A mountain village in Nepal

Mountain Village in Nepal

The cultural diversity that exists among the peoples of the world is one of the things that make the study of anthropology fascinating, endless, and rewarding all at the same time. Moreover, as much as technology has changed the world, for better or for worse, there are still examples of groups of people who have remained loyal to their primitive roots despite the drastic advances in the world all around them. For example, within the rich cultural tapestry of the world, undoubtedly one of the most fascinating cultures to be found in the entire annals of anthropology is that of the mountain villages of Nepal. The contradictions, nuances, customs and beliefs of these ancient people is worthy of closer examination. In this paper, the theory and issues of this culture and setting will be presented and discussed, in comparison and contrast to those of other parts of the world.

Who are the People of the Mountains of Nepal?

In order to be able to fully discuss and understand the many aspects of the social, economic and familial customs of the mountain dwellers of Nepal, it is extremely useful to first consider a demographic profile of the Nepalese people. Nepal is a relatively small nation, located in Asia with such huge and powerful neighbors as China. While Nepal is influenced somewhat by the influence of other cultures and its geographic neighbors, in many respects, the mountain villages of Nepal have remained the same as they were thousands of years ago. Many of the agricultural techniques and tools that are used today have not changed to any degree since the Stone Age. These simple people have been able to remain loyal to their roots and traditions and still survive despite many of the changes in other parts of the world.

Ethnography

Today, Nepal is still predominantly a primitive farming society, where nearly all of the people live in rural areas and depend on farming as a source of livelihood. Farming and agriculture are still a huge portion of the economic backbone of the Nepalese people, as the regions of Nepal itself outside the three cities in the Katmandu Valley are farming communities that use their many farms and livestock operations as a source of income. Even in the Katmandu Valley cities, approximately 3 in 10 city dwellers are agriculturalists in one form or another (Pigg, 1995). In this sense, most urban areas are still seen as agricultural areas, albeit with the introduction of the urban influence and control of the total agricultural process, but the farm is still the sort of factory where wages are earned and the people of Nepal are allowed to continue their somewhat primitive way of life. Farming is the dominant order of society and the mainstay of the economy, a situation that sees no change in sight, at least in the near future, because of the extremely slow process by which the Nepalese economy evolves, if at all. Especially in the mountain villages, the ancient ways are still held tightly by a great number of the people living in them today, seemingly despite the advancement of the rest of the world around them.

If farming is the economic mainstay of the mountainous regions of Nepal, the family can easily be considered the rock upon which economic, social, and emotional strongholds are built. The conventional family, with a few exceptions is ruled by the patriarch and consists of what would be considered the immediate family in a domestic home situation. Beyond the immediate family, there exists a larger kinship network that occasionally involves sharing food, especially in times of need for food, much like Western civilization looks after extended family members should there be a need for sustenance, particularly in a crisis situation. This network is an important means of meeting farm labor needs, especially during the planting and harvesting seasons, when labor shortages are common. These shortages are not unusual, considering the labor intensive farming methods, the widespread number of farms, and the need to make those farms as productive as possible in order to earn money to live and grow food to survive.

Above the family network is the village, which functions as a higher degree of living situation. Some villages in the more remote mountain regions of Nepal are made up of just a few houses; others were sizable communities of several neighboring hamlets. In larger villages, there are trades people who fulfill many of the needs of the villagers, such as metalworkers, weavers, and pottery makers. Villagers sometimes gather together in a team to complete "public works" projects, such as building irrigation ditches or channels, or facilities for drinking water.

Despite the popularity of farming, and the need for a lot of labor to make the farms successful, Nepalese villagers frequently encourage some of their children to leave in search of civil service, army, and other employment opportunities. Individual migration is often the result of a family decision and generates cash incomes, thereby providing the family with protection should the farms begin to founder or some other crisis present itself to the family. Well-to-do village families usually push their children to obtain government jobs as a means of an attractive income, job security, and the opportunity to network with important political officials as a means of advancement, gaining political favors, etc.

Although farming is the most important source of livelihood in rural areas, the limited supply of land greatly suppresses the amount of farmland development that can realistically take place. A 1981 agricultural census identifies five classes of peasantry: landless and nearly landless, people with no land or less than half a hectare; subsistence, those with half a hectare to one hectare; small, holders of one to three hectares; medium, people with three to five hectares; and large, farmers of more than five hectares, with the first two classes depending on large landowners for survival. Small landowners, on the other hand, enjoy freedom from the assistance of the large land owners and have the flexibility to make their own decisions regarding farm operations, planting, harvesting and the like. On the downside, however, they also do not have access to the financial support of the larger landowners, which could explain the widespread poverty that exists in the small mountain villages of Nepal to this day.

Ethnographically speaking, the mountain dwellers of Nepal are generally family oriented farming people, who while not overly wealthy, work hard and make every effort to remain independent, raise their families, and perhaps even advance their children into a better way of life. Regarding the Nepalese family structure, this structure is important to consider as well when evaluating the Nepalese culture.

An Overview of Familial Structures and Bonds

The various ways that families are formed and live their everyday lives, for all of their differences, typically have some common factors within them. Overall, when speaking of cultural defined relationships between people who are commonly considered to have family ties, one refers to the concepts of kinship (Palomar, 2006). Within the structure of kinship, there are rules, norms and customs that are established, such as the ideas of passing of inheritance rights from one generation to another, forming the identity of individuals as members of a group, as well as blood ties, which is known as consanguinity (Palomar, 2006).

Specifically speaking of the life in Nepalese villages, there exist some very interesting parallels and paradoxes in comparison to other more advanced cultures. In reality, many of the villages in the mountains of Nepal are hardly advanced past the conditions of the Stone Age (Hitchcock, 1980). Influenced to a great deal by the culture of China, a country which borders Nepal, the kinship to be found there is very similar to that of the Chinese. In Nepal, the family, or parabar as the Nepalese would refer to it, represents a very broad line of many relatives, which extends from the primitive village life that many mountaineers live to that of the cities, where many of the younger generation migrate in order to advance their livelihoods and to start a new existence beyond their humble beginnings (Childs, 2004). Within these extended family units, the labor, which is often farm based, is divided equally, and in many cases, if a brother or sister leaves the main family unit to live away from it, he or she is given a share of their inheritance in advance.

Kinship in itself is extremely important to these people; like many societies, kinship is a main principle of social organization along with age and gender for example (Childs, 2004). Further, kinship is the uniting factor that links one generation to another, which could be a main reason for many of the Nepalese customs being sustained for century after century.

Status Symbols in the Mountains of Nepal

While it may sound like a misnomer to discuss the concept of status symbols in the mountain villages of Nepal, these symbols do exist, admittedly different in nature than those of the Western world, however. Of course, Western culture often holds material consumer products in high regard as status symbols, such as homes, automobiles, elaborate clothing, and the like. In the case of the Nepalese, however, the case is vastly different. In the mountain villages, land is the primary commodity that is held in the highest regard as a symbol of status, wealth and power. This is so for very specific reasons, given the fact that land is in short supply in Nepal, land is vital in a mostly agrarian society such as that of the Nepalese villages, and the very simple way of life that the villagers lead makes many of the common Western status symbols unnecessary at best and outright ridiculous at the very least.

The status symbol of land in Nepal seems to be mostly centered on the males of the culture; for the females, who are generally prohibited from owning land, education is something that is one tangible measure of women's status was their educational attainment. Although the constitution offers women equal educational opportunities, many social, economic, and cultural factors contributed to lower enrollment and higher dropout rates for girls. Illiteracy imposed the greatest hindrance to enhancing equal opportunity and status for women. They were caught in a vicious circle imposed by the patriarchic society. Their lower status hindered their education, and the lack of education, in turn, constricted their status and position. Although the female literacy rate has improved noticeably over the years, the level in the early 1990s fell far short of the male level. The level of educational attainment among female children of wealthy and educated families was much higher than that among female children of poor families. This class disparity in educational attainment was also true for boys. In Nepal, as in many societies, education was heavily class-biased.

By the early 1990s, a direct correlation existed between the level of education and status. Educated women were given more opportunities to advance themselves, achieve independence, and perhaps even break from the restrictions of mountain life to study, work and live in the cities of Nepal. Whatever the achievement of the educated woman outside of her family, however, an educated woman did not necessarily hold a higher status at home than her uneducated counterpart. Also within the family, a woman's status, especially a daughter-in-law's status, was more closely tied to her husband's authority and to her parental family's wealth and status than anything else.

Gender Roles

Anthropologically speaking, the baseline of measuring the status of men or women in terms of their gender is done within the context of their access to knowledge, economic resources, and political power, as well as their freedom when given an active role in the process of decision making. More specifically, within the mountain regions of Nepal, as long as recorded history has existed, women have clearly been put in a role that is subordinate to men in the majority of the Nepalese ethnic groups, with some exceptions. Without bogging down the research with minute details, suffice it to say that some regions provide more freedom to women than others, due to a variety of factors. One common trait in most of the regions of Nepal however is the power that the senior woman of each family holds. As a form of cultural tradition, the senior woman controls resources such as food, medicine, clothing, coordinating the planting and harvesting of crops, and budgeting the spending of money and purchasing of the goods that the family needs. The younger women are many times relegated to the more menial daily chores that need to be performed within the family, and despite having to use more physical energy than the older women, are typically allotted less food, even in comparison to the males of the same age group.

Restrictions to Sexual Access

As a cultural standard of sorts, most, if not all cultures have defined rules regarding sexual access, and the lack thereof. Within the scope of marriage, with few exceptions, sexual contact with those outside of the marriage is universally viewed off-limits especially for the woman and in most cases for the man as well. Beyond this more defined structure of limited access, it is also common in most cultures for sexual access to children, close relatives, and those unable to make a conscious consent to sexual contact to be considered taboo. This protects those who are unable to protect themselves from unwanted sexual solicitation, and also gives the culture a baseline of morality and standards of conduct to assure the effective functioning of the culture overall. This being said, it is also important to realize that for as primitive as the Nepalese mountain villagers may be in some respects, they are also very conscious of limiting inappropriate sexual access to certain members of society, with special protection being afforded to women, as gender is very important to these people.

Marriage in Nepalese Culture

Related to gender in the Nepalese culture is the issue of marriage. The concept of marriage exists in one form or another in virtually all cultures, and within the framework of marriage, there are certain universal traits that are true in the culture of Nepal, indicative of many other cultures in other parts of the world.

Marriage, broadly defined, is the socially recognized union of two or more people, generally viewed as an effective way to regulate heterosexual intercourse by determining socially acceptable sexual partners (Palomar, 2006). Generally speaking, the act of marriage between two or more people places people outside of the marriage off-limits in terms of sexual activity. What this type of an arrangement serves to achieve is a definition of morality, social order, and respect for the union of people together in a marital setting. The bond of marriage, in the case of the mountain people of Nepal, takes on several important implications. Through marriage, the Nepalese form political alliances for the gaining and holding of power, attainment of respect and wealth/material possessions, although as noted earlier, these material possessions generally focus on land and agriculture, and not many of the more consumer-oriented goods that may be coveted by other cultures internationally. Because of the order that marriages provides in Nepal and other parts of the world, cultures are able to maintain internal order, prolong the life and vitality of the family unit, and interact with others within their culture who are not necessarily family members, but have some commonality with the family of their spouse in terms of values, customs, and priorities.

One of the most important parts of the marriage process in any situation is the means by which an individual chooses marriage partner(s); generally, this selection process tends to be culturally defined (Palomar, 2006). In the Western tradition, affection, physical attraction, sexual compatibility and love are important criteria when selecting spouses. Beyond this, on of the main attributes that many cultures emphasize in the selection of marriage partners is physical beauty. While the concept of beauty is highly subjective most of the time, cultures often do hold certain universal standards as the norm for the evaluation of a potential spouse, one of the most significant being physical beauty. This beauty is based in large part upon cultural traditions as well; for example, some groups maintain that women who are more curvaceous are the standard of beauty, but others stand by the belief that women should be extremely thin in order to be considered the most attractive and suitable for marriage, reflecting a difference of viewpoint and opinion among the world's cultures themselves.

Ethnocentricities can also contribute in large part to the perception of beauty, as some races of people unfortunately view certain others as unattractive, whereas some cultures are broadly considered to be physically beautiful simply by their inclusion in that group.

Mating Patterns in Culture

The Nepalese culture is not much different from other cultures in terms of the matting patterns that exist. Despite centuries of advancement, there are still some norms that are maintained by the people of Nepal. Whether for economic/political reasons, or to promote the continuance of the family blood line, like many other nations, Nepal holds marriage in extremely high regard. Conversely, those who remain unmarried are viewed to be at a disadvantage in some cases, leading to pity from others, and to be undesirable, leading to unfair hatred in others, making the bold assumption that one remains unmarried mostly due to some sort of character flaw that they possess which makes them unworthy of the benefits of marriage. Moving from the remote mountain villages of Nepal to the larger, more urban areas, the perception of unmarried people seems to be somewhat more favorable, perhaps due to the more liberal viewpoints of city dwellers, or perhaps even due to the influence of other cultures in the melting pots of the cities, where diversity exists and different points-of-view are often shared tolerantly with others. In all societies, whether expressly regulated by law or guided through tradition, there are rules of one form or another to regulate the finalizing of a marriage "contract." These rules include privileges, rights and responsibilities of the couple to be married, including the agreement of guidelines for sexual access, the having and caretaking of a child or children, division of labor, and the extension of kinship bonds to the relatives of the spouse. As one can see, these rules, and how they are carried out, can vary greatly due to cultural customs or even the established law.

Proliferation of the Members of a Culture

The future of any culture depends upon new people being introduced into the culture; this introduction most often occurs through reproduction of the members of that culture to create children who will grow up in that culture itself. Despite the obvious benefits that having large numbers of children would have in increasing the size of the ranks of a culture, the practicality of supporting and providing for all of these children inevitably leads to the need to limit the number of births, or at the very least make it possible for births to occur in a properly scheduled way so that each child that has the potential to be a healthy, positive addition to the cultural makeup can do so to the best of their ability, without being overcrowded or pushed aside by less viable individuals. On the darker side of this initiative exist the methods of terminating pregnancies, but many cultures have realized the value of abstinence as a viable birth control method, a method which in many cases is compatible with religious and moral convictions.