PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The many years of research and writing that resulted in this book required the support of many people and institutions. I am grateful and relieved to be able, at long last, to acknowledge them.

The years of research in Nepal were supported by grants from the University of California and the National Science Foundation. There were two one-year periods when I was providentially freed from other responsibilities and able to write at leisure. The first was made possible by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, supplemented by a grant from the Social Science Research Council, and the second by a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, once again with supplementary support from the Social Science Research Council. The Center for Advanced Study provides an incomparable setting for intellectual stimulation and for getting work done. Its Fellows are usually burdened for life with affectionate nostalgia and gratitude, as am I.

Leslie Lindzey at the Center, and Marian Payne at the University of California, San Diego, helped enormously in various stages of preparing the manuscript. Cathy Hertz of the University of California Press meticulously saved me from a multitude of errors. The ones that remain are mostly a matter of my own stubbornness. Susan Coerr carved an orderly index out of the tangled materials of the book.

I had invaluable aid in getting started on the study from Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Leo Rose, the late Bhuwan Lal Joshi, and Jaya Pratap Malla. In Nepal I received much information and support from

Abner and Sylvia Hurwitz, Jacob and Patricia Crane, Gabriel Campbell, Lynn Bennett, and the staff of the United States Educational Foundation. Many departments of His Majesty's Government generously helped me with maps, statistical information, and support of various kinds. In Bhaktapur the great scholar Ramapati Raj Sarma gave me patient and invaluable help with my many linguistic, historical, and interpretive problems. The very many others in Bhaktapur who wish to remain anonymous helped as informants, teachers, and scribes. In the United States Devi and Gautam Vajracharya helped in the translation of masses of interview materials and acted as living reference works during the years in which the book was being written. Steven Parish had many useful comments to make on the manuscript based on his own research in Bhaktapur. Roy D'Andrade helped me through some of the more tangled patches of the material on kinship terminology.

My indebtedness to the works of contemporaries and predecessors in the study of the Kathmandu Valley is, as the following chapters will show, enormous. Among these, I am especially indebted to Niels Gutschow, whose many years of work in Bhaktapur, whose maps— including the ones he has prepared for use in this book, and whose frequent "personal communications" stimulated by his careful reading of the manuscript inform and embellish the book.

The introductory chapter tells something of what I owe to my collaborator, Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya. This book would have been something entirely different and very much less without him.

And, finally, to the one without whom there would have been no book, and not much of anything else, my beloved wife, Nerys.

The maps in the book were prepared by Niels Gutschow. He is also responsible for the photograph used on the jacket and as a frontispiece. Roy Porello prepared the color plates of the Nine Durga masks. The other photographs are by Robert Levy.

In the quotations used in the book we have generally altered the transliteration of Nepali, Newari and Sanskrit terms to follow the usages of the text.