Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://archive.nnl.gov.np:8080/handle/123456789/43
Title: Hygiene and sanitation system of rural community: an ethnographic study from Lothar village development committee of Chitwan district
Authors: Sharma, Kamal Raj
Keywords: Hygiene and sanitation
Issue Date: 12-Nov-2017
Abstract: If human behaviors are the product of cultural system of a given society/community, then this study is an endeavor to bring anthropological insights about hygiene and sanitation behaviors produced and reproduced by internalities and external forces induced from outer actors to the local setting. In this study, I have tried to understand the process of structuring and restructuring the human behaviour at local level. I have explored how the cultural domain of community people adopted and rejected the new and old behavior patterns during the course of their learning and adaptation. Culture is the core among driving and motivating forces, but how people either individually or collectively injected the new concepts, ideas, and strategies to change their behavior patterns as per circumstances is the fundamental anthropological inquiry which has been reflected in the institutional and organizational arrangements and various forms of local level behaviors. This study has concluded that the new behavior patterns are the outcomes of the process of production and reproduction as a general process through the adoption of cultural norms of outer interventions and the changing local perceptions and beliefs. Differences in the patterns of behaviors exist due to the differences in socio-economic positions, perceptions, and beliefs of community people living in a geographical location. In such conditions, the development intervention has been a process of transmitting the new cultural traits, the mechanism of creating dependency, and the major cause of dependency of the behavioral system of a particular local people depending upon outside support, which also makes the state apparatus a means of diffusing the outer cultural ideas into the host structure. However, intervention not only increased the dependency of local community but also enhanced the awareness and uplifted the levels of livelihood of those local people who adopted the modern system. As a result, development becomes the process of transmitting the new traits of culture; nevertheless, the internalities always remain strong for mastering the structures of behaviors guided by deep roots of culture. Through the interaction between external and internal components, the new ecological domains and system of behavior come into existence; however, it is limited by the perceptions and worldviews of local community people. The overall behavioral patterns of the community people are the consequences of local level cultural sphere and the new concepts, strategies, and ideas transmitted through development intervention. But it could also be said that the ideas injected by outside intervention alone cannot bring change in the rural community inhabited traditionally in specific geographical locations because of local internalities along with multiple worldviews, and culturally differential behavioral system always seemed stronger than externalities. More specifically, the hygiene and sanitation system operational at local level has been shaped and reshaped also by the historical traditions and practices guided by the contemporary local circumstances, and Lothar can be considered an example of this generalization.
Description: A dissertation submitted to the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tribhuvan University in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology, Nepal , 2014.
URI: http://103.69.125.248:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/43
Appears in Collections:300 Social sciences

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