The polemics and discourse of conservation in Nepal: a case study of Sonaha Indigenous Minorities and Bardia National Park

Abstract

This thesis presents a critical ethnographic investigation into contestations between the Sonaha indigenous minorities and the Bardia National Park regime in Nepal. Sonahas routinely encounter and resist the powerful and occasionally combative force of the state as mediated through the competing discourses and practices of conservation and indigenous rights/identity. This contestation is reframed as a multifaceted politics of space within which a ‘bio-cultural social space’ perspective is postulated as a basis for a ‘just’ conservation.