ABSTRACT
How do Himalayan peoples conceptualize ‘territory’? In English, this concept joins the multiple scales of individual land ownership, communal emplacement in locality, and belonging and ownership of sovereign space at the national level. But how are the links between these different scales envisaged in Himalayan worldviews and languages – if at all? These questions emerge out of my ongoing study of the state-restructuring process in Nepal since 2006 – in which political debates over all three scales of territorial belonging have played an important discursive role. Here I investigate how such political categories are constituted in relation to practices of territoriality at the grassroots level in rural Nepal, both before and after the 2015 earthquakes.
