Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. viii, 277 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8651-5.
Who mediates neoliberalism, and how are those individuals’ own lives transformed in the process? Heather Hindman’s Mediating the Global: Expatria’s Forms and Consequences in Kathmandu is a poignant investigation of this question through an ethnography of expatriate lives in Nepal’s capital city in the 1990s and 2000s. In this important contribution to the anthropologies of development and work—as well as to development studies, international business, human resources and South Asian studies—Hindman offers an incisive yet sympathetic account of the intimate challenges that “global middlemen” face in their daily lives.
The book is not a kneejerk critique of international aid or global capitalism, but rather a view into the family dramas, consumption practices, and subjectivities of those who are “asked to be implementers of neoliberalism and also find themselves its objects” (217). Hindman asks us to consider how those tasked with implementing such agendas, through both governmental and non-governmental agencies, often suffer the negative consequences of their own policies at a personal level. This perspective takes us beyond the “dyad of originating site and destination site” (219) in studies of globalization to explore the crucial role of mediation and mediators.
The location of the study in Kathmandu is in some ways incidental to the author’s portrayal of “Expatria” as a deterritorialized polity that “shared many of the characteristics of a small town” (9). Expatria’s inhabitants are linked through “postings” across the globe, from Mali to Peru, Indonesia to Oman. But Hindman is clear that this is not a book written in the “simple language of flows and exchange” (219) between disparate locations. Rather, it is a sited, historically contextualized ethnography that tells us much about Nepal’s position in the current global conjuncture. Through the experiences of its expatriate inhabitants, we come to understand how Nepal has been shaped by the economic and geopolitical forces that have deposited these often unlikely residents in Kathmandu. In this way, although the book is not about Nepalis themselves—except in cameo appearances as household help or elite international women’s group members—it begins to suggest how Nepali lives are increasingly mediated by the global.
With an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, the book explores expatriate life from several angles. Chapter 1 considers whether contemporary expatriates in Nepal can be compared with British colonials elsewhere. The answer is “not really.” This is both because Nepal was never formally colonized and so the postcolonial optic that shapes much scholarship on South Asia does not fully apply, but perhaps more importantly because “the widespread aspiration to the status of ‘being global’” (40) is a recent phenomenon, dating to the late twentieth century.
Chapters 2 and 3, “Families that Fail” and “Market Basket Economics,” constitute the ethnographic heart of the book. Here we meet several expat couples and families in the 1990s, whose experiences either exemplify corporate and governmental expectations of “success,” or illustrate the embarrassment of failure. Hindman shows how a heteronormative family with children that relies upon the uncompensated labour of a (usually female) spouse was long the unquestioned kinship model at the heart of expatriate “packages” used to compensate international employees. Of course many real families deviated in some way, but the pressure to conform could tear them apart.
In one of the book’s most poignant ethnographic moments, Hindman describes how a group of expat women forego serving rice at a planned party because the foreigner-oriented supermarket is out of boxed Uncle Ben’s rice, without even considering the possibility of buying rice in bulk from a local shop (100). This example shows how expats must negotiate between consumption practices intended to replicate “home,” as dictated by idealized compensation categories promoted by their home governments and companies, and the reality of Nepali markets and their fluctuations. For Hindman, this day-to-day “labor of producing normalcy” (79) is an often misrecognized element of expat livelihoods that demands better analysis—rather than derision—from anthropologists.
The remaining three chapters take us further behind the scenes to show how structural transformations began to render the “package expatriates” described in chapters 2 and 3 obsolete by the early 2000s. Corporate investment in “cross-cultural training” (chapter 5) gave way to new communication technologies (chapter 6) and an emergent ideal of the flexible, unattached single worker (chapter 4). These changes were driven by economic downturns in the “Global North” as well as new corporate paradigms of “flexibility” that transformed “displacement from a source of concern to a job benefit” (134). At the same time, Nepal’s Maoist-state civil conflict (1996–2006) accelerated, making it seem a less than ideal posting for families with children. Single, short-term contractors began to take their place, in turn shaping the commodities and services—and therefore employment—available in Kathmandu.
This confluence between global labour paradigms and national political scenarios takes us to the heart of Kathmandu’s ongoing transformation. The scaling back of expatriate consumption has been paralleled by the entry of ever greater numbers of Nepalis onto the city’s increasingly conspicuous landscape of consumption. Fuelled by remittances earned by the approximately 25 percent of Nepal’s workforce employed outside the country—many of whom left directly or indirectly due to the conflict—it is now primarily Nepalis who populate the restaurants and supermarkets that Hindman describes as the province of expatriates in decades past. The iconic landmark that was once Mike’s Breakfast—the restaurant pictured on Hindman’s cover—has now become a bar catering to young Nepalis. Their experiences as construction workers in the Gulf, university students in North America, or hotel receptionists in Korea, and the ways their earnings and shifts in consciousness are changing Kathmandu demand new research. Heather Hindman is already ahead of the curve, with recent articles focusing on Nepali experiences of the language exam required to work in Korea, and the political views of city youth returned from abroad. Understanding these eminently Nepali experiences of global mediation is a welcome next step that nicely complements Hindman’s excellent first monograph.
Sara Shneiderman
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada