Other Conferences

Negotiating Ethnicity in Nepal’s Past and Present
(in collaboration with Institute for World Society Studies, University of Bielefeld and Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu)

12-14 September, 2005

Ethnicity formation was a direct result of the 1990 ‘spring awakening’ whereby the image of a multicultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual Nepali society emerged as a powerful counterproject to the offi cial rhetoric describing Nepal in an assimilative and homogenising language during the Panchayat period. But the depiction of Nepali society as ‘multicultural’has proved to be an embattled ground where diverse visions, strategies and grievances have come to intersect and to contest each other. The aim of the conference was to understand these negotiations and specifi cally to grasp the dynamics of ‘ethnicisation’ and ‘de-ethnicisation’ in Nepal’s past and present.