Interpreting the Human Rights Field: A Conversation

This article takes the form of a conversation between an anthropologist and seven interpreters who worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) during its mission in Nepal (2005–2011). As any human rights or humanitarian worker knows quite well, an interpreter is essential to any field mission; they are typically the means by which ‘internationals’ are able to speak to any local person. Interpreters make it possible for local events to be transformed into a globally legible register of human rights abuses or cases. Field interpreters are therefore crucial to realizing the global ambitions of any bureaucracy like the UN. Yet rarely do human rights officers or academics (outside of translation studies) hear from interpreters themselves about their experience in the field. This conversation is an attempt to bridge this lacuna directly, in the hope that human rights practitioners and academics might benefit from thinking more deeply about the people upon whom our knowledge often depends

Domestic archives: Memory and home in Kathmandu.

This dissertation, Domestic Archives: Memory and Home in Kathmandu , examines the relationship between sentiments, cultural memory, and politics in contemporary Kathmandu. Set during the tumultuous decade after the reestablishment of democracy in 1990, the dissertation looks at several ideologies that inform the way the past is constructed in contemporary Kathmandu, ranging from bikas (progress, democracy) to the popular interest in narrating one's own history and heritage. Recent debates in the city about the possibilities and limits of the current democracy are often articulated through the language of sentiment and deploy other stories about the cultural, national, or personal past. The chapters discuss four different domestic archives: the Kathmandu FM radio, a proposed reform for inheritance law, an urban practice of visuality and remembrance, and the discourse of history and heritage. While domestic archives draw on the categories of knowledge and sentiments produced by state archives, the primary agents of domestic archives act outside of the state. Each of the domestic archives I examine here creates narratives about the past and sentiments like nostalgia, loss, love, and dispossession that carve boundaries between different urban publics. The domestic archives examined in the dissertation, then, work in two directions: They point to the way the domestic world is archived, through laws, popular written narratives, photographs and saved objects in the home, as well as the way the categories of state archives are domesticated in everyday social relations.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129811/2/3042102.pd