Placing practice in Thamel, Kathmandu

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, Thamel—a dense neighborhood in Kathmandu, Nepal—has become the primary hub of transgressive, experimental cultural practice among young urban Nepalis. The multivalent assemblage of Thamel reflects emergent lifeworlds that challenge “traditional” conceptions of Nepali identity, and the place produces those emergent lifeworlds as well. Such transformations contest normative social roles, intersecting with multiple power relations at multiple scales. The “spatial production of cosmopolitanism” refers to this co‐constitutive relation between space and culture, highlighting how everyday cosmopolitanisms emerge and manifest in spatial practice. Contemporary Nepali cosmopolitanisms take many forms in Thamel, but it is through the spatial agglomeration of diverse subjects—and the consequent disorientation it induces—that new modes of Nepali selfhood take shape. [cosmopolitanism,cities,assemblage,urbanism,place,popular culture,Kathmandu,Nepal]

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