From early times war has been recognized as a decisive sociological moment. As Heraclitus put it, it 'shows' men in a new light, it 'makes' their social status. Yet the anthropology of war still needs to assert its field of research and its methodology, even if the fecundity of its approach no longer needs to be demonstrated. With war shaped at its summit by the vision and will of a handful of individuals, contemporary wars, until recently, remained the privileged field for political analysts, and so much so that none of the anthropologists who fought in World War I offered an analysis of it (Audoin Rouzeau 2008). Leaving aside the event-based aspects of war at national level and its approach in the form of a single narrative, the anthropology of war focuses on the particular moment of social restructuring that it represents, on its anonymous actors and on microscopic events, and the way in which they are linked to great history. The case of the People's War waged by the Maoist party in Nepal, as examined here, is specific in this respect for having overtly aimed at radically changing the nature of power and society. It therefore, calls for an anthropological study of its development and effect in society. Although the Maoists did not ultimately seize power through the use of weapons, the movement undoubtedly took the form of a revolution, in the sense that it was a well. thought-out ideological project, the action and implementation of which were carefully developed on a very large scale in a methodical way. To account for this powerful socio-political project and its far-reaching effects for what this protracted war 'showed' and 'made' in society-our study could be nothing but collective. Indeed, the variety of contexts where it developed called for a number of case studies to be considered in order to achieve a polycentric portrayal of how it took root. We, thus, produced an extensive, detailed picture of village contexts under Maoist control and emphasized the importance of such a descriptive approach focusing on village life and its micro-history, and on leaving people time to speak, to narrate their experiences, to air their opinions and to expose their choices. This immersion at the grass-roots level and as close as possible to the actors themselves forms the basis of anthropology. In a context of war, with all the great complexity and passion it involves, this is even more necessary to avoid hasty generalizations or biases. Not only did we deliberately start with the facts and with ordinary social contexts, but we also opted to maximize this effect by compiling a collection of descriptive accounts? This provided a broad scope that we did not attempt to limit in order to allow speech and information to flow freely, along with the particular course of history in each place.
Yet, all this follows the lines of a common project which, far from aiming to be exhaustive or even representative in a statistical sense, seeks to explore the conditions of possibility for an armed revolutionary movement to develop, extend and encompass all aspects of life. We attempted to provide some answers to this puzzling question at the root of armed mass movements by examining, on the one hand, the antecedents of the People's War and, on the other hand, how it was waged in the country's rural areas which were directly under Maoist control, and the variety of paths it followed in such a composite context in terms of ethnic group, caste, language, religion, education, and where political culture is both a very recent implant and still at an elementary level. We paid special attention to the manner in which ordinary people perceived the movement over time, their hesitations, resistance or enthusiasm, and to the mechanisms that finally led to it being acquiesced in by the majority. To complement this village-centred approach we also devoted space to some features of the revolutionary organization, namely, its military specificities, and its cultural production, whereas its structure and ideology are not dealt with here other than how they appeared to villagers (on this subject, see Hachhethu 2008-9; Ogura 2008a).
The study of a revolutionary period raises fundamental questions, such as the respective importance of contingent events and individual agency, on the one hand, and of the long-term evolution of social structures, on the other. Our grass-roots approach highlights the embedding of these apparently opposed spheres, and the structuration resulting from an accumulation of similar phenomena that are shaped by being subjected to the same conditions. The role of school teachers as vectors of revolutionary ideas in many localities in Nepal may serve to illustrate this. Endowed with additional symbolic capital, but not with power or economic means, school teachers were the first to develop social criticism (as described, for instance, in Benoît Cailmail's chapter, this volume). Yet, it was not before the advent of political liberalization in the early 1990s, which also coincided with a void created by massive migration depriving Nepal of many of its educated, relatively well-off young men, and the creation of a nationwide revolutionary project and organization, that they became fully operative. This recalls Tocqueville's theory that the French Revolution found its origin in the newly enriched bourgeoisie but that their revolt against the court, privileges and ascriptive status came at a time when the old nobility itself disapproved of the new court manners. Though schoolteachers do not form a social or economic class in the so-called class war that Nepal's People's War represented for the Maoists, ethnography shows that they have something in common with many of those who chose the revolutionary path early on in Nepal: a subaltern position within the elite. Indeed, in many localities of the base region, a local conflict within the dominant clan meshed with the national conflict when it became expressed in terms of a conservative/revolutionary dichotomy following the introduction of party politics in the early 1990s.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1085)
Archaeology (754)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist