Dr. Sara Shneiderman’s latest publication, “Equivocating Houses: Kinship, Materiality, and Bureaucratic Practice in Post-earthquake Nepal” is part of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, entitled The Administration of Everyday Life in Nepal.
About the Special Issue
When do citizens resist bureaucratic governance, and when do they seek to be recognized by it? Can everyday engagements with formal procedures be reduced to self-interested strategy or rationalized rule following? What are the politics of rule breaking? Such questions undergird our contributions. While the term “administration” suggests top-down private or public governance, our section shows how administrative actions in Nepal often move against this grain, crisscrossing between different institutions, corporate bodies, and kinship groups, allowing for innovative and strategic practices among human agents that capitalize on the affordances and entailments built into the procedures themselves. In doing so, we emphasize the productive dimension of administration, examining instances of unexpected creation within apparent stringent formality.
We offer three papers, each with a unique and deeply ethnographic view of Nepali administrative life. These include post-earthquake housing reconstruction (Shneiderman), community-based road building committees in rural Nepal (Rankin et al.), and the private bank lending procedures in Kathmandu (Haxby). Throughout, we show how ideas of efficiency, modernity, corruption, and family are enacted in the transaction and procedures we analyze, reframing engagements with formal bureaucracy as a foundation for creativity, agency, and moral play.
