Judith Pettigrew, Maoists at the Hearth

When, on February 4 1996, an obscure faction of Nepal's left-movement, submitted a 40-point memorandum to the government with the threat of initiating an armed revolt unless its ambitious demands for a completely restructured polity were immediately addressed, few had anticipated the decade-long militarized conflict that was to engulf most of the country and which left over 16,000 people dead and 1,300 missing. The history of Nepal's Maoist uprising is yet to be written, in part because its effects are still unfolding. But it is an event which has drastically altered the country's social and political landscape and none more so than in the rural areas. Adopting the Maoist strategy of a 'Protracted War', it survived in the interstices of the village economy, drawing from it resources of personnel and food while exerting varied control over rural politics in its effort to combat and drive away the local state, in particular police and health posts. The Maoist movement, a surprisingly tight organization composed of various fronts and alliances, grew through the mass mobilization, conscripted and voluntary, of significant sections of rural youth whose participation reverberated through the entire social fabric as generations became adversaries and as villages split along political lines. Adopting an interventionist 'cultural revolution', the Maoists sought to reconfigure the basic social relationships at the heart of a caste-dominated discriminatory social order. However, in their trail, the Maoists left not so much permanently altered societal structures as much as changed consciousness and scarred relations. Nationally, the legacy of Maoism in Nepal might be visible only in the birth of

Caste · Civil society · Economic growth · Militarization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Nepal

• Fear and everyday life in rural Nepal

  Open Access•Jonathan Pettigrew, Judith Pettigrew et al.•Dialectical Anthropology•2009

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