HIMALAYA is a biannual, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS), formerly known as the Nepal Studies Association (1972-2000).
This conference report documents Entangled Medical Futures, a three-day workshop held in Edinburgh that brought together scholars and clinicians to examine plural medical worlds in Highland Asia. Focusing on therapeutic practice amid ecological change, infrastructural precarity, and shifting expectations of care, the discussions foregrounded healing as a relational, multispecies, and ethically situated process. Across ethnographic, historical, and clinical perspectives, the workshop highlighted how medical pluralism in highland contexts challenges linear models of health, governance, and expertise.
Copyright (c) 2026 Michael T. Heneise https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Moments of Rupture in an Exhausted Political World
This editorial reflects on the conditions of political violence, moral exhaustion, and uneven rupture that have marked 2025 globally and in the Himalayan region. Taking recent unrest in Nepal as an analytic point of departure, it considers how moments of breakdown expose exhausted forms of authority and reopen questions of legitimacy, responsibility, and agency. Situating the journal’s work against the normalisation of political fatalism, the editorial reaffirms HIMALAYA’s commitment to historically grounded, ethically attentive scholarship. It introduces the contributions to Volume 44, Issue 2 as engagements with ritual, ecology, art, migration, and care that together insist on complexity, situated knowledge, and the continued possibility of critical thought in unsettled times.
Seedless Chilies and Dried Turnip Leaves
Based on one year of anthropological fieldwork in a group of villages in the Haa Valley of western Bhutan, this ethnographic paper examines how Bhutanese migrants in Australia maintain connections to their home villages through food. Although migration to Australia has become a prominent phenomenon in Bhutan (and across the Himalayan region), the paper challenges mainstream accounts of rural depopulation that portray young Bhutanese as progressively detaching from their culture and villages and migration as a linear process of separation from the country of origin and integration into the society of destination. Instead, it argues that moving to Australia prompts Bhutanese migrants to engage with their home villages and social networks in ways they may not have done otherwise. The paper highlights the central role of food in how migrants reconnect, reaffirm, maintain, reinforce, and forge new ties with their home communities. It concludes that migration—particularly in a Himalayan context—should be understood not as a linear process of detachment but as one of connection and continuity, with food and food practices serving as key means through which transnational relationships are nurtured and sustained.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Neri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Himalayan Buddhist regions such as Sikkim preserve vibrant traditions of thangka painting, where sacred imagery, ritual practice, and precise iconometric systems converge. Yet, compared to other Himalayan artistic centers, Sikkim’s thangka traditions have received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on 2024 ethnographic fieldwork and guided by theoretical approaches from Gell’s notion of art as agency, Malinowski’s emphasis on embodied practice, and Sharf’s view of Buddhist images as enlivened through consecration, this paper analyses how iconometry (thig tshad), ritual discipline, and lineage-based apprenticeships structure artistic creation. It also shows how these sacred arts persist even as tourism and new markets influence how they are made. In the end, the study highlights thangka painting in Sikkim as a vibrant living tradition, where skill, devotion, and ritual vitality remain central.
Copyright (c) 2026 Karma Norbu Bhutia, Mitashree Srivastava https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Kathmandu: A Reader by Benjamin Linder (ed.)
Copyright (c) 2026 Enrico Beltramini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Nepal in the Long 1950s by Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty (eds.)
Copyright (c) 2026 Charlotte Ramble https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Expanding Horizons, Deepening Engagement
This editorial reflects on a period of institutional growth and editorial transition at HIMALAYA, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Amid recent regional upheavals—including the May 2025 escalation between India and Pakistan—the journal reaffirms its commitment to rigorous, inclusive scholarship on the Himalayan region. Strategic developments such as the adoption of the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, a publishing partnership with the University of Edinburgh, and expanded print access through IngramSpark have significantly increased the journal’s global reach and accessibility. The editorial welcomes new team members who mark a generational and geographic expansion of HIMALAYA's editorial vision. These include Associate Editor Dr. Shubham Sapkota (University of Colorado Boulder); Reviews Editor Dr. Zezhou Yang (Asia Research Institute, NUS); and in-region Assistant Editors Heidamteu Zeme (IIT Delhi), Gulal Salil (independent artist), and Yatin Batra (University of Delhi). Fatma Matar, a master's student in visual anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, has also recently joined the team as Assistant Editor. This issue features contributions on ritual performance, visual repatriation, agricultural imaginaries, linguistic justice, and archival critique, exemplifying the journal’s evolving commitment to multimodal, interdisciplinary, and regionally grounded scholarship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michael Timothy Heneise https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Borderland’s Soul: Through the India–China Border and the Hidden Histories of Kalimpong
Copyright (c) 2025 Tanka Subba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Pyre (चिता) directed by Vinod Kapri
Copyright (c) 2026 Prince Tomar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay
Copyright (c) 2026 Manish Pandey https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Translating the Snow Leopard into a Fictitious Commodity
Snow leopard tourism has emerged as a niche in Ladakh’s broader tourism sector. This paper traces the translation of snow leopards into a fictitious commodity in the context of wildlife tourism in Ladakh. Snow leopards are not a commodity in a Marxist sense because they are not a product of human labor. Instead, I draw from Karl Polyani’s notion of “fictitious commodities” to conceptualize the peculiar nature of the commodified snow leopards. To trace the process of becoming a fictitious commodity, I take anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of translation, which she uses to examine shifts in the value of matsutake mushrooms from gift to commodity and vice versa. The idea of translation helps elucidate how the snow leopard comes to be treated as a tradable entity. However, before such translation is possible, the snow leopard must be made visible as a wild animal. This article suggests that popular books, such as Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), as well as academic/conservation research and wildlife films, played a key role in rendering the snow leopard visible. Once the animal is visible, advertisements and tour packages translate the snow leopard into a fictitious commodity. However, the emergence of a commodified snow leopard raises questions about responsibility, especially when one of the major threats to the species is the changing climate, a phenomenon to which the fossil fueldependent tourism industry is a major contributor.
Copyright (c) 2026 Padma Rigzin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Chasing a Blazing Fire in the Himalayas: A Brief Sketch of the (Un)Noticed Kalimpong Pentecostal Revival by Anmol Mukhia
Copyright (c) 2026 Komal Chhetri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Nepal and surrounding regions in India are known for resplendent masked performances. Often ritual in nature, they serve as tools for spiritual belonging, community cohesion, ties of kinship, and artistic expression. Research on Nepal’s culture and performance traditions has been smaller compared to neighboring South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Nepal’s performance traditions are complex, with centuries of history, culture, and religious beliefs attached to them. In Nepal, many of these traditional performances are called Pyakhan or stories/parables. They are deserving of in-depth study, much like their other South Asian counterparts. This paper takes a deep dive into masked dance forms of Nepal, especially the making and use of masks in Bhairab Nach, and Navadurga performance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Deepsikha Chatterjee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article explores the complexities of colonial photography, archival ownership, and visual repatriation within the context of Arunachal Pradesh, India, focusing on historic Nyishi photographs from the Pitt Rivers Museum. By reconnecting the families of Nyishi interpreters Bath Heli and Kop Temi with photographs taken by colonial administrators Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Robert Stonor, the study examines the power dynamics embedded in the archival process. Using an autoethnographic approach, the research situates visual repatriation as a medium for restoring Nyishi cultural memory and examining tribal identity. The findings reveal how photographs, once decontextualized in the colonial archive, carry distinct meanings when reintegrated into their communities— challenging colonial narratives locked within museum spaces and enabling cultural resurgence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Menia Taba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
There are many ways to define Ladakh: geographically (as an area between the Himalayas and the Karakoram), historically (as a kingdom from the 10th century until the Dogra conquest in 1834), or linguistically (as a region sharing a common language—a Tibetan dialect). However, most of these definitions have been put forward by foreigners or officials. Do the inhabitants of these areas feel that they belong to the same community? The author's answer is “no.” He concludes that Shi’as in Kargil and Buddhists in Leh consider themselves to constitute separate communities. The survey draws on sociology, ethnology, and some history, extending back to 1931.
Copyright (c) 2025 Patrick Kaplanian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Ladakh’s climatic conditions have preserved some of the most impressive monuments in the Himalaya. These temples trace the spread of Buddhism in the Western Himalaya and the development of artistic and architectural styles. However, they are increasingly under threat due to the introduction of modern construction materials and methods, as well as the intensification of climate change induced events. In 1999, Achi Association was formed to conserve temples belonging to the Drikung Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, one of the oldest orders in Ladakh, and one under which many of the earliest temples in the region were built. In 2010, the establishment of Achi Association India (AAI) expanded this to any Buddhist heritage in precarity throughout Ladakh, regardless of sect. With a quarter of a century of experience in the region, the two organizations collectively produced an impressive fountain of documents that chart and record all aspects of conservation work done across nine sites that date from the late 13th century to the 19th century. In this paper I scaffold an interdisciplinary approach to access these archives, which range from architectural surveys to community engagement reports, accentuating that conservation is a dialectic between stakeholders, where decisions made by conservators — shaped by their training and available technology — are interpreted by other stakeholders, namely locals and the clergy, through their own epistemic frameworks. Mapping the entirety of conservation and restoration, this paper covers multiple aspects of the process, including documentation, community engagement, technical procedures, and the ritual ramifications of decisions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sushan Bhattarai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Nepal’s Dalits in Transition by David N. Geller and Krishna P. Adhikari
Copyright (c) 2025 Ina Zharkevich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Conducting fieldwork among middle-class families in Bhaktapur, Nepal in 2018-2019, I found that local parents are concerned with teaching their children the notion of ‘moral measure’. At the same time, a strategy of avoidance, rather than open negotiation, is preferred to maintain harmony and preserve kinship networks. Focusing on the case study of Dor Bahadur and his children Sita and Vishnu around a contested birthday celebration, in these visual works in gouache, acrylics, and oil colors, I explore and analyze the role that parent-child interactions play in the making of moral selves among middle-class people in Nepal. Through layers of colors, I convey the sense of the conflictual processes that the protagonists of this story experience, and the concomitant ‘opacity of minds’ established between their existential perspectives.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paola Tiné https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This essay attempts to foreground the question of native agency in the making of the photographic archive of Charles Alfred Bell, British Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. It seeks to approach a new hermeneutics of British imperial archive-making vis-á-vis Tibet by assessing not only how native agency variously informed the sacerdotal, epistemic and technical content of most of Bell’s photographic archive, but also how such agency was central to its very process of visual production. By examining the roles of Rabden Lepcha, Sonam Wangyal or Palhese and Kartick Chandra Pyne, apropos their contribution to Bell’s visual archive, the essay shows how British imperial knowledge-construction on Tibet deployed native agency, thereafter relegating them (mostly) to archival silence. In the process, the essay demonstrates how these silences were not merely accidental, but fundamental to the process of knowledge-production on Tibet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Parjanya Sen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Michael T. Heneise, Jeevan R. Sharma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This contribution is an edited version of a wide-ranging conversation between linguistic anthropologist and past co-editor of HIMALAYA, Mark Turin, and Lava Deo Awasthi, the first Chairperson of Nepal’s Language Commission. In the course of the interview, Turin and Awasthi discuss the Commission’s role and establishment, Awasthi’s appointment to the position of Chairperson, his intellectual training and administrative preparation for the task, and the strategic goals and objectives that he brought to the portfolio. The conversation then moves on to a critical reflection of the challenges and achievements of Awasthi’s term as Chairperson, concluding with his vision for mother tongue instruction and linguistic justice in Nepal.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mark Turin, Lava Deo Awasthi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Upland Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
In the last two decades, different governments in India have made a concerted effort to address the plight of the marginal farmer who owns (or has access to) some private or communal land across the uplands in the northeast of the country. Various governmental schemes and subsidies have been initiated to ensure that other ways of earning a livelihood mitigate falling returns from agriculture and the increasing need for cash among farmers. Upland farmers have evoked both hope and despair from governments that look to transform subsistence-style agricultural practices into revenue-earning endeavours. They have been the source of much political posturing, as the regional political elite, scientists, and industry have taken up their cause. The same farmers have also been subjected to intense policy pressure, persuading them to think differently and pull themselves out of poverty. There is, therefore, an increasing demand for them to prepare for radical changes in their livelihoods and way of thinking. In this article, I draw from fieldwork conducted in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, and Mizoram to examine how new discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation have become essential to understanding social and economic transformations in the uplands of Northeast India.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sanjay Barbora https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Carole McGranahan, Sienna R. Craig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Examining the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in a mixed-farming system in Sindhuli District, Nepal
This paper aims to explore the feminization of agriculture amidst the agrarian transition from cereal to citrus crops in Sindhuli district. Multiple ethnographic field studies in citrus-producing areas have been used to present the conceptual debate and empirical findings on the feminization of agriculture in a mixed-farming system. The paper highlights changing labor arrangements for household labor, exchange labor, and wage labor in agriculture and presents the nature of the agricultural work conducted by men and women. The paper argues that cash crop farming has resulted in a gendered hierarchy in agriculture, with men primarily occupied with skill-based work in high-value citrus crops, while women’s engagement is mainly limited to subsistence farming and menial agricultural tasks. However, some women directly benefit at the household level because of their involvement in citrus production. The study shows that gender-based inequalities in labor use have the power to reinforce and intensify the existing gender roles that render women subordinate. However, women choose their work based on its importance for household food security. The paper portrays four categories of feminization, namely feminization of labor vis-à-vis managerial feminization, feminization of labor categories such as household, exchange, and wage labor, and feminization of particular crop/livestock and subsistence/commercial farming. The study concludes that feminization varies based on the degree of crop marketability.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hritika Rana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
What do high Himalayan villages feel like as they shift in form and character through patterns of outmigration and the effects of climate change? How do people wrestle with enduring connections to place, through the pain and uncertainty that accompanies social and ecological change? What does it mean to steward a landscape and attend to sacred geography as well as history through these transitions? These questions are explored in this flash ethnography, set in the village of Samdzong, upper Mustang, Nepal.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sienna R Craig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Promises and Perils of Highland Infrastructure
In recent years, state-led infrastructure creation in the name of progress and development has occurred across the Himalayan region. It has increased the presence of the state in places formerly regarded as relatively isolated. Despite being aspirational, infrastructure creation projects have uprooted people from their lands, deprived them of their livelihoods, and transformed their identities. This paper focuses on Pakyong Airport in the state of Sikkim, which has provoked huge protests in recent times. Through the study of this mega-infrastructure project, the paper addresses everyday processes associated with rampant change, transformation, and the formation of social memory forged through resistance and struggle in the form of counterpublics. Considering different processes, the paper assesses how Himalayan infrastructure development has a varied impact on the people and politics of the region.
Copyright (c) 2024 Archana Pathak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Ek Tha Gaon directed by Srishti Lakhera
Copyright (c) 2024 Vidushi Dobhal Naithani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of A Mountain Oasis: Daily Life in a Village in the Yasin Valley, Pakistan by Susan York
Copyright (c) 2024 Fizza Batool https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Vitality and Sustainability of Traditional Music
Dāphā bhajan is a participatory genre of Hindu–Buddhist devotional music, sung by groups of farmers and other Newar singers in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. It is deeply integrated with local neighbourhood communities, but owing to recent disasters (the 2015 earthquake, the 2020–2022 Covid-19 pandemic) and ongoing cultural changes, its sustainability is in doubt. In 2022–2023 the authors conducted a survey of selected groups to investigate the performers’ perspectives. In this preliminary report we find that dāphā groups showed resilience in recovering from the recent disasters, the main effect of which was to exacerbate ongoing systemic problems. Chief among these is the difficulty of recruiting and training new members, to which some groups are responding with innovative solutions. But a range of other interconnected issues also emerged. We conclude that although many groups exhibit continuing vitality and an integrated relationship with the local communities in which they are embedded, their dependence on traditional models may be unsustainable without a degree of change.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nutandhar Sharma, Richard Widdess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tibetan pastoralists often say that many know how to graze animals (ཟོག་ལུག་འཚོ་བ), but few know how to nurture them (ཟོག་ལུག་སྐྱོང་བ). Skyong (སྐྱོང) means nurturing or attending to something or someone with tenderness. While conducting fieldwork research among Tibetan pastoralists in eastern Tibet, I learned that animals were dying from eating discarded plastic khata (ceremonial scarves) and prayer flags. Even those who nurture animals through winter, when grass was scarce and snowstorms were constant, were not sure what to do to prevent this. This ethnographic experience inspired me to make a documentary film and to experiment with flash ethnography on this topic of the sacred status of khata in relation to its poisonous contemporary materiality. This flash ethnography takes creative license, allowing khata to speak.
Copyright (c) 2024 Huatse Gyal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0