Modern Dharma: Seeking Family Well-Being in Middle-Class Nepal
Penn Press, 2025 (forthcoming)
Facing a steady increase in the cost of education and job-market competition, as well as emerging opportunities to attain well-being, people in Nepal are confronted by the need to restructure moral codes and care for their families. Modern Dharma investigates how and why – amidst conflicting necessities – people make moral choices in the name of well-being. Why are many large families separating into smaller nuclei, and why do some choose not to? Why are young people seeking the support of their friends and hiding their private desires from their parents? And how do marriage choices and friendship relationships help people navigate the ongoing difficulties engendered by socio-economic change? This book examines domestic lives amongst a growing middle class, centring the household and kinship relationships as the places where global transitions are reflected and negotiated.
“See, Your Grandma Has Two Mother Tongues…Or Only One?”: Shame, Dialect, and Shifting Mother Tongues in Sicily
American Anthropologist, 2025 (forthcoming)
In the Sicilian town of Palermo, two main languages are spoken, Italian and Sicilian. But people are often unwilling to consider Sicilian a language, taking it instead as an inferior ‘dialect’. This essay examines how linguistic practices using these two languages evoke generalised affects that derive from a history of colonization of Sicily; a racialisation of Sicilian ethnicity; and a subsequent association of the place and people with low education, poverty, and criminality. Through autoethnography and fieldwork encounters, I discuss how people use, refuse, avoid, or reclaim Sicilian in everyday contexts and track how discourses of the ‘lingua madre’ (mother tongue) are differently negotiated across these practices.
Dev, 2024
Through painting and narrative, this artbook explores the existential trajectories of young people in Nepal as they fight against domestic hierarchies and gendered politics in the context of their daily lives. Building on three women’s real-life stories collected through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it portrays intimate dimensions of domestic relationships and the way these experiences lead to the construction of an idealised past and a dreaded – as much as sought – future.
Anthropology & Medicine, 2024
This paper examines how middle-class women experience and make sense of gyāstrik (an umbrella term for multiple gut disorders) as an embodiment of social change. Enumerating dietary injustices and distress following unmet middle-class expectations of well-being and domestic intimacy as a primary cause of the condition, these women narratively problematised social norms and found ways out through the concomitant vocalisation of physical pain and social discontent. These accounts demonstrate both a passive and active role of the gut in the social change experience, inviting to take the gut as the site where somatic modes of ‘attention’ and ‘action’ enable the navigation of personal life trajectories and the negotiation of social change itself.
Himalaya, 2022
This paper examines the ongoing phenomenon of household nuclearization in the Newar city of Bhaktapur, Nepal. I investigate the reasons for household fission and the related kinship transformations. Tracing the interconnected stories of conflict and dispersal of the members of a joint family, I argue that transitions in domestic structures not only represent the consequence of improved economic possibilities but also communicate dramatic social transformations and a redefinition of hierarchies of value and power between family members, which emerge alongside new ideas of family and self.
Seeking Heartfelt Help: The Emergence of the Friendship Guthi as a Middle-Class Practice in Contemporary Nepal
SINHAS, 2021
This paper investigates the emergence of friendship associations (guthis) in Bhaktapur, Nepal. It addresses three interconnected questions: why are friendship guthis progressively taking the funerary function that was once the exclusive role of the (pre-existing) shi guthi? Why are friendship guthis with an economic function so widespread when the shi guthi was not known for this role? And why is it so important that the help received is “heartfelt”? I argue that while building on pre-existing practices of socialization (such as that of the guthi institution) and on the morality of help and reciprocity, the relatively new institution of the friendship guthi plays a crucial role in the networking between households, allowing local families to navigate vulnerability in a climate of dramatic social and economic transformation.
Current Anthropology, 2021
By developing the artistic style of abstract realism, this work in the medium of oil painting and digital elaboration focuses on the story of Maya, a Nepali woman who, by rebelling against constraining social norms in relation to gender roles and household hierarchy, is said to be possessed by evil spirits. Through portraitures and selected scenes, this visual account portrays a changing society, revealing the desire of young people to move toward egalitarian relations despite the risk of incurring social condemnation.
The question of Expression When Using Art as a Research Method in Anthropology: Notes for the Anthropologist-Artist
Bloomsbury, 2022
In this book chapter, I argue that the 'anthropologist-artist' should reflect upon and explain how, in each case study, the plastic elements of their chosen form of 'representation' contribute to shaping the content, that is how the visual works add theoretical and analytical depth to the research data.