Discourses of Awareness: Development, Social Movements and the Practices of Freedom in Nepal

Discourses of Awareness explores the ways in which projects of development and social transformation, through both their successes and failures, have helped produce new forms of imagination and socio-political engagements in Nepal. Combining historical and ethnographic analyses, the book shows, among other things, how the self-conception of contemporary village leaders, the revolutionary visions of the Maoists, and the mobilization for the liberation of bonded laborers, all emerge out of the history of a variety of projects for individual and societal transformation and improvement in Nepal since the 1950s. Tatsuro Fujikura is Professor at the Department of South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS), Kyoto University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has been engaged in extensive anthropological research since the mid-1990s in both rural and urban Nepal on development practices and social movements.