Introduction: The Internal Structure of the Thar

In chapter 5 we considered the thar s and their arrangement into larger levels and groupings as the building blocks of Bhaktapur's urban society. We remarked that as long as they continued to produce the goods, services, and relational behaviors that were essential to urban organization, the internal organization of the thar , like that of many corporate units in Bhaktapur, was carefully and properly hidden from the scrutiny of outside observers. We have said that the internal forms were of no concern to the city. That must be qualified, for the internal forms generate many of the shared and contrasting experiences and meanings that the public urban system must express or work with or counter. These internal arrangements provide a background of private meanings and private problems which the integrative forms of the city must take account of.

We will sketch something of the internal structure of the thar s here. This is not our main concern in this study, and we must be superficial and general, collapsing differences among the thars insofar as they may exist and concerning which we have only limited information. Much is similar throughout the hundreds of units of the macrosystem; other aspects vary according to the local histories and traditions of the thar s, or in accordance with larger social and economic forces that variously affect them. Within the thar s we will consider aspects of the house-

hold, kinship structure, extended-family organization, and aspects of marriage. As we are here for the space of a chapter approaching the intimate lives of individuals we will, in contrast to our general procedure in this volume, make some limited use of transcribed accounts of interviews.

In passing from aspects of the macrosystem and its component units to the internal institutions of the thar s, we are crossing a threshold. On one side are the processes that belong directly to the organization of the city in itself; on the other are the sustaining smaller processes more systematically related to the person and the household, the extended family, and the neighborhood. The content and forms of organization of these two worlds are different.