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.
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.
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.
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.
The kichkini is a young, beautiful, female ghost featured in Nepalese legends, instantly recognizable by her back-turned feet. She is believed to travel through the night in search of men to seduce, and those who encounter her may fall ill or even die. This article explores the kichkini narrative through four in-depth interviews with Nepali nationals—three based in the UK (n=3) and one in Nepal (n=1)—supported by published stories, online blogs, and YouTube video clips. Ghost stories are found throughout the world, and many features of the kichkini legend are transcultural. For example, “hitchhiking ghosts” and “back-footed beings” appear in other folklore traditions. At the same time, ghost stories may also act as “cultural objects,” reflecting specific cultural ideas and concerns. In the Nepali context, ghosts arise due to “bad deaths” or incorrect death rituals. They can be malign, and shamans are tasked with protecting the living from these entities. Kichkini may represent the perceived threat posed by female sexuality to patrilineal structures and be used to justify restrictions on women and even violence against them. As the social climate of Nepal shifts under the influence of modernity and the drive for development, the position of women is changing, and the kichkini story appears to be evolving to reflect this. There is little research-based literature on the kichkini, and analyzing such legends could provide deeper understanding of death, gender, female sexuality, and social change in Nepal.
What happens when an ethnographer gossips about ritual with interlocutors? What do the contents of these exchanges reveal about the ritual performances being discussed? The extracts of gossip exchanges between the ethnographer, Newar Buddhist priests, ritual sponsors, and other participants demonstrate that through gossiping, people create the space to express ritual criticism. Through these intersubjective gossiping sessions, focused on the actions of ritual performers during the offering ritual known as chāhāyekegu, people come to express their opinions about proper ritual procedure, thereby defining what is appropriate and inappropriate. Gossip-cum-ritual criticism allows people to share their views on ritual mistakes and proper procedure, albeit never their own shortcomings. While these conversations run the risk of making the ethnographer uncomfortable, ethnographers must follow these invitations to gossip since they provide a unique perspective on how interlocutors understand and engage with rituals.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This paper examines the pictorial practices of landscape painting in colonial British art and the textual practice of colonial travel writing to examine the landscape aesthetics of remoteness in the Indian Himalayas. It argues that neither the ‘picturesque’ nor the ‘sublime’ genre of colonial landscape paintings can describe the representation of the marginalised geographies of the Indian Himalayas and the colonial impetus to engineer them. By offering a paradigm of the landscape aesthetics of remoteness, this paper demonstrates how remoteness is aesthetically reproduced in the colonial visual imagination, which informs the mapping, engineering and transformation of the Himalayan landscape. It examines the landscape aesthetics in the travelogue and its accompanying illustrations of aquatints in the works of James B. Fraser (1820a, b) and of the lithographs and accompanying text in the work of Thomas Daniell (c.1800) for the North-Western Himalayan region in India. The paper situates these representations of colonial landscape paintings in a broader study of ‘landscape and power’ (Mitchell 1994). It analyses the pictorial and textual practices through the dialectic of the ‘interior’ and the ‘frontier’ that produces the landscape aesthetic of remoteness and provides a new paradigm for studying landscapes and their representation.
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.
