Culture, Capital, and Community in Mustang, Nepal
A Tale of Two Temples: Culture, Capital, and Community in Mustang, Nepal Sienna Craig Introduction This article focuses on two religious and community institutions. The first, Thubchen Lhakhang, is a 15th century temple located in the remote walled city of Lo Monthang, Mustang District, Nepal. The other, located near Swayambunath in the northwestern part of the Kathmandu Valley, is a newly built community temple meant to serve people from Mustang District. This paper asks why Thubchen has fallen into disrepair and disuse over the last decades, only to be “saved” by a team of foreign restoration experts, while the financial capital, sense of community, responsibility, and cultural commitment required, one could say, to “save” Thubchen by people from Mustang themselves has been invested instead in the founding of a new institution in Kathmandu. Through two narrative scenes and analysis, I examine who is responsible for a community’s sacred space, how each of the temples is being repaired or constructed, designed and administered, and the circumstances under which the temples are deemed finished. Finally, I comment on how these temples are currently being occupied and used, since restoration/construction efforts were completed. More generally, this paper speaks to anthropological concerns about local/global interfaces, particularly how the expectations and visions of cultural preservation, which often emanate from the west, impact and are impacted by communities and individuals such as those from Mustang. The circumstances surrounding these two projects illustrate larger questions about aesthetics and identity, agency, and transnational movements of people, resources, and ideas, as well as nostalgia for things “local” and “traditional” generated both by people from Mustang and their foreign interlocutors.
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