Living Between Juniper and Palm

Description

Polarized conceptualizations of nature versus culture have, directly or indirectly, informed long drawn, inconclusive debates within the discourse of environmental conservation. It is not surprising that modern interventions towards environmental conservation often end up downplaying perspectives that validate and draw upon indigenous peoples’ intimate ecological interactions.   Living between Juniper and Palm is a rich ethnographic study of the Tamang people inhabiting the Nepal Himalayas. An in-depth anthropological study of the issues of sustainability, ecology, and livelihood among the Tamangs, the author locates people and environments in a relationship that does not depend upon a split between physical reality and an overlay of cultural meaning. Combining various critical perspectives for analysing human– environment relations, this book documents indigenous environmental knowledge about forests, pathways, animals, and ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between humans and nonhumans. Modern practices of conservation are contrasted to shamanic and Hindu cosmologies, providing cultural analysis to the ‘power’ dimensions of participatory conservation after Nepal’s Maoist insurgency.   Based on extensive fieldwork and oral accounts of the indigenous Tamang people, this book will be an engaging read for students and scholars of conservation and development, political ecology, social and environmental anthropology, sociology, human geography, and the general reader interested in the ecology and environment in Nepal.