By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) has transformed Nepali society within a period of less than a decade. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, not on the military or political aspects of the People's War, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution: of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, reconfiguring the ways people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'. |
