Coming across old digital records and documents, I have decided to reproduce many of them in my blog. This is a paper I wrote for my Introduction to Anthropology class as an undergraduate student at Grinnell College from 1990 to 1994. The paper describe how an ancient culture in the Amazon Rainforest, Munduruc culture, evolved in response to external forces.
Four years into living and working in Kathmandu, a young female adult -- a conclusion based on her Twitter profile -- has decided that working her ass off in the city is not worth it, and that she was better off struggling abroad. The tweet appears to speak to many others -- they tweeted affirmatively in response.
After living and working in Nepal for most of the last 8 years, I also concur.
A reproduction of an Instagram post about a family in Nepal pressuring their young professional adult medical doctor daughter based in Australia to accept an arranged marriage proposal from a complete stranger. In spite of her "No" the day the post was published, it had been three weeks of constant pressure from the family to accept the proposal, completely ignoring her wishes and thus putting her through a lot of mental and emotional agony!
Life at home among the familiar and predictable—people, culture, social and physical surroundings, routines etc. — surprises and challenges generally are few and far in between, unless you go in search of them or are on the lookout for. When traveling however, unexpected and unfamiliar struggles and challenges are routine, and that's one reason to travel!
Something I have been curious to learn more about for a while: Why are Nepalis so defensive when it comes to comments about, or criticisms of, their beliefs or cultural practices? And why is one of the objections always, "You can't view it through Western lenses"? Here's an example of one such instance which got me scratching my head...again.
Why do most of the contestants and winners of Miss Nepal beauty pageant belong to BCN (Bahun Chhetri Newar) trio of ethnicities?
My tentative answer is that they are the most privileged groups in the country, and the pageant is of the BCN, by the BCN, for the BCN!