interview with Bista.pdf

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Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and

Himalayan Studies Volume 17Number 1Himalayan Research Bulletin Article 5

1-1-1997

An Interview with Dor Bahadur Bista James F. FisherCarleton College

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n Interview with Dor Bahadur Bista

James F. FisherDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology

Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

Reprinted with permission from The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. This interview took placein Kathmandu Nepal May 22 1991.

JFF: Most foreign scholars in Nepal regard you asthe father of Nepalese anthropology. Can you tell ushow you came to be an anthropologist?

DBB: Professor [Christoph] von Furer-Haimendorffrom London University was here to go to SoluKhumbu for field research and was looking for anassistant/informant. I went and worked with him.That's how my interest in anthropology began. Ihappened to be the first Nepali student of anthropology.That's how I got the title.

JFF: What were you doing at the time he came?

DBB: I was the headmaster of a girls' high schoolthat I had started in 1952. I resigned my position asheadmaster to go with him.

JFF: How did you move from being a field assistantto being an anthropologist in your own right?

DBB: Well, from my own point of view I didn'tenlist as an assistant to begin with. I was looking for aNepali companion to travel with me. So when I foundHaimendorf, I went to him and said, I will be glad ifyou allow me to come with you; my advantage will bethat I will be looking into my own country, my ownsociety, and not just with one pair of eyes and one pairof ears but with the added pair of eyes and ears of a

professor of London University of the reputation whichyou have. And in return, I'm willing to do anything,whatever you want me to do. That's how I offered myservices. But from his point of view, he was looking -for an assistant/informant, and I fit into that role.Frankly, had not even heard the word anthropologyin those days. I had to go and look in the dictionary tofind out what the word meant.

DOR BAHADUR BISTA/Fisher

JFF: What kind of research of your own did you dowhen you were with him in the field?

DBB: In the beginning, I maintained my ownjournal in Nepali and noted down everything-literallyeven trees and birds. All I was doing was opening myeyes and ears. I didn't know what I was doing. All Iwas doing was looking for everything. I didn't knowwhat was important. So I recorded anything andeverything-that s how I began. But soon after, as wemoved along, increasingly I began to discipline myself,following and imitating his style. He was collectingcertain types of information, which raised questions in

my mind: Why is he doing this? What is the point ofraising certain questions and not other types ofquestions?

JFF: Since you had come from a high-caste Hindubackground yourself, what was your reaction to lifeamong the Sherpas?

DBB: In the beginning, I must say I was shocked,because of the background I had, the way I was raised.But I already had some questions in my mind about thevalidity of the style of life, the attitude, and the worldview which I had been given, both within the familyand within the context of Hindu values. I was quitewell educated in Sanskrit. I had studied Hindu

mythology-Shrimad-Bhagavad, Mahabharata,Ramayana, Mitishash-tra and so on. Therefore I wasquite well versed not only in the folk tradition of Hindureligion and high-caste values but also in the classicaldefinition of what a Hindu society should be. So I hadalready begun to question the discrepancy between theway society and individuals behaved and the standardprescribed norms. Of course I didn't know anythingoutside of Hindu society, so my questions at that pointwere aimed at Hindu society itself. I was, in a way,

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ready to absorb anything that I could see outside thesocial norms I was brought up with. I was quite willingto accept Sherpa norms as one of the variances becausethe level of society I was brought up in itself had somany unorthodox and unprescribed irregularities. Thatwas the beginning of both my inquisitiveness and myopenness to absorbing and accepting the variations.Accepting several norms was no problem for me at all.

f I hadn't had the background of Sanskritic educationand the norms and values which I was raised in, itwould have been difficult for me to accept. But I wasalready beginning to look at differences with an openmind, at least theoretically. But actually living withEuropean Christians among Buddhists was not easy inthe beginning. That is why I was shocked at first.

IFF: How did you move from that period offieldwork to other aspects of anthropology?

DBB: Increasingly I began to feel both inquisitiveand interested in anthropology and at the same timesuffocated. I did not see my own future limited to beingjust an informant and field assistant. I wanted tobecome an anthropologist like Haimendorf himself.And Haimendorf could in absolutely no way allow orvisualize my being his student in anthropology. Lateron, while still in the field, it became clearer that Iwanted to be an anthropologist and have a career inanthropology, and Haimendorf did not want me tobecome one. Of course, in all fairness to him, later on,in 1960, with my persistence he agreed to become mysupervisor and professor, and therefore I mustn't judgehim only by the way he was in the beginning. Heaccepts me as a colleague now, but in the beginning Ihad to be persistent. Most of his European andAmerican students find it difficult to understand this,because he has always been supportive of them in theirfield research in Nepal. But the crude reality was thathis attitude towards me was very different in thebeginning.

IFF: When was it that you went to London, andwhat were the circumstances of that visit?

DBB: I was with Haimendorf throughout 1957:seven months in Sherpa country and then another twomonths in the Eastern Hills, all the way to the border,into Darjeeling, and then two months in the KaskiLamjung area, among the Gurungs, and one monthamong the Chhetris of the southern part of KathmanduValley. By this time, I had been well t ra ined ormaybe self trained I don't know whether he was tryingto train me or whether I was, as far as he was concerned,still just an employee working for 100 rupees permonth plus food. But I trained myself in the disciplineof field anthropology. Then in 1960 I got theopportunity to go to London nothing to do withanthropology, because it was in the Department ofLinguistics. They needed a research assistant to helpteach Nepali at the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies. T. W. Clark was preparing his Nepali textbookwith recorded oral texts on discs. He needed a middle-

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class Kathmandu colloquial native speaker. He washaving problems recording with two earlier non-Nepalispeaking assistants. Haimendorf recommended mebecause he needed me to further process his own fielddata. I could continue to work with him as his assistantand help him with discrepancies, fill in gaps, identifythe masses of photographs he had taken he couldn'tpossibly remember where they were all taken, who thepeople were, and so on. At the same time I couldsupport myself working as a research assistant in theLinguistics Department with Clark. I tried to join theDepartment of Anthropology as an undergraduate. Itwas very difficult Haimendorf didn't think I wouldmake a good student of anthropology. But I insisted,and finally I was admitted as an undergraduate. And Idid finish my undergraduate work.

IFF: That was your ethnography diploma?

DBB: Yes, a Certificate in Indian Ethnography.Then Haimendorf invited me to come to Nepal withhim again as his field assistant, but by this time I wasalready registered as a graduate student at LondonUniversity, so he said, Well, I am going to be yoursupervisor, and, since I am going to be reading andhelping you with your Master's thesis, why don't youcome out with me and help me? Clark wanted me tostay on in London and help him. Haimendorf and Clarkhad serious quarrels over this. But in the end I cameback to Nepal. At the end of the fieldwork he managedto discourage me enough that I didn't go back to Londonto finish my degree. I stayed home.

IFF: Where did you go with Haimendorf on thissecond trip?

DBB: To the Kaligandaki Valley and Dolpa.

IFF: Since your career in London was terminated,what was the next step for you?

DBB: Well, for me there were serious problems.One was that I had my wife and four children. That wasone concern. Second, I had opportunities here for agood job. Haimendorf didn't want me to finish mydegree in anthropology and didn't want me to come backwith him to London. I was already half-decided to stayhome, because of my family and my job. And then myown professor, my supervisor, didn't want to review mythesis, and so the balance weighed heavily towardsstaying behind. I was unhappy that I couldn't finish mydegree, and yet I couldn't walk away from anthropology.I was already deep inside it. So I had to make a choice.Either I had to take the risk of pushing my family intofurther hardship and problems, because my family, mywife particularly, would have a harder time, or I couldcontinue my study of anthropology unofficially andcontinue my conflict with Haimendorf. You maywonder why I say conflict with Haimendorf. He hadspecifically told me at one point that I would not beallowed to publish anything in English, although hewould not mind my publishing in Nepali, because allthe information I had collected was under his copyright.

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That is why I had to revisit those areas to collect myown data later on. That was the reason he was shockedwhen I published my first ethnography, People ofNepal [ 1967]. He was even more shocked whenErnest Gellner helped me publish my Thakali article inMan [ 1971]. I think those years were very important,very crucial in my career in anthropology. That's why Ihad to be an unorthodox, formally speaking unqualified,

and yet seriously involved and committedanthropologist, an anthropologist without a formaldegree.

I continued my research throughout the country. Icompleted, by 1963, my extensive ethnographic surveyof the country-all the ethnic communities, includingthe smaller minority ones, such as Danuwar and Bote,of only a couple hundred people, speaking their ownlanguage. I visited all of them. In a way, this pushedme much harder to become an anthropologist than theway most anthropologists go to a university and qualifyfor a degree.

JFF: And this resulted in

DBB: The publication of People of Nepal, forwhich I was rewarded far more heavily than I hadexpected. I was rewarded financially, because manycopies were sold, but more than that, people began totake an interest in me. I was invited repeatedly tolecture undergraduate students at several universities.Mostly it was American friends and universities whoencouraged me, continually pushing me and proppingme up so that I was accepted as an anthropologist,which benefi ted me a great deal. I was encouraged andaccepted as a de facto field anthropologist of Nepal, andin those days there were no other Nepali students whohad studied anthropology. This helped me not bedisappointed and take a negative turn towardsanthropo logy in general. Without this support Iprobably would have gradually turned in a differentdirection. But this continuous encouragement fromAmerica directly or indirectly helped me a great deal.

Therefore later on I decided to develop a specific fieldof Nepali anthropology. That's how I became the

father of Nepali anthropology. I thought the earlierlevel of anthropology which Haimendorf did was aproduct of colonial days, and he was a colonialprofessor. He maintained a native-versus-Westernuniversity- professor kind of attitude. He may havechanged by now, but I could never forget those days.We Nepalis, i f we had to develop a field of

anthropology, or a department of anthropology atTribhuvan University, or train a younger generation ofNepalis (which I did later on), had to develop adiscipline of anthropology with a specific focus onNepal and Nepal's future. And therefore it had to beappl ied- couldn't continue on in theoreticalanthropology. My own experience with a colonialanthropologist proved that there was no room for thediscipline in Nepal if we were only going to mimicEuropean schools of anthropology. There was

DOR BAHADUR BIST A/Fisher

absolutely no point in Nepalis becoming the Europeantype of anthropologist.

So, from that time on I began to think veryseriously whether anthropology was a useful disciplinefor a country like ours. f it was, it had to be applied,related to development, and also closely connected withsociology, because we had no need to have sociology asa separate field as in the West and anthropology couldnot do all the work towards development alone. It hadto be future-oriented. Just field ethnography would beof absolutely no use. What do Sanskritic texts like thePuranas do? Pandits can recite and collect dachina butethnographers cannot afford to recite texts and collectdachina- no Nepalis are going to pay you for that. thad to be useful.

JFF: Was your People of Nepal conceived in theolder style?

DBB: In the older style, absolutely, because that wasan imitation of what Haimendorf did to a certain extent.

JFF: When did you make this change to Nepalese

anthropology?DBB: In the late sixties, after I visited America.

You invited me to the University of Missouri inColumbia in 1965, and then I visited the University ofChicago and met Sol Tax. After that I was at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle, and then I visitedBerkeley and met George Foster. In 1966 I visited theUniversity of Hawaii and the University of Wisconsin.In the '70s I widened my anthropological horizons whenI met [Robert] Murphy and Marvin Harris at Columbia.But by the end of '68 I was clear about whatanthropology was needed for Nepal and what I wasgoing to do. From the end of '68 through 1972 Iworked with His Majesty's Government as anadministrator for area development in the northernHimalayan regions. I applied my own anthropologicalknowledge of that region for economic development.By that time it had become clear that if I wrote anotherbook I would write a very, very different kind of bookfrom People of Nepal.

JFF: Most anthropologists don't realize that youalso have a kind of secondary career as a creativewriter-in Nepal you've published stories and novels.Can you comment on that, on how youranthropological training, or lack of it, affected yourother writing?

DBB: I began oddly enough, many years before, as acreative writer, and I had already published a couple ofshort stories and a few poems, and I wrote essays whichwere not philosophic but almost, I would say now,ethnographic. So I already had an interest in writing.When I went into anthropology my interest in writingincreased, and I found anthropology quite useful, andsubsequently I wrote half a dozen short stories,anthropologically oriented, that is, based onethnographic peculiarities.

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JFF: Do you think you might not have gone in thatdirection if you had followed full-blown anthropologicaltraining?

DBB: f I hadn t gone into anthropology I wouldhave continued in creative writing and I would havewritten very different kinds of things. But once I wentinto anthropology my creative writing interest wasgreatly hampered. I couldn t write anything withoutbringing in anthropological material. My novelShotala, which is based on the adventures of a Nepaliin Tibet, is an example. In a way it s a novel, but atthe same time I put many ethnographic materials in it.And so if I had gone further into anthropology maybe Iwould have completely stopped my creative writing, andif I hadn t gone into anthropology at all I would havegone into creative writing alone. But I became amishmash, half this, half that.

JFF: I think it was in 1972 that you left your job atthe Remote Areas Development Committee and went asthe consul general of Nepal to Lhasa . Can youcomment on that experience on how anthropologyaffected the way you saw things in Tibet and how youperceived the Tibetan situation and the Chinese there?

DBB: When I was assigned to Lhasa, the mostimportant ideas His Majesty the King had in mind atthe t ime and he gave me personal instructions as towhat my role was going to be concerned political andcommercial matters. Our trade relations with Tibetwere at a very low level at the time, so we had to revivethem for the sake of our northern-region people andNepal as a whole. And there was naturally a politicalrole. So in the beginning, although my knowledgeabout the northern high-altitude area was very useful, Ididn t see myself operating as an anthropologist there. I

was mostly representing my country, and therefore myinterest was to see how best I could serve the interest ofmy country at the political and commercial levels. Ithink I managed to achieve most of what I started out todo and also most of what His Majesty the King at thetime had mandated me to do. I didn t see my role inTibet as that of an anthropologist, but nevertheless myanthropological eyes and ears were open I couldn tclose them. When I saw Tibet versus China, Tibetanversus Chinese, I wrote a report exactly as I saw it,without any interpretations, just the way I did inPeople of Nepal. My book Report from Lhasa[1979] is a travelogue. I described what I saw, withoutany value judgments one way or another because I

thought it would be inappropriate for me as therepresentative of a friendly government and as adiplomat to make value judgments. Even though it s aconsulate, our position in Lhasa is unique in the sensethat it is not a consulate like those in many othercommercial towns where consuls are sent purely forcommercial trade purposes. For more than 300 yearsNepal has had an official envoy in Lhasa. t is a verydifferent role, far more important and unique in itshistorical context. For that reason I did not do any

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formal anthropology while I was there. But I could seethe situation there.

One other thing: was there towards the end of theCultural Revolution, so things were not very smoothand normal. There were stiff, strict restrictions all over.I did make my travels but they were restricted, and I hadto be escorted by host-government representatives. Butmy movements within Lhasa were not restricted. I had alot of friends I could visit. On my recent visit to Lhasat was very different, far more open, and there was not

much restriction, a lot of tourists coming in. I hadn tbeen too far off the realities I had predicted.Unfortunately, the article I wrote about this disappearedin America with most of my color slides.

JFF: Did the fact that you had become very familiarwith Tibetan culture through your residence with theSherpas affect in any way your perception of Tibet?

DBB: Very much so. Because of my studies of theSherpas I was quite familiar with Tibetan society andculture and religion. The Western concern was that the

Chinese were destroying Tibetan culture, religion andcivilization. I said that was not true, that they were notdoing it deliberately. Of course, during the CulturalRevolution they did destroy much but the Chinese RedGuards were destroying everything religious and culturalthroughout China. They were destroying temples,monasteries, burning books, and in the Western worldsometimes there are slightly misguided reports that theChinese were doing this in a colonial style to theTibetans, which is a little bit distorted, because ChineseRed Guards at the time were destroying everythingcultural and religious everywhere. So, when things inLhasa were destroyed, it wasn t the Chinese destroyingTibetan things Tibetan members of the Red Guard

were doing it There were former lamas, former monks,former disciples of these various monasteriesthemselves destroying this under the Red Guard. TheWestern world, with its own colonial history, had anobsession with it and guilt about it and tried to interpretthings the way 19th-century colonials did throughoutthe world. It s not the same thing. The Chinese inTibet are not colonial. It s a big political issue andcontroversial. I don t want to talk about that. TheChinese did not have a colonial attitude towards Tibetthis is what I had said in that article which wasn tpublished.

JFF: Well, lets pick up the story then, after yourthree years in Lhasa. What was the next stage in thedevelopment of your career?

DBB: I came back after three years in Lhasa. Iworked briefly for the resettlement program along thesouthern border for two years and then I went to theuniversity. My studies in anthropology and myexperience in Lhasa led me more and more to theacademic field, away from administration anddevelopment, where I had been working. Tribhuvan

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University wanted to start a department of anthropologyand created a chair in anthropology for me.

JFF: That was in Centre for Nepal and AsianStudies?

DBB: No, not to begin with. A chair was created inanthropology for a Department of Anthropology in1977 but about that time I was offered a Fulbright

senior fellowship to go to Columbia University. Myfriend Theodore Riccardi had recommended me for this.I was there for one academic year. Then the formervice-chancellor who had helped create this chair ofanthropology retired, and his successor invited me to bethe director of CNAS. This chair of anthropologystayed with CNAS for some years until I asked to haveit transferred to the Department of Sociology/Anthropology, of which I was chairman.

JFF: What changes did you bring to CNAS?

DBB: Well, aside from administrative reforms, I wasvery adventurous in expanding anthropology and CNASresearch activities. It had been a rather tame, small, and

very disciplined institution until then. It was led byPrayog Raj Sharma, a scholar of good reputation. Butwhen I came in, with my experience in wide-rangingactivities both within the government and outside it, athome and around the world, I could not stay with what Ifound. I explained various fields of activities in manydifferent disciplines; I invited young people to startresearch and senior people to write books. While I wasthere I started more than a dozen book-length projectson Nepalese history, economics, culture, religion,philosophy, anthropology and sociology. Quite a fewbooks were published. I built a building and equipped it.

But aside from these logistical and administrativematters I did other very important things. I began aregular system of open seminars, weekly seminars likethe brown-bag lunch seminars in American universities.This being a new concept, many Nepali academicsfound it difficult to accept, because for them a seminarincluded full paraphernalia: written paperscommentators, moderators, announcements, pay forpaper presenters and so on. My brown-bag seminarswere appreciated by most people, but a few continued tobe uncomfortable with it. As soon as I retired from thedirectorship it unfortunately was discontinued.Anyway, I found it very helpful, and foreign scholarsand ambassadors used to attend because there were alsopapers on politics, political development, internationalrelations. This made some of my colleaguesuncomfortable because CNAS's role until then had beenmostly linguistic, historic and anthropological. Butwith the name Nepal and Asian Studies I saw noreason to restrict ourselves to history, linguistics, andanthropology. Some thought my activities were tooambitious , too unwieldy for that time. I didn't thinkso. Therefore CNAS did become different, in my periodof three years, from what it had been. We became veryactive, with lots of young people coming in, not only


Nepalis but many American and West European,Japanese, and Russian people too.

JFF: And then when you retired from thedirectorship, you actively started building a departmentof anthropology and sociology, now one of the biggestand most popular in the university. Can you tell us ofthose early days?

DBB: I belonged to a totally different generation.The younger generation had come, by this time, fromvarious universities from around the world-fromAmerica, Europe, India, and so on. What I thought wasthat there was no need for our university to haveseparate departments of sociology and anthropology.This was hard to bring home to my junior colleagueswith graduate degrees from universities with separatedepartments. They felt very uncomfortable with myidea of having a single department. They said, Well,we can have a single department, but with two separatecourses of teaching. I insisted on a single pedagogicaltrack, because if you keep in mind what Nepal is andwhat Nepal's future needs are, then there is no point in

having two departments. So that was hardest for me inthe beginning, to keep both disciplines in some kind ofhybrid system. But we compromised by giving twooptional courses for the two disciplines and keeping therest of the courses combined, so that students couldchoose to call their degrees sociology or anthropology.

The other difficult part, which I insisted on with myjunior colleagues was a dissertation based oncompulsory fieldwork for the Master's degree. Theuniversity had an optional arrangement for any studentwho wanted to submit a fieldwork-based dissertation,but I said it had to be compulsory or no one would goto the field. And the way I visualized it, the departmentwould not produce suitable graduates unless they wererequired to do fieldwork. Without it they would not beany different from graduates in other disciplines in thesocial sciences such as political science and economics.There was a great deal of pressure to keep it optional,and if the department had been organized without me orby somebody else at a different stage, we would havehad two separate departments and fieldwork would nothave been compulsory. To make sure it would work Ifound several kinds of financial support to pay studentsin the field and while they wrote their dissertations. Ialso asked you to come and help the department in this.My friend John Cool then head of WinrockInternational in Kathmandu, helped by providingfellowships for study in Southeast Asian universitiesand giving some money for research and writing M.A.theses. Of course, you must also remember that myexposure to American universities and contact withanthropologists such as Sol Tax George Foster,Marvin Harris, and you yourself had a lot to do withwhat I was doing.

JFF: Do you feel satisfied that the department nowrepresents the kind of Nepalese orientation that youwanted all along for it to achieve?

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DBB: I have to make c lear tha t as far as I mconcerned I can talk only about Nepal, not othercountries. Although I would say that this stratifiedfatalistic model of caste was imported from India at ~c e r ~ a i nstage in our history I don t mean to say thatIndta altogether is like that, but I do wish India wouldget rid of Hindu fundamentalists saying they want todemolish a mosque which is more than 400 years old.

But let s keep within the Nepalese context. For me,Nepal, like any country, has always learned, imitated,borrowed practices from the countries and societiesaround it. Even in the most isolated countries there isalways borrowing certainly in languages, and also incultural practices, in artifacts, in architecture and so on.Until medieval times the countries of reference wereonly Nepal, India, Tibet, China; Nepal had no contactwith o t h e ~countries. Now, with the technological age,we come mto contact with most of the countries of thew?rld. Naturally, therefore, Nepalis today adopt certaint h t ~ g sAmerican, certain things Japanese, certain thingsChmese, and as they always have, certain things Indian.~ h t I am s y i n ~is that you cannot continually

dtsmantle the baste social structure, the norms andvalues, and the nature of the composition of the societyand reconstruct it. No society can afford to do that. Wehave seen that in some of the countries which triedMarxism/Leninism and found that it didn t work thesociety has a certain degree of resilience and sp;ingsback to its native system.

So in Nepal, this Indian caste system was adoptedonly by a small number of people at the highestpolitical level, which of course, happens to be the mostvisible. By no means it is the majority culture. It s asmall minority but it is highly visible, so short- timevisitors always notice it. Longtime residents see otherlevels too. We will continue to borrow lifestyles andlanguages and dress and music, but we cannot dismantleour basic social structure and borrow one frome l s e ~ ~ e r eTherefore what I recommend to planners,admtmstrators, and political leaders is that we go backto the basic native structure of the society, which todayis strictly maintained without much disturbance amongt h ~ ethnic coi?-munities. The so-called high-casteHmdus have tned to adopt many new things and havecontinued to change. Therefore this elite level of thesociety is no model for the rest of the country. Youcannot impose it.

It s hopeless to try to. Even if you could, it woulds ~ pthe ~ i t a l i t yof the whole society by stratifying it

hterarchtcally so that it would disintegrate as it did?uring the 17th and 18th centuries. That s my argumentm the book. You are left with backbiting, characterassassination and intolerance. The moment anyone triesto achieve something others attack and demolish him.This is the tendency within caste _society, becauseeveryone likes to be at the top, but that s not possible.

JFF: Given the increasing number of Nepalianthropologists trained in Nepal with advanced degrees


from Europe and the United States, how do you see thefuture of foreign anthropologists working in Nepal, andwhat should their relationship be with Nepaleseanthropologists?

DBB: Anthropologists from abroad have done aremarkable and very valuable job in Nepal in the sensethat without them we would not have the amount ofpublication that we do, on both the ethnic and castecommunities, Hindu or otherwise, in this country.This is a valuable resource. So at that level, anabsolutely valuable contribution has been madebeginning with, of course, Haimendorf, who has d o n ~more than anybody else so far, and we have to begrateful to him for that. But this kind of original,pioneering ethnography of any society that is notknown to the rest of the world has a limit. Even myPeople o epal is a pioneering work in the sensethat it introduces Nepali society to the world in a singlebook, although in a simplistic way. Up to a point suchstudies have value, but they tend to reach a point ofdiminishing returns because you cannot continue the

ethnographyof

exploration forever.Nepali society has gone way beyond what it was 40

years ago, after this country opened up in 1950. Nowwe are at a stage where we re dealing with real political,economic and social issues. Unless anthropology isprepared to address these problems it will lose its value.Now, this is a very crucial point: at this stage, mostforeign anthropologists cannot do this, though there area few exceptions like you, who have been a longtimeresident and keep coming back and updating yourself ongrowth and development and change. Most of them areyoung people, graduate students, and here for the firsttime. We cannot expect them to understand the wholehistoric context of the past 40 years, what the countrywas like in 1950 when it opened up and what hashappened since then. So, we can have a dialogue withyou and a few others, but we cannot possibly do thiswith anthropologists who come into this country forthe first time. They will continue their kind ofexploratory anthropology.

When you view the discipline of anthropology fromthat perspective, what becomes c lear is that it s theNepalis who will have to play the important role. It sonly the Nepalis who have lived their lives throughthese political, economic, social and administrativechanges. These are the only people who can provideinsight into the social dynamics and the direction ofchange. f you do not look at the source of the riveryou do not know where the river is headed. But e p a l i ~by themselves will also have a problem in the sensethat it is parochial to try tQ understand the wholeprocess of change in isolation, because Nepal is notalone today. You have to be able to see things in abroader perspective, in the context of similar kinds of~ o c i e t i e sor societies slightly ahead of Nepal. This veryImportant part can be played only by foreignanthropologists. Therefore I see increasingly exciting

3


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possibilities for joint work between foreign and Nepalianthropologists.

Now, when I say this, there are two very importantpoints to keep in mind. First, Nepali anthropologistshave to be trained appropriately. I'm afraid I have to saythat a Ph.D. from a foreign university does notnecessarily prepare them for this kind of role unless

they reorient themselves to the Nepali situation,because it tends to orient them towards theanthropological tradition of that particular university ordepartment or school of thought, which will beunrelated to the Nepalese context. So these Nepalis,when they have been trained abroad and come back, haveto reorient themselves to Nepal. They should not godirectly to the Department of Anthropology atTribhuvan University and start teaching anthropology.To me that is not acceptable. And second, foreignanthropologists, simply because they have been trainedat a famous university to do their research and publish abook in the United States or Europe or Japan so thattheir own colleagues can read it, will establish their

names, have jobs, get promotions, and everything, butthat has nothing to do with the Nepalese context.Many anthropologists are going to remain like that, andI have nothing to say about them. But those whoremain permanent friends of Nepal, who have developedan interest in helping Nepal have to look atanthropology from the perspective of the Nepalesesituation. That's why I call this a Nepali school ofanthropology; unless you do that, the discipline, thetool, the method, and the whole theoretical backgroundis there, but how do you apply it all? t must beculture-specific, country-specif ic. This is true of anycountry around the world. Anthropology cannot justcontinue to be guided by some American or European

schools forever. f anthropologists want to be useful toThird World countries, whether in Latin America, Africaor other parts of Asia, they have to help train theircounterparts who know their countries inside out.That's the kind of anthropology which has an absolutelyunlimited scope and future, and unless you do that,anthropology is, to me, a dead end. That doesn't meanthat anthropology departments will close down; ofcourse they will continue, they will survive, but withnot much fun and excitement and future orientation.

JFF: Tell us about the future of anthropology.

DBB: I think it's very important that we talk aboutthe future of anthropology in Nepal. It's interesting,you know, that in Nepal most academics are high-casteHindus. And therefore, it's inevitable that the style andnature of academia emanate from the interests thesehighcaste Hindu people have. By this I mean thedepartment of whatever discipline you open up at theuniversity usually becomes an end in itself. It's an

Every-country-has-a-university, why-don't-we? kindof attitude. That's why we have a university. No onethought about what the university was really going tobe. I'm afraid most Nepali academics tend to ignore that

32

question and think that simply because there areuniversities elsewhere we should have one too. f wethought more about these fundamental issues we wouldnot allow Tribhuvan University to be dominated bypolitical scandals all the time.

Therefore, when our department was organized, likeany other department it could very easily have gone inthe direction, Well, let's have a department ofsociology, or, anthropology and then, Well, whatcourses do we teach? All right, anything we can find,anything somebody happens to mention, or anythingsomebody happens to know. f you don't have a clearpurpose in your mind of what you're going to do andwhy you're going to do it, of course you are going toend up with no positive results. That's what thedifference was, I think, when I became instrumental instarting the department. I asked, Do we need adepartment of anthropology? f we do, why, and whatdo our graduate students do? That's why I think it'svery important that we pay very close attention to whatkind of courses we prescribe, what kind of professors

from abroad we bring into the department. I wouldnever have recommended starting a department ofanthropology if I had not thought that anthropology hadan important role to play in Nepal. I didn't recommendthat the chair be created so that I could hold that chair.You have to give careful consideration to how we trainand for what particular ends. This is what we did withthe Department of Anthropology. It began with a verydifferent emphasis, and all of these people who joinedme, the younger generation, went along with me. Weall agreed. t was an extremely close-knit, wellorganized and motivated group of anthropologists andsociologists who founded the department. t won'tnecessarily remain like that unless we keep the same

kind of people running the department, because there arepeople interested in becoming chairman just for its ownsake. This is why I say that it's very important that wekeep a clear perspective on the purpose of having adepartment of anthropology. I see a clear, very vitalrole for future graduates in anthropology in Nepal.When we say that they have an important role, then wehave to think of how they are trained. That's why it'svery important that anthropology be closely tied in withsociology. Anthropologists have to study the historyof Nepal too. Otherwise anthropology will be just animitation of other departments in other universitiesaround the world and won't prepare studet:tts to play animportant role in the future of Nepal.

References Cited

Bista, Dor Bahadur. 1967. People of Nepal.Kathmandu.

1971. The political innovators o Upper KaliGandaki Man 6:52-60.

1979. Report from Lhasa. Kathmandu:Sajha Prakashan.

.1991. Fatal ism and development .Calcutta: Orient Longman.

HIMALAYAN RESEARCH BULLETIN XV T (1) 1997

interview with Bista.pdf

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Transcript of interview with Bista.pdf