323 research outputs found
Traditional Healers and Mental Health in Nepal: A Scoping Review.
Despite extensive ethnographic and qualitative research on traditional healers in Nepal, the role of traditional healers in relation to mental health has not been synthesized. We focused on the following clinically based research question, "What are the processes by which Nepali traditional healers address mental well-being?" We adopted a scoping review methodology to maximize the available literature base and conducted a modified thematic analysis rooted in grounded theory, ethnography, and phenomenology. We searched five databases using terms related to traditional healers and mental health. We contacted key authors and reviewed references for additional literature. Our scoping review yielded 86 eligible studies, 65 of which relied solely on classical qualitative study designs. The reviewed literature suggests that traditional healers use a wide range of interventions that utilize magico-religious explanatory models to invoke symbolic transference, manipulation of local illness narratives, roles, and relationships, cognitive restructuring, meaning-making, and catharsis. Traditional healers' perceived impact appears greatest for mild to moderate forms of psychological distress. However, the methodological and sample heterogeneity preclude uniform conclusions about traditional healing. Further research should employ methods which are both empirically sound and culturally adapted to explore the role of traditional healers in mental health
'We Nepalis': Language, Literature and the Formation of a Nepali Public Sphere in India, 1914-1940.
This thesis examines the processes which led to the emergence and development of a form of Nepali public sphere in India in the early twentieth century. It proposes that an analysis of the rational-critical modes of discourse adopted by this sphere, and their extension into areas of social, cultural and political institutionalisation offers the best way of understanding the formulation of a modern Nepali identity which has proved persuasive to this day. The central chapters focus on the way in which popular publishing built up both a large readership and the infrastructure which was adopted by more discursive journals; the contours, complexities and contradictions of the dominant rhetoric of social progress which they fuelled and propagated; the way in which rhetoric was incarnated in various organisations and social structures, and the extent to which social mobility allowed power relations to be redrawn while other paradigms of exclusion continued to delimit participation in public life; finally, it offers an assessment of the summation of these processes insofar as they contributed to the development of a clearly articulated, self-aware, and delimited sense of Nepali social consciousness and community belonging. This thesis is based on materials that have been almost entirely ignored by previous historical or literary studies, primarily published Nepali journals and books. It challenges many of the presumptions which underlie traditional approaches to the areas studied and offers specific critiques of a number of influential theorisations of Nepali history and society. At the heart of its analysis is a commitment to understanding the intellectual processes of community conceptualisation and rationalisation as they were experienced and expressed by Nepalis themselves in the period in question. This also entails a detailed dissection of issues of power and authority, of tendencies towards both contestation and the development of normative understandings, and, throughout, of the role of language in enabling and mediating these processes
Advancements in AI-driven multilingual comprehension for social robot interactions: An extensive review
In the digital era, human-robot interaction is rapidly expanding, emphasizing the need for social robots to fluently understand and communicate in multiple languages. It is not merely about decoding words but about establishing connections and building trust. However, many current social robots are limited to popular languages, serving in fields like language teaching, healthcare and companionship. This review examines the AI-driven language abilities in social robots, providing a detailed overview of their applications and the challenges faced, from nuanced linguistic understanding to data quality and cultural adaptability. Last, we discuss the future of integrating advanced language models in robots to move beyond basic interactions and towards deeper emotional connections. Through this endeavor, we hope to provide a beacon for researchers, steering them towards a path where linguistic adeptness in robots is seamlessly melded with their capacity for genuine emotional engagement
Whose Responsibility is it Anyway? Accountability and Standpoints for Disaster Risk Reduction in Nepal
Generalisation, universal knowledge claims, and recommendations within disaster studies are problematic because they lead to miscommunication and the misapplication of actionable knowledge. The consequences and impacts thereof are not often considered by experts; forgone as irrelevant to the academic division of labour. There is a disconnect between expert assertions for disaster risk reduction (DRR) and their practical suitability for laypersons. Experts currently assert independently of the context within which protective action measures (PAMs) are to be used, measures unconnected to the people for whom they are developed. This has knock-on effects for DRR: much expert-generated science and policy remains unused, unimplemented, and sometimes misapplied.
I use philosophical accounts of assertion and epistemic blame to highlight the epistemic relationship between experts and laypersons. This relationship includes responsibilities and agreements between epistemic agents. Since multilevel DRR knowledge still transfers top-down from experts to laypersons, if experts impair the epistemic relationship, they can be held epistemically blameworthy. To address the pervasiveness of top-down systems, I analyse the epistemic framings and narratives currently shaping DRR, and more specifically PAMs and campaigns. I deconstruct universal perspectives that dominate the epistemic processes of generating, disseminating, and implementing DRR knowledge and specifically for co-seismic landslide PAMs for Nepal.
I argue for more inclusive, contextual, and epistemically responsible DRR. Co-production of knowledge should begin from the standpoints of marginalised persons who may have an epistemic advantage due to their socio-politically marginalised positions. Often these epistemic contributions are left out of DRR efforts because marginalised persons are rarely afforded equal, if any, epistemic agency, which results in epistemic gaps and a large pool of relevant knowledge remaining unincorporated and unused in DRR research and policy
Brokering Governance? A Political Ethnography of the UN Tenure Guidelines in Struggles for Access to Land, Fisheries and Forests in Nepal
This thesis examines the brokerage of rights-based governance, and the role of intermediary organisations therein; a key yet neglected issue in the global food and agricultural governance literature. Governance brokerage encompasses overlapping forms of mediation: brokers translate rights and development projects, across a continuum of state-society and global-local relations. The thesis assesses how civil society actors employ the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (2012) in their struggles in Nepal. The context is Nepal's 2015 Constitution, and the newly enshrined rights to food and to food sovereignty.Through a multi-sited political ethnography, I interrogate how the Tenure Guidelines were introduced into Nepal, and I observe how these spaces of policy dialogue are adapted and operationalised by three organisations, affiliated to different transnational advocacy networks. I locate state and non-state actors' uneven mediation practices at the interstices of national efforts toward inclusive deliberative spaces. I assess the extent to which they employ the Tenure Guidelines to amend and draft laws with participation of affected peoples. I analyse how the focus on law reform and multi-stakeholderism condition this process of adaptation. Based on empirically grounded research, substantiated by historical and sociopolitical analysis, I show that governance brokers play critical functions in connecting grassroots struggles to decision-makers. Yet their role as well-placed connectors isreinforced by the project-based approach to governance, in an unstable grey area of statecivil society and global-local intermediation. Beyond policy dialogue, I conclude that to bring social forces together to use human rights-based instruments as a tool in grassroots struggles, deliberative spaces need to equally be created or adapted by local activist networks, closer to the conflicts themselves
Schooling Languages: Indigeneity, Language Policy And Language Shift In Nepal
What happens when a language is allowed into school for the first time? How do policies and characterizations of languages travel through time and space? How do official metasemiotic regimes relate to linguistic behaviors and their interpretation, and what do we learn from this about phenomena such as indigeneity and states? In this dissertation, I examine these questions through the case of Dhimal, an indigenous Tibeto-Burman language spoken by around 20,000 people in the eastern plains of Nepal. Recent political changes in Nepal, a country with substantial cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity but longstanding one-nation one-language policies, guaranteed all communities the right to education in their mother tongues. Implementation of this bold provision has been a site of political struggle, shaped by relations of power and inequality between languages and their speakers. At the same time, speakers of minoritized languages increasingly demand schooling in English, and many have shifted to using Nepali in daily life.
Working in the traditions of ethnography of language policy and semiotic anthropology, I investigate citizenship, indigeneity and language policy at multiple scales of time and space. Following a brief history of language in education policy in Nepal, I discuss three government schools that have or have not introduced a Dhimal language subject, demonstrating how agents and their affiliations to political parties, not just linguistic or ethnic groups, determined school-level language policy. Through analysis of a textbook lesson as it was written and revised, I show how the voicing structure of a single text illustrated conflicting goals among the participants in a single language revitalization project. At the classroom level, teaching methods influenced by the metasemiotic projects described in the prior chapters shaped teaching methods that focused on demonstrating equivalence and separation between named languages. Outside of school, language shift was taking place due to discourse patterns in which young people were never expected to produce Dhimal language, while close examination of these and other interactions demonstrated that no matter what speech forms children produced, they were never heard by adults as speaking Dhimal
Formalizing the Informal: Development and its Impacts on Traditional Dispute Resolution in Bhutan
Bhutan, a small landlocked country, with less than a million residents lies between two of the most populous nations on earth, India and China. Beyond its beautiful scenery and national development philosophy of pursuing “Gross National Happiness,” this Article argues that it should also be known for its heritage of traditional dispute resolution. This system kept peace in villages for centuries; however, now such tradition face extinction. As argued below, such extinction stems from modernization. This Article explores the interplay between reforms to the formal justice system and the informal dispute resolution practices that operate at the local level, as well as the way these changes impact rural communities. Further, it raises important ethical questions about development initiatives that are aimed at promoting the rule of law, especially when it comes to informal, or so-called “alternative” dispute resolution processes in pluralistic legal systems
Outward looking eyes: visions of schooling, development and the state in Nepal
This study explores the relationship between global discourses of education and
development, how those ideas are taken up and utilised in the context of national programme
development and implementation, and their further reinterpretation by groups at the district
and school level. I engage in an examination of development as a socio-political process in
order to explore critically the tensions and paradoxes evident in the promotion of schooling
in contemporary Nepal. In doing so, I challenge the depoliticised vision of schooling which
underpins dominant donor discourses of education reform and highlight the political and
contested nature of education administration and the everyday activities in school.
I take as my starting point Nepal's Basic and Primary Education Project (BPEP), a multidonor
initiative aiming to improve access to schooling, the quality of education provision
and the efficiency of education administration. Developed in line with the goals of the
World Conference on Education for All, the initiative starts from the assumption that the
various parties involved - donors, central government officials, District Education Office
staff, teachers and parents - share a common interest in and commitment to the promotion of
schooling. As such, schooling is considered a clear development 'good' and the state viewed
as a single entity, acting as a benign provider of this service.
Through an exploration of the context into which this programme is inserted, the limitations
of this dominant consensus-based model are considered. Particular focus is given to the
multiple interests played out in the arena of education reform challenging the assumption of
shared interests in expanding schooling opportunities. The study traverses from debates
between the various donor and central government officials in Kathmandu, through the
implementation of the process of District Education Planning, to an examination of the
everyday practices of school life and the direct, and often violent, challenges made to the
state through schools. At each level, the conflicts of interest and multiple views of the
relationship between schooling, development and the state in Nepal are highlighted,
challenging the idea that a consensus exists around the content and purpose of schooling.
Such an analysis creates an opportunity for a more critical examination of perceptions of
schooling and the link between education and development and, as such, has implications for
how development practitioners view their role in processes of education reform in Nepal
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