Discourses of Awareness explores the ways in which projects of development and social transformation, through both their successes and failures, have helped produce new forms of imagination and socio-political engagements in Nepal. Combining historical and ethnographic analyses, the book shows, among other things, how the self-conception of contemporary village leaders, the revolutionary visions of the Maoists, and the mobilization for the liberation of bonded laborers, all emerge out of the history of a variety of projects for individual and societal transformation and improvement in Nepal since the 1950s.