Lanham: Lexington Books. This success was achieved despite all the vagaries and the political and economic changes that had already marked the 20th century. While their renowned beauty and dedication had enabled them to secure gratifications and positions in palaces, which would have been impossible in their rural home setting, it is through their own virtue that Tamang women developed, for their own benefit and for that of their community, the goods and outward signs of a true rural middle class.
They sometimes became landowners and were therefore able to provide for their offspring and, according to the anthropologist, became heroines of female emancipation in Nepal. Women have been able to gradually shed the yoke of male oppression and to free themselves of the initial debt they ran up in setting up a brothel, with the work there primarily going towards reimbursing the initial costs p , though the anthropologist provides only hints of how this mechanism of bonded labour due to the debts that many migrant workers incur actually works.
This shows how Tamang women have an innate capacity to gradually take their destiny into their own hands mainly by holding out against foreign endeavours to rehabilitate and socially integrate them, which have been undertaken by anti-trafficking NGOs that have plagued the country since the s and s.
These real industries in Nepal, with a growing presence from onwards, were meant to prevent and prohibit women from engaging in what the Western world considers to be outright sexual trafficking.
Her rigorous, generous and empathetic investigation steers away from stereotypes associated with prostitution to find the true origins of the wonderful physical and symbolic emancipation of Tamang women. Unfortunately, the arguments on which her examples are based are tainted with contradictions which the anthropologist in her enthusiasm and empirical experience overlooks.
