Cotton on the silk road: Subjection of labor to the global economy in the shadow of empire (or the dialectic of a merchant community in Nepal).

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the Newar Bazaar Bandipur to describe relations and ritual in Nepal in terms of global processes and theoretical understandings. The historical materialist approach, taken from Marx's introduction to his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858, is presented as the framework for analysis in contrast to dominant methodological paradigms. The focus is shifted from the structural and empirical emphases which have dominated materialist approaches in anthropology to the dialectical and historical one emphasized by Marx in his own work. Relations between structural categories such as infrastructure and superstructure are seen as occurring in time rather than in immediate determinate relationships. Later more abstract categories are seen as incorporating and transforming more concrete earlier ones as relations and forms of production spread over the globe and subsumed other forms.; Following this approach, the analysis begins not with the immediate empirical subject such as a Nepalese village; rather it begins with the most abstract and transcendent categories and widest relations represented in the state. The state is shown presently to take the substance of industrial capitalism. Earlier forms of state in Nepal represented in landed property and mercantile capital, and the manner of their subjugation and incorporation into industrial capitalism, are then described. This discussion provides the basis to show what has been subsumed by industrial capitalist expansion.; The next two chapters show how the rise of capitalist interests took form in the historical development of Bandipur. They show how the Newar merchants of Bandipur simultaneously challenged landed property for control over the countryside and served as agents for industrial capital to bring the categories and relations in the countryside under the control of capital. The last chapter shows the content of this domination in the contemporary relations, institutions, categories, and ritual in the countryside, and how it is reproduced.