| This dissertation is an ethnography of one segment of the Nepalese official class—the civil servants detailed to the royal parks. In it, I explore the ways in which bureaucrats partake of the charismatic identity of kingship to become part of the monarch's fictive family. The study examines the process by which local and national identities are created in relation to the monarchy, and how this relationship has been challenged, influenced, and refashioned by the forces of globalization and democratization during the post-andolan era of the 1990s.; For over half a century, the personal identities of wildlife officials and the Nepali monarchy have been inextricably linked. The king of Nepal was the King of the Jungle—and the park staff who served him were, to some degree, Kings of the Jungle as well. With the rise of democratization, however, both the king and his surrogates have been in decline.; The royal massacre of 2001 was not only a horrific event, it was also a horrific metaphor. The victims of the physical massacre were limited to the royal family itself, but the victims of the metaphoric attack on the monarchy stretched the length and breadth of the country. Few Nepalis felt the psychic blow more deeply and more personally than the rangers, scouts and wardens of Royal Bardia and the Makalu-Baron national parks.; In Nepal (as elsewhere), the package of globalization—representative government, modernization, increased involvement with NGOs, integration to the wider world community—has brought material benefits, but often at great cost. The losers of this paradigm shift are not solely those predicted by globalization theorists.; The park staff on whom my ethnography is focused do not fit neatly into the standard framework of globalization's losers: they are not natural anachronisms, in either an economic or political categorization. In this respect, my ethnography contains observations applicable to many other communities all over the world: globalization's losers—or those who consider themselves to be losers—are far more numerous, varied, and resistant to easy categorization than the economic determinists of Western academia may like to believe. |
