EDITORIAL 3 ARTICLES Affirmative Action to Target Dalits: Practices of Swiss Development • 53 2019 RESEARCH OF HIMALAYAN BULLETIN EUROPEAN Agencies in Nepal 5 Annabelle Jaggi and Ulrike Müller-Böker 53 Sending the Sons Away: Western-Himalayan Songs of Women Alone Spring 2019 at Home 35 Mahesh Sharma ‘Bringing the Light’: Youth, Development and Everyday Politics in Post-War Nepal 70 Ina Zharkevich Bhaktapur Revisited: Dīpaṅkara Buddha’s Life in a Hindu City 108 Andrea Wollein BOOK REVIEW 141 NOTES ON COntRIButORs 146 EBHR EUROPEAN BULLETIN OF HIMALAYAN RESEARCH Spring 2019 published by the EBHR Editorial Committee in conjunction with Social Science Baha, Kathmandu, Nepal European Bulletin of Himalayan Research The European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EBHR) was founded by the late Richard Burghart in 1991. It is the result of a partnership between France (Centre d’Etudes Himalayennes, CNRS, Paris), Germany (South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg) and the United Kingdom (School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS]). From 2014 to 2018 the editorial board is based at the South Asia Institute (SAI) in Heidelberg, Germany and comprises William Sax (SAI, Managing Editor), Christoph Bergmann (SAI), Christiane Brosius (Karl Jaspers Centre, Heidelberg), Julia Dame (SAI), Axel Michaels (SAI), Marcus Nuesser (SAI), Karin Polit (SAI), Mona Schrempf (Berlin), Anja Wagner, Astrid Zotter (SAI), Heleen Plaisier, and Arik Moran (University of Haifa, book reviews editor). The EBHR’s contributing editors are Martijn van Beek (University of Aarhus) Tone Bleie (University of Tromso) Ben Campbell (Durham University) Pascale Dollfus (CNRS, Paris) Martin Gaenszle (University of Vienna) David Gellner (University of Oxford) Ingemar Grandin (Linkoping University) Sondra Hausner (University of Oxford) Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (CNRS, Paris) Chiara Letizia (University of Milano-Bicocca) Fiona McConnell (University of Newcastle) Axel Michaels (University of Heidelberg) Matthew Nelson (SOAS) Judith Pettigrew (University of Limerick) Philippe Ramirez (CNRS, Paris) Anne de Sales (CNRS, Paris) Surya Subedi (University of Leeds) Mark Watson (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh) Astrid Zotter (University of Heidelberg) The following address should be used for correspondence: William Sax South Asia Institute INF 330, 69120 Heidelberg Germany Email: [email protected] For subscription details and back issues (>3 years) http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/ebhr The EBHR is published from Kathmandu in collaboration with Social Science Baha (http://www.soscbaha.org) EBHR 53 EDITORIAL 3 ARTICLES Affirmative Action to Target Dalits: Practices of Swiss Development Agencies in Nepal 5 Annabelle Jaggi and Ulrike Müller-Böker Sending the Sons Away: Western-Himalayan Songs of Women Alone at Home 35 Mahesh Sharma ‘Bringing the Light’: Youth, Development and Everyday Politics in Post-War Nepal 70 Ina Zharkevich Bhaktapur Revisited: Dīpaṅkara Buddha’s Life in a Hindu City 108 Andrea Wollein BOOK REVIEW Markus Viehbeck: Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a “Contact Zone” 142 Catherine Warner NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 146 EDITORIAL With issue number 53, my second three-year stint as editor of the Bulletin comes to an end, and it seems appropriate to cast two glances, one backward to the founding of the Bulletin and one forward towards its future. With regard to the Bulletin’s past, I am reminded once again of its founder, Prof. Richard Burghart, who was my predecessor as Professor of the Ethnology of South Asia at the South Asia Institute. One of the contributors to the current issue, Prof. Ulrike Müller-Böker, recalled in a recent e-mail exchange with me that the idea of such a publication “was put forward at the German-French Conference (D.F.G.- C.N.R.S.) Anthropology and History of Nepal, which took place in Arc-et-Senans, in June 1990, with strong support from Martin Gaenszle” (now Professor at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Wien) and András Höfer. (András and Martin did much of the work during my first stint as editor.) Professor Müller-Böker writes that there was a strong collaboration in those days amongst Nepal scholars in Europe, and that Burghart “was an innovative newcomer in this community” whose idea was received very positively by participants at the conference. I am happy to have been able to carry on with many of Burghart’s interests: the ethnology of the Himalayas, the Anthropology of Health and Illness (“Medical Anthropology,” which is our focus in Heidelberg), and of course the Bulletin. As is customary, the rotating editorship of the Bulletin now moves on to Paris, where plans are afoot to transform it into an online journal. I congratulate my colleagues in Paris for their initiative, and I look forward to reading future issues of the Bulletin in its reincarnated form. It has been an honour to serve once again as editor, and I have every confidence that the Bulletin will retain and build upon what have always been its strengths: multi-disciplinarity, a broad geographical reach, and the making available of new and exciting work by young and creative scholars as well as older and more established ones. William Sax, Editor European Bulletin of Himalayan Studies Affirmative Action to Target Dalits: Practices of Swiss Development Agencies in Nepal Annabelle Jaggi and Ulrike Müller-Böker Abstract With a focus on Nepal’s Dalits, this article examines how development agencies adopt affirmative action measures that produce intended and unintended implications. The article delves into a qualitative case study of a nationwide vocational skills training project called the Employment Fund Nepal and two Swiss development agencies that are involved in its planning and implementation. In this project, economically poor members of various groups (including Dalits), who are discriminated based on social categories such as caste or ethnicity, are subsumed under the category ‘Disadvantaged Groups’ and treated as priority target groups. Academic literature shows that targeting based on social categories can unintentionally foster these categories and risks ignoring intra-group inequalities. Our research indicates that these pitfalls of affirmative action might also emerge in the Employment Fund. Nevertheless, the case study suggests that the breadth of the Disadvantaged Groups category also facilitates inclusivity and emphasises commonalities, and might prevent an enforced division along traditional social boundaries. We assume that the inclusion of Dalits into broad categories such as Disadvantaged Groups reduces their traditional stigmatisation. Still, we argue that certain Dalit-specific livelihood realities should be given extra attention within development projects and that affirmative action measures need to be highly contextualised and flexibly implemented. Keywords: Affirmative action, development practice, targeting, Dalits, caste, Nepal Introduction In September 2015, the Nepali constituent assembly promulgated a new constitution, which aims at ending the prevailing discrimination and European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 53: 5-34 (2019) 6 EBHR 53 socio-economic inequalities that stratify Nepal’s society along factors such as class, caste, ethnicity, gender, region, religion and language (CAS 2015: 2, 6, 26). Affirmative action policies followed from the constitution’s goals that placed inclusive development at the top of Nepal’s national agenda. Against this political background, national and international development agencies design and implement development interventions. When constructing their target groups, they often combine indicators for economic poverty with social categories such as gender, caste or ethnicity, which serve as indicators of social discrimination (Contzen & Müller-Böker 2014: 1, 7-9, cf. Shneiderman 2013: 46). Nepal’s Dalits are almost always addressed as a priority target group (cf. Cameron 2007, CAS 2015: 6, Kisan 2005). This article aims at creating a deeper understanding of how development agencies adopt affirmative action measures in practice – encompassing Dalits as a target group – and which intended and unintended implications these measures can produce. It draws its empirical insights from a qualitative case study of a nation-wide development project – the Employment Fund Nepal (EF) – and the involvement of two Swiss development actors: the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the non-governmental organisation HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation (here referred to as Helvetas). Even though the presented findings are based on a case study, the social context of the project is comparable with the context of other development interventions in Nepal. Studies that bring together the research strands addressing the disadvantaged social situation of Nepali Dalits with the ones examining affirmative action measures adopted by development agencies appear to be scarce. The existing literature on affirmative action in Nepal for the most part focuses on governmental policies (e.g. Dong 2016, Drucza 2017b, Kisan 2009, 2012, Pyakurel 2011, Shah & Shneiderman 2013) or concerns affirmative action policies of foreign development agencies, mainly in relation to Nepal’s ethnic groups (e.g. Middleton & Shneiderman 2008, Sapkota 2012, Shneiderman 2013), and issues of social inclusion and identity politics (Drucza 2017a) . We first provide a literature-based overview of the social situation of Dalits in Nepal. Subsequently, we offer a glimpse of the