Bhaktapur's Order, Stability, And Stasis

Bhaktapur has emphasized a certain way, one way among others, in which a community tries to hold flux, tries to make it seem meaningful

and knowable. In an essay on the relations of History and Anthropology Bernard Cohn (1980, 218) wrote:

We write of an event as being unique, something that happens only once; yet every culture has a means to convert the uniqueness into a general and transcendent meaningfulness through the language members of the society speak. To classify phenomena at a "commonsense" level is to recognize categories of events coded by the cultural system. An event becomes a marker within the cultural system. All societies have such markers, which can be public or private. The death of a ruler may be mourned by rituals which turn the biographic fact of a death into a public statement relating not only to a particular ruler but to rulership per se. In many societies ritual transforms uniqueness into structure.

Bhaktapur's system of marked symbols, its mesocosm, has been a powerful device for turning accident and history into structure, for trying to escape the contingencies and consequences of history, for trying to capture change, to make change seem illusory within an enduring order.

The very attempt to capture change, to deny a meandering history, to deny the effects of political will is—like the city's striving for coherence—in itself a fertile source of intellectual problems. Contact with a modern world is bringing problems of another order, much more difficult—and finally impossible—for Bhaktapur to absorb within its traditional order. For the implication of the ideas and the economic imperatives of that new world denies the city's central orienting value of birth-determined and fixed social hierarchy, assigns power and rewards by new principles, defines and values individuals in new and different ways, and treats a religiously anchored marked symbolism and its enactments as radically alien to a new and valued mobile secular

order.