Of "Tourist" Places: The Cultural Politics of Narrating Space in Thamel

Abstract

Thamel—a bustling neighborhood of restaurants, shops, bars, dance clubs, street vendors, and hotels in Kathmandu, Nepal—is overwhelmingly portrayed as a ‘tourist place’ by Nepalis and foreigners alike. Despite this widespread reputation, many user-groups assign divergent and contradictory meanings to the space, and these cannot be so easily reduced to the machinations of foreign tourism. This article critically considers this common trope that relegates Thamel to a ‘foreign’ status within Kathmandu’s cultural landscape. After reviewing the history of Thamel, the article details the various modes of reiteration through which the ‘tourist place’ characterization finds continued articulation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015-2016, it then offers contrary evidence to undermine the assertion that tourism represents the most salient aspect for understanding contemporary Thamel. It argues that prevailing narratives of the space eclipse other modes of meaning-making, thereby impoverishing scholarly understandings and simultaneously obscuring the ongoing contestations over Thamel’s cultural significance. In so doing, the article highlights the problematic cultural politics of continually positioning ‘tourism’ as Thamel’s sole (or central) referent. A discussion of Nepali cosmopolitan youth highlights the very real affective significance that Thamel holds for this particular user-group. Furthermore, it illustrates the implicit delegitimizing of youth experiences that occurs through reiterations of the ‘tourist place’ trope. The article concludes with a broader discussion of the theoretical, conceptual, and political stakes involved in critically engaging with attempts to fix spatial meaning in a neighborhood like Thamel.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.