connection on 15 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/773; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebhr.773

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About the author

Amy Leigh Johnson

Amy Leigh Johnson is currently a research fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University and is working on local geomorphological knowledge and anticipatory disaster governance in Nepal as part of a collaborative interdisciplinary project ‘Sajag Nepal: Preparedness and Planning for the Mountain Hazard and Risk Chain in Nepal’ funded by the UK Global Challenges Research Fund.

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Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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