What Are you Doing in this Place of Nothing but Rocks and Trees

The area of Northern Nepal where I found myself repeatedly attracted to 
spend time over the last four decades is spoken of as remote, and not nearly so 
alluring as other parts of the Nepal Himalayas. The Tamang-speaking villagers had 
their doubts about what I could find interesting in their precipitous homeland, from 
which they struggled to make a living “chasing hunger high and low on the 
mountainside”. The Rough Guide to Nepal stated “There’s not much culture up here”. 
For me it has been a location yielding profound cultural, social, political and 
environmental insights. It has been a place that stretches the reach of concepts, 
theories, languages, infrastructures and polities, and with a radical, ridge-dwelling 
ontological ‘politics of location’ opens up possibilities for learning from indigenous 
reflection on multi-species relations, gender, livelihood prosperity, environment and 
sustainability. In this lecture I will gather some insights and images that have inspired 
phases of my research into mutual aid and gender in agro-pastoral subsistence, 
Himalayan biodiversity and regimes of participatory conservation, climate change, 
and energy transitions. Interspersed with these thematic interests has been a life 
pursued in the ways of compost-making and goat-keeping (from East Anglia to the 
South Pennines), with which to ground the comparative ethnographic study of food 
growing as fertile folk knowledge that anthropologists have in fact long shared with 
publics well beyond academic readerships (and now visual platforms). 

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Registration for the lecture is not required, please just come along on the day.