Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture, and Power in the Himalayas

摘要

This book is a thick ethnography about a people, a national park and about the theoretical and political aspects of both of these. Located in the Rasuwa district of Nepal, it interrogates the relationship of the Tamang speaking people of the village Tengu, situated on the banks of Trisuli river and adjacent to the Langtang National Park. The much debated problem of human vs. nature takes on entirely different overtones as the concepts of nature, culture, society and even those of human and non-human are deconstructed and displaced to show that in many non-western perceptions, such divisions are meaningless and the boundaries either do not exist as between nature and culture and human and non-human or are fluid and contested as those between people and objects situated on different planes of hierarchy. The author has taken care to examine every possible theoretical stand that exists, before settling for a 'dwelling' phenomenological perspective, like of Ingold and Viveiros de Castros and one that is inclusive of apolitical ecological perspective and focus on the global encounter between the top down 'developmental' activities and the bottom up counteractions of various actors on the ground, including people like the ones discussed here. The author has gone into a detailed and nuanced analysis of the interactive world of the people, one that is not based on a pre-given cognitive and culturally conditioned map, but one that is constituted dynamically through lived experiences and therefore transforms in relation to the changing conditions of these interactions. Culture is then not a given and closed entity but a fluid and continually recharged concept.