‘The view from the clinic'

This chapter provides the 'view from the clinic' and how medically trained practitioners have related to 'tradition' and laamaas. Notions of progress and development for the nation circulate continuously on radio, television, through non-governmental organisation (NGO) programmes, school textbooks, and in general discourse. The Voice of Child Workers, the quarterly newsletter of the NGO Child Workers in Nepal (CWIN), was one of the development-oriented publications ordered for the United Mission to Nepal (UMN) community health and development team. Ambiguity and doubt are utilised as a mechanism for the circulation of medical authority. Many feminist activists, human rights activists, women's groups and representatives of the media attended her funeral. Medical power circulates in ways similar to colonial authority, as Homi Bhabha suggests, by creating a space of undecidability, the 'production of a doubt in the native place of enunciation'. The story of 'Norway laamaa', who used to work for the Norwegian international NGO Redd Barna, caused much mirth.