Maoists at the Hearth ─ Everyday Life in Nepal's Civil War

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal lasted from 1996 to 2006, and at the pinnacle of their armed success the Maoists controlled much of the countryside. "Maoists at the Hearth," which is based on ethnographic research that commenced more than a decade before the escalation of the civil war in 2001, explores the daily life in a hill village in central Nepal, during the "People's War." It focuses on the way inhabitants managed their everyday activities following the arrival of the Maoists in the late 1990s, exploring their changing social relationships with fellow villagers and the parties to the conflict both during the insurgency and in its aftermath.War is not an interruption that suspends social processes. Daily life in the village focused as usual on social challenges, interpersonal negotiations, and essential duties such as managing agricultural work, running households and organizing development projects. But as Judith Pettigrew shows, social life, cultural practices, and everyday activities are reshaped in uncertain and dangerous circumstances. The book considers how these activities were conducted under dramatically transformed conditions and discusses the challenges and occasional opportunities that the villagers confronted.By considering local spatial models and their adaptation, Pettigrew explores the villagers' reactions when they lost control of the physical spaces of the village. A central consideration of "Maoists at the Hearth" is an exploration of how local social tensions were realized and renegotiated as people supported (and sometimes betrayed) each other and of how villager-Maoist relationships, which drew on a range of culturally patterned preexisting relationships, were reforged, transformed, or renegotiated in the context of the conflict.

Judith Pettigrew is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Therapies and member of the Centre for Peace and Development Studies at the University of Limerick. She is coeditor of Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal. David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. He is author of several books, including Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal (with Sarah LeVine).