Domestic archives and publics of heritage among emerging Nepali middle class

Abstract

With the emergence of a thriving market for antiques, the booming heritage industry, and new revisions of history among political actors, objects and stories of the past have acquired new value as evidence of 'history. At this time, emerging middle class Nepalis are creating their own archives from objects and stories from their homes. In this paper, I am interested in the urgency among many Kathmandu families to retrieve or restore cultural, historical, and personal memories that they feel are endangered of being lost. While archives pave the path for certain relationships and events to be continuously recalled, they also leave traces of other histories that are rarely heard. By looking at domestic archives, I pursue the tension between state-given narratives of history, the Nepali pasts glorified by the booming heritage industry promoted by international organizations, like UNESCO, and the emerging histories associated with the jana jati movement. Ethnographers writing after the jan aandolan I have stressed the significance of this political transition for enabling new narratives of history. With new narratives of the cultural past, new political and cultural identities rise to the surface of social consciousness. Attention has been paid primarily to the political stakes raised by emerging social groups and reform movements, and the narrative contexts of their attempts to change the state. For example, the search of janajati movements across the nation for alternative pasts is a political response to exclusive religious and historical narratives of the Nepali-Gorkhali-Hindu state, but their message is heard by many who are not directly involved in janajati activity. I here take a different approach. None of the people I discuss in this paper were formal political actors, but their projects of creating domestic archives resonate with the contemporary ways in which cultural heritage and public debate about history has played a significant role in redefining political and personal lives. Each of the stories I explore here engages with the question of how public discourses of history and heritage may, unwittingly and indirectly, affect people who are not directly a part of that public. What does it mean to become part of a 'public' and how do public discourses that circulate around people influence their understanding of their possessions, their inheritance, and selves within a social world? How can we begin to think about the effect of the growing public sphere on people's personal projects, and their desire to be recognized within the emergence of publics to which they may not be active participants? This discussion raises some thorny epistemological and methodological questions about how to interpret the effect of public discourses of history/heritage on personal projects when the links are not directly obvious.