Amy Johnson

AMY L. JOHNSON, then a graduate student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was awarded funding in April 2016 to aid research on ‘Citizenship and Belonging: Environment, Federalism, and Nepal’s New Constitution,’ supervised by Dr. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan. The grantee conducted twenty-four months of ethnographic and historical research for the dissertation, ‘Federalism, Environment, and the Aesthetics of Belonging: State Re-Making in Nepal’ between March 2016 and March 2018. Centered on the unfolding implementation of Nepal’s federal constitution, the research explores how intimate experience of land and state become part of the institutional design of a nation through the territorial politics of federalism. Interlocutors included high-caste Hill-origin settlers residing in the lowland Tarai of Farwestern Nepal, regional political elites, and constitutional lawyers, scholars, parliamentarians, and federalism experts based in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu. Connecting formal political processes (i.e. constitution writing and federal restructuring) with quotidian subjective processes of belonging, this dissertation research brings together methodological and theoretical insights from the anthropology of the state, environmental anthropology, phenomenology of place, and settler colonial studies.