Journal article
Sixteen years ago, when an old adage that schools in Nepal are as scarce as snakes in Ireland was often taken as literal truth, Bernard Pignede made the discovery that in relatively isolated Dansing-Mohoriya village, some 80% of the Gurung men from 19 to 80 were literate. Eight percent of the women also could read and write. The national census of 1954 had shown the corresponding figures for...
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...
There is no dependable record of the development of the Nepali legal system prior to the fourteenth century AD. The laws shown in inscriptions of the ancient Hindu rulers have not proved to be very important as judicial works which could have influenced the later legal systems of Nepal. The first influential proponent of judicial law in Nepal was Jayasthiti Malla. As stated in the chronicle (...
The word mandal is Sanskrit in origin and has passed into the north Indian languages meaning a halo of light or circle. The word is also used in the sense of a circle of colleagues or people who pursue similar (such as literary) interests and are linked together in a loosely knit yet formally constructed organisation. Devotees of various Vaisnavite sects form kirtan (devotional hymns) mandals...
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