We are very pleased to introduce a second special issue of HIMALAYA in 2023, in this instance titled “Writing with Care: Ethnographies from the Margins of Tibet and the Himalayas”. Curated by guest editors Harmandeep Kaur Gill and Theresia Hofer, this issue is an important contribution to a relatively recent, more conscious, effort to diversify and deepen the discourse within area studies, emphasising the voices and perspectives of ordinary people, and especially of those living at the margins of mainstream society.

The guest editors have brought together a collection that challenges and rearticulates social categories like gender, class, and disability. They emphasize the need to look beyond fixed generalizations and to embrace the complexities and contradictions of individual lives. This approach, rooted in feminist and decolonial methodologies, not only enriches our academic understanding but also connects us more deeply with the human aspects of the subjects we study. Writing with care, as the guest editors put, is to ‘enable the reader to connect with people as individual personalities and not merely as members of social and third-person categories.’

In the loving memory of Mo Samdrup Drolma who is featured on the front page and passed away 22nd of November 2023

Note: To have Tibetan script correctly displayed, please download the PDF file and open it in a desktop application. 

We are delighted to present this special issue, Vol. 42.2.,guest edited by Stephen Christopher and Peter Phillimore, focusing on the Gaddi community of the Western Himalayas. This volume brings together anthropologists from various generations and a historian, presenting a myriad of perspectives on Gaddis that offer insights into changes in their identity, beliefs, marital customs, politics, and livelihoods. We are confident that researchers across the Himalayas will find this compilation beneficial, aiding in discussions on identity, politics, belonging, and livelihoods of other tribal and mountain groups. The editors of this Special Issue note a scarcity of research on Gaddis, especially conducted by Gaddis themselves. However, they anticipate Gaddi social scientists will produce scholarship from their own perspectives in the near future. 

Special Issue Cover Image:

Reeta Purhaan, a Gaddi folk singer, participating in the 2020 #challengeaccepted social media campaign of women posting black-and-white selfies to show global solidarity. In 2023, Reeta began a PhD at The Central University of Punjab. 

It is our pleasure to introduce the first issue of HIMALAYA’s 42nd volume! It features two short pieces by Jacki Betsworth and Terri Fishel reflecting on what we might call its ‘golden decade’ at Macalester College (2009-2019). In our research articles section, Arjun Guneratne navigates the "Fate of a Text" amidst change, while Aditya Kiran Kakati scrutinises the "Elephant in the Room". The joint piece by Zezhou Yang and Tianyi Chen provides intriguing insights into transcultural trajectories of Arniko. In "Buddhist Values as Legal Values in the Constitution of Bhutan" Michaela Windischgraetz explores the relationship between national legal order and Buddhism in Bhutan. Sofie Dalum Kjærgaard and Sarmila Chaudhary offers insights on how the Nepali government’s focus on the politics of controlling the Covid-19 pandemic in Nepal. Vineet Gairola and Shubha Ranganathan explore in their article and accompanying photo essay the history and transition of worshiping practices in the Garhwal Himalaya. The photo essay by Oinam Premchand Singh documents the extant craft of cord-marked pottery in the hills of northeastern India. Thank you for reading HIMALAYA! 

As our 50^th year of publishing research on Nepal and the Himalayas draws to a close, we are proud to bring issue 41.2 to our readers across the globe. In this issue we feature a special section edited by former HIMALAYA editor Arjun Guneratne featuring three articles on Tharu Identity. And we follow these with four omnibus articles touching on themes of caste, Tibetan pilgrimage, kinship, and identity. We have a perspective piece by long-term contributor Geoff Childs, a wonderful photo essay by Paola Tiné, and a rich selection of seven book reviews. Finally, we are also very excited to include a conference report summarizing the recent Himalaya Studies Conference, organized by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS), and held at the University of Toronto from October 13-16. Thank you for reading HIMALAYA!

We are proud to publish this special issue of HIMALAYA titled "Multivocal Spaces: An Exploration of Everyday Life in Darjeeling Himalayas", guest edited by Dipti Tamang, Rinzi Lama and Sarah Besky. In seven articles, a beautiful photo essay and an extraordinary artwork, our guest editors are bringing together an exceptional group of scholars offering new insight into the ways local communities in Darjeeling speak, wrestle, envision, and articulate their own aspirations, understandings of place, belonging, and indeed inclusion and exclusion in the broader political fabric.  

We are pleased to bring to you Volume 40, Issue 2. In this issue we include eight omnibus pieces, two beautiful photo essays, and eight book reviews, in addition to our regular conference report, president’s letter, and editorial. We also pay tribute to three remarkable scholars, Narpat Singh Jodha (1937–2020), Pradyumna Prasad Karan (1930–2018) and Theodore Riccardi, Jr. (1937–2020), who were larger-than-life figures in Himalayan studies, and who together leave us a remarkable body of scholarship that will continue to influence the field. Do also check us out on social media. Thank you for reading Himalaya. 

We are delighted to bring you HIMALAYA Volume 40, Number 1, with its emphasis on Kashmir, a Himalayan region that has witnessed decades of wars and military occupation, and remains one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. Yet the dominant scholarship on the region, at least until recently, erased critical histories and counter narratives, and privileged state-based perspectives that had little to no resonance with the everyday complexities of people’s lives in this deeply contested area in the Himalaya. Popular framings of Kashmir continue to view it as a bilateral dispute between two warring nation-states, India and Pakistan. Such perspectives ignore Kashmiris’ longstanding resistance to despotic regimes, and their aspirations for azadi (Urdu. freedom), that predate the formation of India and Pakistan. This special issue of HIMALAYA offers a much needed corrective by centering Kashmiri perspectives on politics, wars, militarization, and occupation, while attesting to multifaceted struggles for rights, justice, and accountability.

We are excited to bring you Volume 39, Number 2 of HIMALAYA, with its emphasis on exploring religious diversity and social change in Ladakh. This special issue foregrounds the plural faith traditions and religions in Ladakh, and presents religion as a site of creativity, visuality, innovation, and social and political change. An array of academic articles examine religion in Ladakh as a set of practices and epistemologies that are hardly insular, but rather embody decades of material and ideological encounters with the world outside. Taken together, the articles debunk the imaginaries of Ladakh as an isolated mountain frontier, and center religion to track and explore the rich regional and global connections that continue to influence Ladakh’s profuse cultural and political heritage.

We’re delighted to welcome readers to this spring issue of HIMALAYA, full of an array of enthusing content! Volume 39.1 foregrounds a special thematic section on “Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia”, guest co-edited by Barbara Gerke and Jan M. A. van der Valk. A truly interdisciplinary compilation of original research articles, perspective essays, and curated images, the pieces within draw us into the (al)chemical, medico-religious, socio-ecological, and politicaleconomic processes that render substances ‘potent’ across time and place. Indeed, the specifics of place often have a great deal to do with potency, as contributors collectively reveal through their historically deep, ethnographically rich, and theoretically robust explorations of materials (e.g., plants, stones, compounds) and the syncretic methods and meanings applied to them in different contexts, by different people, for different reasons. Together, these authors tackle questions of matter, materiality, and efficacy amidst the complex histories and politics of varying sensorial worlds in which conceptions of food, flavors, and medicine are differently shaped.

We are excited to bring you issue 38.2 of HIMALAYA, with its emphasis on exploring the diversity of Islam across the Himalayas. This special issue foregrounds the heterogeneities among Muslim populations in the Himalayan region, as well as the complex ideological, ritual, and spiritual worlds that unite them. This volume is particularly exciting because it will likely take our readers into unfamiliar worlds, illuminating communities and lifeways that have not received adequate attention in the past. With this issue, we move a step closer towards our goal of expanding the ambit of the journal by including areas and communities that have remained marginal in dominant scholarship on the Himalayas, despite their centrality to global and regional politics. Our guest editors, Megan Adamson Sijapati and Jacqueline H. Fewkes, have curated articles from multiple disciplinary perspectives to explore the ways in which Islam shapes people’s conceptions of piety and politics, and informs their ethical and moral universe. The rising Islamophobia across the globe has tended to conflate Muslimness with terrorism and religious radicalism, and perpetuated dangerous stereotypes about a complex religion. This issue foregrounds the lived histories of Islam in the Himalayan region, and is an urgent corrective to reductive conceptions of Muslims that have become ubiquitous in our public narratives.