Demographic dimensions of an inter-village land dispute in Nubri, Nepal.

In the Sama-Lho conflict, the villagers were fighting over a small stretch of forested land that lay between their two villages. The purpose of this paper is to examine demographic differences between the two villages of Sama and Lho that may be held accountable, or at least can be considered as contributing factors, to the arising of the dispute between the two villages. The author illustrates how the Microdemographic Community Study Approach (Axinn et. al. 1991)(1) can be used to discern the demographic significance of cultural variations between two villages. The main hypothesis is that, prior to the conflict, Lho had a higher rate of population growth than Sama. Due to socio-cultural similarities, this is a trend that would not have been intuitively obvious in the absence of supporting data. The main focus of the paper is on how family management strategies, household economic practices, and social roles shape internal (i.e., cultural) mechanisms for regulating population growth in a context of unstable access to economic resources stimulated by changing exogenous (political and economic) factors. The integration of micro and macro-level perspectives used herein is conducive to the unveiling of many interrelated factors that led to the crisis described above. Population growth (or lack thereof) is seen as a direct outcome of cultural, political, and economic processes that can only be understood in light of ethnographic details and the shifting importance of exogenous connections. (from Introduction).