THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

were generally brought into Tarnaphok about four or five days after
publication by people coming in from Dhankuta (the nearest town in which
newspapers were sold) or further afield, and could normally be found in
the school staffroom or at the pradhdn pd-c's house. Another source of
information (or perhaps fantasy) about the outside world, for those that
went to Basantapur, was the video hall mentioned in Chapter Seven,
Education, politics and development projects were three
institutionally backed catalysts of social change which were
particularly dependent on these lines of communication and which seemed
to me particularly significant forces in terms of their effects on Yakha
perceptions of their environment and cultural identity during our
fieldwork, While the changes they brought were new, the responses of
the Yakha of Tarnaphok to them followed older patterns. It is these
patterns that I shall try to elucidate in my analysis.
There is a dominant myth (most perpetuated by more popular travel
books but not totally absent from anthropological writings) about
village Nepal which presents life outside Kathmandu as untouched by
developments in the capital. In Chapter One I described political
events which took place in the capital during my fieldwork. Part of
this chapter looks at what happened in Tamaphok following these events,
It demonstrates that, with the increasing sophistication of
communications, Tamaphok was not untouched by the changes at the
national level (if indeed it ever had been). Certainly, some Tamaphok
Yakha did speak of living in a kun6 (backwater, literally 'corner').
However, considering this to be the case itself implied awareness of the
world outside with which Tamaphok was being unfavourably compared. Even