Unsettling Roads : Ethnographies of Dust across Rural Nepal

Abstract

Although the three of us traveled on the same path, our intimacy with the land will always be different.This thesis is a conversation between my grandfather, my father and myself. It is a conversation between the mountains, rivers, footpaths, In Hatiya, Nepal that find themselves entangled with deployed methods of Road Building. Roads precede with expectations of stability and acceleration. In Nepal, and specifically Hatiya, they unsettle physically, atmospherically and metaphorically. The intrusion of the Mid-hill highway along the valley has lured the desires of connectivity. Feder roads sit still, frozen and fragmented in a state of construction, exposed to the phase-shifts of climate.

This thesis looks at the evolving physicality of transportation networks in rural Nepal and its implications to the state of the village, or ga’um. As the foot-paths we walked are encroached by larger operations of excavation and erasure, the ga’um has responded accordingly. What was once a landscape abundant with cultivation and agrarian livelihood is slowly integrating into economical hubs catering to schedules of tourism and commerce. The slow intrusion of national highways being the main artery facilitating these forces.

Road building in Nepal is linked to decades of national promise of forthcoming economic prosperity. The reality is a contested network of material confluence. Over the last three generations, government involvement in rural road expansion has challenged existing notions of time, acceleration, and mobility, resulting in different waves of sociocultural shifts in rural regions of Nepal. How can roads be deconstructed, redesigned, diverted, and striated, to initiate new types of intimacy with the land. How can roads be deconstructed, redesigned, diverted, and striated to invite new intimacies with the land. How can geological speeds and collisions of earth and life be visualized and their conflicts rendered? A intimacy and rendering that allows for containment of some operations and the spilling of others. One that welcomes my grandfather's history, my fathers translations and my fragmented understanding and experiences of our hometown.