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

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 (@anhs_himalaya). Thank you for reading Himalaya.

Jeevan Sharma and Michael Heneise

Co-Editors, HIMALAYA

Calls for submissions are now open for two ANHS Awards. The due date for both awards is on Nov 15, 2021. Please see links below for more details:

1. The James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region

2. The Dor Bahadur Bista Prize for the Best Graduate Student Paper

The CAORC 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 program first launched in 1993 with fourteen ORCs participating. Now in its 28th year, the network has expanded to twenty-five ORCs who participate (with the exception of countries with travel restrictions).

The fellowship supports advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and allied natural sciences for US doctoral candidates, who are '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. Approximately nine awards of $11,500 will be granted.​

​Each year the highest ranking Multi-Country 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: November 16, 2021

Fellowship Guidelines: Link

Questions: fellowships@caorc.org

Structural Inequality and Epidemiological Invisibility: Himalayan New Yorkers Respond to Covid-19

A project funded by the Social Science Research Council, with additional support from the Peter Wall Institute (UBC) and the SPARK Award from Dartmouth College

This project addresses the rapidly unfolding health, humanitarian, and socioeconomic crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic among communities of Himalayan New Yorkers who live and work at the epicenter of the current outbreak. Using daily auto-ethnographic video diaries, interviews, language mapping methodologies, and analysis of health messaging about Covid-19 from state, city, and community institutions as well as social media, this project responds to the SSRC call for research on how Covid-19 reflects social inequality and the uneven impacts across lines of race and ethnicity as well as the role of religious ideas, practices, and institutions in responding to the pandemic. So far, the most affected areas in New York are those that are most linguistically diverse. Drawing on anthropologies of global health and scholarship on migration, mobility, and diaspora with research on linguistic diversity and socioeconomic marginalization, our project asks how language and culture intersect with structural inequality to render a marginalized immigrant community, in a hyperdiverse urban context, “epidemiologically invisible” during a global pandemic. This project builds on long-term collaborations and relations of trust with members of the Himalayan New York community. Our research alliance has a proven track record of publications, funding, media impact, and visibility. This project leverages existing networks of community research associates and engaged scholarship; an ongoing language mapping project, itself emergent from a Languages of New York map and related research; ethnography conducted with Himalayan communities, both in New York City and in home countries; and the “Voices of the Himalaya” video storytelling project.

Link to SSRC Items article

Link to Asian Medicine Special Issue article, currently Open Access!

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). The purpose of the prize is to recognize outstanding scholarship by students whose research focuses on the areas of Himalayas. Submissions from all academic disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and arts will be accepted.

The winner of 2020 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper is Phurwa Dhondup Gurung. Phurwa is a PhD Student in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. The title of his paper is: "Dispossessing while Decentralizing: Participatory Conservation as an Emergent Structure of Dispossession in the Himalayas".

Abstract:
Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total land area of Nepal and over a third of its entire Himalayan region. Despite the rhetoric of participatory conservation often used to justify fortress conservation, National Parks in Nepal remain firmly under the control of the central state and are governed by strict conservation policies implemented through a heavily militarized structures. Using a political ecology approach, this paper examines how and to what extent centralized conservation policies and the institutions of participatory conservation affect local socioecological lives in Dolpo, Nepal. I first provide a brief sketch of Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) followed by an analysis of its role in monopolizing the governance of yartsa gunbu in Dho Tarap valley, Dolpo. Drawing from three-months of ethnographic field research at multiple field sites in the summer of 2019, as well as from my own engagements with Dolpo communities for over a decade, I argue that participatory conservation materializes on the ground as an emergent structure of dispossession— not only in terms of the extraction of resources like yartsa gunbu but also because of its role in displacing community-led resource governance. This paper contributes to the literature on conservation as government, the politics of decentralization in resource management, as well as the growing literature on the management of yartsa gunbu in the Himalayas.

The ANHS Executive Council underwent a major turnover in 2020 and has been managing significant transitions for the Association over the last 18 months. Given also the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are announcing the 2019 award this year. We will soon solicit a call for books to be considered for both 2020 and 2021.

Congratulations to the 2019 James Fisher Prize winner Karine Gagné for her book Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals and Humanity in the Himalayas. This ethnography contributes to our understanding of human-environment relations in the Himalayan region, and employs novel theoretical interventions to do so. The book contributes to an understanding of ethics as informed by both practical activity in daily life, and beliefs about the nonhuman world. It engages the concept of an ethics of care by showing how the Ladakhi people sacrifice for the land, identify with a glacier, attend to domesticated animals, and cultivate knowledge about Ladakhi ecosystems. Based on year-round research in the Sham region of Ladakh, Gagne shows how caring for the land, glaciers, animals is a moral responsibility informed by religious ideas, but also by everyday life. In so doing she specifies a theory of the Anthropocene outside centres of global North knowledge production, where everyday human life engages nonhuman transitions at a key site manifesting contemporary geologic transformations. The book evokes a powerful moral and biophysical framework for the global call for care beyond humans, and points to critical questions about where the Indian state (and others) stands in relation to global discussions about the relationship between the human and the more-than-human.

In addition, the Prize Committee awards Honorable Mention to Stefan Fiol for his book  Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media and Social Mobililty. Fiol illustrates through an ethnographic and historical study how folk music and the terminology of “folk” is conditioned by colonial, nationalist, and caste-based values and expectations. Spatially the book focuses on the Garhwal and Kumaon region in the Indian state of Uttarakhand In so doing it explores the everyday praxis of performers and performances in order to articulate the historical and contemporary “recasting” of folk in the Indian Himalayas. Specifically “folk” is recast via a politics of caste hierarchy—“lower-caste artisans from rural areas were celebrated as the source of the artistic heritage of the nation, but upper-caste artists were required to reform these raw materials and transform them into folklore.” Fiol thus reveals how the politics of folklorization itself is inherently interconnected with social status and mobility.