THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVIL IN NEPAL

Disease, undeserved suffering, unexpected misfortune, hunger, crop failure, early and untimely death—all agree that these are in some sense “evils” and that humans must struggle to overcome them. But what is the immediate cause of such suffering? Material drawn from fieldwork in Nepal over more than thirty years suggests the rather unfashionable conclusion (unfashionable within social and cultural anthropology at any rate) that, in the Nepalese context at least, there is an intense battle going on between two radically different and competing answers to this question. At the broadest level of generality, these two answers reflect two worldviews and