ANHS is pleased to announce Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold by Sara Smith (University North Carolina, Chapel Hill) as the 2022 winner of the ANHS James Fisher Book Award. The James Fisher Prize honors the significant and substantive contributions of Dr. James Fisher to scholarship on the Himalayas, and it recognizes particularly outstanding first books on the region. 

“This is a beautiful book. It starts with a love story between Muslim and Buddhist youth in Leh, in which “dire geopolitical potentials associated with their union” terminate a relationship and a pregnancy. Such marriages have become impossible in a region where religious and ethnic minorities experience existential vulnerability. The book develops a compelling, ethnographically rich argument about how geopolitical conflict rests in bodies, manifests in daily life, and how bodies in turn can become a terrain for forging territory, through intimacy, love and reproduction. The ethnographic detail furnishes a feminist theory of intimate geopolitics. We see how bodies can refuse to be “instrumentalized for territorial purposes;” or how they can become a “link between territory of today and territories of the future” (when marginalized groups experience existential uncertainty, they seek to manage the bodies of their youth as the occupants of future territory, in a dynamic that Smith calls “generational vertigo”). The book duly considers how a frame of intimate geopolitics might help understand other areas of the world, and Smith writes with a humility and reflexivity that builds the trust of readers.”

Honorable Mention

ANHS also congratulates Swargajyoti Gohain on receiving the 2022 Honorary Mention for the James Fisher Book Prize for Imagined Geographies in the Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Culture, Politics Place.  

About the James Fisher Book Prize

ANHS congratulates Daniel Loebell, who was selected as the winner of the 2022 Dor Bahadur. Bista Prize for his paper “Nepal: the BIT-less holdout among India's BRI Neighbours.”. The Dor Bahadur Bista Prize honors the life, career, and service of Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s first anthropologist and former Honorary President of the ANHS predecessor organization, the Nepal Studies Association (NSA). This prize recognizes outstanding scholarship by graduate students in any discipline whose research focuses on the Himalayas.

Daniel Loebell’s paper explores why Nepal, unlike other India-contiguous neighbor states who are participating in the Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI), does not have a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) with China. Nepal, also, is formally engaged with the BRI and actively seeks foreign direct investment, but will not sign a BIT with China. The author argues that the Nepali government’s reluctance stems neither from internal bureaucratic intrigues or its historic ties to India. Rather, Nepal has adopted a “Soft-Law” policy with all its neighbor-investors. Soft Law refers to guidelines, policy declarations, or codes of conduct which govern interactions between countries, but are not directly enforceable. Nepal seems to have adopted a Soft Law policy in order to have more flexibility in resolving disputes over investments with China or with other state investors.

About the Dor Bahadur Bista Prize

The Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) is currently accepting nominations for the 2023 James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region. The prize honors the significant and substantive contributions of Dr. James Fisher to scholarship on the Himalayas, and it recognizes particularly outstanding first books on the region. Applicants in all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

LEARN MORE

The Conference Committee of the Himalayan Studies Conference 6 (HSC 6) has just posted a revised conference program with the panel and roundtable abstracts as well as the information about the conference venue and event locations. There are some significant updates to the schedule, so please check the program carefully.

 

We are pleased to share the preliminary program for the Himalayan Studies Conference 6 in Toronto. You can also explore the different panels and roundtables on our website. 

If you are participating in-person and want to take advantage of the pre-conference registration discount, visit our website to register before August 30, 2022. Afterwards, on-site registration at the conference registration desk will be available for in-person attendees at a higher rate.

Registration for remote participation will remain available until September 15, 2022. 

Please note that if you are not already an ANHS member, you will need to become a member before registering for the conference. You can join ANHS by visiting the membership page. 

If you have not yet registered for the conference because you are waiting to confirm travel plans (e.g. have applied for a visa but have not heard back yet), and you have not already been in touch with the conference organizers, please send an email to conference@anhs-himalaya.org. 

Please feel free to share this in your network and social media. 

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia.

Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.

Edited by: Jelle J.P. Wouters and Michael T. Heneise

Learn More 

CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellowship Accepting Applications

The Multi-Country Research Fellowship is now accepting applications! This fellowship enables US scholars to carry out trans-regional and comparative research in countries across the network of Overseas Research Centers (ORCs), as well as other countries.

The Multi-Country Research Fellowship has been running since 1993 and supports advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and allied natural sciences for US doctoral candidates, who are ABD (all but dissertation), and scholars who have earned their PhD. Scholars must carry out research in two or more countries outside the US, at least one of which must host a participating ORC. ​Applicants are eligible to apply as individuals or as teams and independent scholars are also welcome to apply. Approximately nine awards of $12,000 will be granted. ​

​Each year the highest ranking Multi-Country Research Fellowship applicant will receive an additional $1,000 toward travel expenses through the Mary Ellen Lane Multi-Country Travel Award. The award is named after CAORC's founding director, Dr. Mary Ellen Lane.

Minority scholars and scholars from Minority-Serving Institutions are encouraged to apply.

Deadline: December 8, 2022

Application Guidelines:https://www.caorc.org/multi-fellowship-guidelines

Apply:https://orcfellowships.smapply.org/prog/caorc_multi-country_research_fellowship/

Questions: fellowships@caorc.org

FELLOWSHIP GUIDELINES

ANHS is now accepting submissions for the 2022 Dor Bahadur Bista Pirze for the Best Graduate Student Paper. This prize recognizes outstanding scholarship by graduate student who research focuses on the Himalayan region. Deadline is August 30. Learn more at the Bista Prize section in our ANHS-himalaya.org website. 

The Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) is pleased to announce that the Himalayan Studies Conference 6 (HSC6) will be held at the University of Toronto, on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit, from October 13–16, 2022.

The conference will be organized and hosted by the University of Toronto on behalf of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS). 

Call for Papers: HSC 6_CFP_extended.pdf

On December 11, 2021 Cornell anthropologists and long-term ANHS members David Holmberg and Kathryn March received the 2021 Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal. They received the Hillary Medal for their many decades of friendship and assistance to Nepal, and for their leadership in educational exchange programs. Professors Holmberg and March carried out field work among the Tamang of Nepal for more than forty years, documenting and preserving customs and beliefs. After the 2015 earthquakes, they raised thousands of dollars to help their Tamang friends rebuild their villages. Their achievements on behalf of highland communities of Nepal, and of the country itself, are truly exemplary.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION