COSMOPOLITAN CODIFICATIONS: ELITES, EXPATRIATES, AND DIFFERENCE IN KATHMANDU, NEPAL

Abstract

Globalization has been the site of many renegotiations of identity, both at the supra- and subnational levels. Yet, there is an interstitial zone of communication between the global and the local in which distinct processes of boundary-making and translation take place. This essay examines mediators of internationalization, elite nationals and expatriate employees, as they negotiate the form that difference can take in the global marketplace. The contentious politics of Nepalese nationalism as well as South Asian colonial delineations of difference provide precedents for the current social practices of a cosmopolitan population that establishes a hierarchy of difference while also excusing themselves from demarcation and restricting the purview of the concept of culture. The result is a zone made safe for the operation of neoliberal business (a practice seen to be without history or geography) with alterity only allowed in narrowly commodifiable settings.

Key Words:

• Elites
• Nepal
• expatriates
• alterity
• cosmopolitanism
• culture

I offer my great thanks to three anonymous reviewers as well as the editors, Hill and Wilson, for helpful, productive, and in-depth comments on an early version of this essay. In its nascent stages, I enjoyed fruitful conversations about this argument with Peter Moran, Lola Martinez, and John Hartigan. This piece is also a contribution to my on-going struggle with the insights of John Kelly's work, and I thank him for the challenge, as well as David Scott and Rolph Trouillot. In addition, Robert Oppenheim labored over many versions of this piece, extracting the many tangents from a sometimes hidden central argument. All errors are, of course, my own.

Notes

1. In Nepal, the employees sent from Europe and America continue to be predominately male. This was changing in 2000 as women were promoted in Foreign Service jobs, but recently as companies and governments have turned from contract employment to subcontracting and short-term posting, the trend now tilts toward men again. Non-white expatriates were also rare, although Japanese agencies and businesses are a rapidly growing influence. The exception was when the hyphenated identities of employees were seen to be an asset in the local environment. This perception was often naïve, as one Indian-American sent from a United States-based company (India was thought “close enough” to Nepal) often found himself shunned by locals due to long-standing Indian-Nepalese tensions and not seen as a full member of the expatriate community.

2. The research on which this article is based was conducted between 1997 and 2000 and funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, and it was expanded upon in a 2007 follow-up visit.

3. Peter Moran's Buddhism Observed (2004) focuses on another insular community of foreigners in Nepal (also sometimes termed expatriates): those resident in Kathmandu for an extended period of time as part of an interest in Buddhism. Although these religious seekers and the professional expatriates I focus on interact in some settings, there is an element of mutual hostility engendered by the different attitudes toward “home,” their motivations for being in Nepal, and their economic status (Moran 2004: 121).

4. The challenge of complexity and clarity is one that is clear in contemporary scholarship; take for example the recent book by Prakash Raj Crisis of Identity in Nepal (2007), which, while illustrating the tensions within Nepalese diversity during the contemporary upheaval, nonetheless reproduces simplistic ethnic categories when using statistics as documentation for his claims.

5. This was a reference to the Ihi ceremony that Newari girls participate in which they are symbolically married to a bel fruit.

6. Examples of these diasporic education formats include not merely organizations like the Chicagoland Nepali Pariwar and the umbrella organization Sajha but also official classes in university settings and summer camps. South Korean diasporic groups have produced many of these gatherings both for foreign-born children of Korean parents and adoptees (see Jo 2002; Volkman 2006). Brian Axel (2002) also provides a valuable illustration on the problematic relation of diasporic populations and platial identities.

7. For examples of this sort of list outside of popular literature, see Ukyab and Adhikari's The Nationalities of Nepal or Shresta and Singh's Ethnic Groups of Nepal and Their Ways of Living. Gil Daryn (2003) presents a key example of this conflation of terms in his article “Bahuns: Ethnicity without an ‘Ethnic Group.’”