Dipti Sherchan
Resident Graduate Scholars
Anthropology
About
“The Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal”
In “The Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal,” Dipti Sherchan examines contestations between artist-subjects and the nation-state over competing imaginaries of what it means to be modern that proliferate over time. These proliferations are emergent in the shifting cultural projects of nation building as the Nepali state undergoes socio-political transitions from aristocracy to monarchy to a newly federal republic. This anthropological work engages with an interdisciplinary analytical framework that investigates complex artistic and institutional articulations from the Global South. This research is based on long-term ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2018-2022 in Kathmandu.