culture
Despite the fact that Helambu is only three days walk from Kathmandu and is one of the most popular trekking areas, virtually nothing is known about the socio-cultural organisation of its inhabitants. Sherpas live here and it is precisely because of its differences (and similarities) with other Sherpa and Bhotea areas that Helambu is an important area anthropologically. The extent of these...
In Hindu tradition, each stage in the life of an individual is marked by a religious ceremony which is called samskaara, a term that is generally translated by 'sacrament'. of these, there are twelve main ones; among them 'impregnation' (the time when conception is supposed to have occurred), birth, shaving of the head, initiation, marriage, and funerary rites. These sacraments...
A paper entitled "A Medieval Nepalese Temple of Visnu-Narayana" has been published, but the temple is neither of proven medieval date nor dedicated to Visnu Narayana. This article aims to rectify the date assigned to the temple.
The temple is a typical Newar style, small, two-roofed structure of square plan standing at Saugal-tol in Patan, in the Kathmandu Valley. Inscriptions on stone...
The tea shops lining the feeder roads to Narayangad, Chitwan District's main bazaar town, provide an excellent arena for observing interaction between the different caste/ethnic groups that comprise the multi-ethnic population of the Rapti Valley resettlement area. The tea shop is at once a place for relaxation and refreshment, and a place to conduct business. Low status castes may be...
The paper aims to describe certain aspects of illnesses and compare health facilities between regions in eastern Nepal. The focus is on diseases whose remedies have implications for changes in socio-cultural conditions. The impact of health services as they presently exist is discussed from the points of views of doctors, administrators, health workers and villagers. Data was collected in...
Despite the advance of modern medicine in Nepal, the role of the shaman as folk curer remains strong. In a survey of 19 village panchayat areas, not one was without its shamanistic curer who went under various names as jhankri, dhami, janne, or jharphuke. While these appeared to depend largely on the exorcism of possessing spirits to cure diseases, there...
The villager in Nepal has ideas about what medicine should be, respect for specialists who can diagnose and cure, and a faith in the basic validity of the system. This paper explores the methods of healing within a village in central Nepal. As can be seen, there are various techniques of curing - herbal, ritual, western - all of which are integrated into a system designed to deal with the...
The research on which this description of illness and its treatments was carried out in the village of Dhungagaun, which is located about 50 miles north-west of Kathmandu in Nuwakot District, in the Bagmati Zone.
Predominently a Brahman-Chhetri village, over half of its 2,000 inhabitants are of the high (sacred thread-wearing) castes. Apart form Brahmans and Chhetris, other high caste...
The centrality of motherhood in the lives of Hindu women is well known, but it takes on new force with the intensive study of a particular group of contemporary Nepali women. In this case, the women are members of the Brahman and Chhetri castes believed to be representative of similar women in small villages in the Kathmandu Valley and surrounding hills. For these women childbearing is the...
Reduplication is a syntactic process which is quite common in both spoken and written Newari. There is no single meaning that all instances of reduplication hold in common, rather, the semantic force of the reduplication can be determined only in relation to the specific construction involved. There are a number of positions in which reduplication occurs. This paper does not attempt to exhaust...
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