Communicative Orders in Collision and Collusion with Natural Resource Management Regimes in Nepal

ABSTRACT

Successive policy agendas in Nepal have mobilised the notion of the natural environment through crisis scenarios of deforestation and soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and latterly climate change. This article discusses ethnographic work on struggles over livelihoods and national park regulations, and examines collisions and collusions of indigenous shamanic ontologies, moral ecologies, and a hierarchical state symbolism of hunting, to tell very different storylines about languages of nature slipping into affinity with communicative orders of hierarchical purity and power distinctions. Protected areas for nature and wildlife are established in ethnically marked territories, perceived by elites as places of jangal, lacking in culture. Ethnographic research in the Langtang National Park reveals that no singular hegemonic order or ontology dominates but dialogues of power, knowledge, and relational possibility come into play. The aftermath of 2015s earthquakes notably occasioned appeals for social justice to bend the singularly proprietorial resource language of nature protection authorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral ecology
• indigenous knowledge
• protected areas
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Critical reviews of national park and protected area policy in Nepal can be found in Blaikie and Sadeque 2000, Brower 1993, Campbell 2003, Müller-Böker & Kollmair 2000, and Stevens 1997.

2 During my first fieldwork, which was before regular traffic passed along the road to Dhunche, many lowlander Bahun-Chetri would come seeking seed potatoes, or looking to put their ploughing oxen in the care of Tamang-speaking villagers, as these higher places had much better pasture access. Some Bahun traders of cotton would regularly come before the festival period, and so fill a timely need in advance of the peripatetic tailors who would stay in the house and work for a week or so before moving on. Payments for the goods these visitors brought were frequently renegotiated to accommodate irregular access to cash.

3 Rather than ‘tributary’ Descola uses the term ‘analogical’, which I debate in Campbell 2013 chapter 9 ‘Translating Sustainability’.

4 There is insufficient space in this article both to articulate the rationale for concerns over universalizing the category of natural resources, and to underpin each step of the argument with detailed ethnography, for which I refer curious readers to Campbell 2013.

5 Mumford’s (1989) Himalayan Dialogue is the classic analysis for the structural inequality of oral and literate knowledge in the region. Ortner (1998) follows a similar argument for knowledge hierarchy while also explaining the ongoing appeal for oral inspiration.

6 Similarly in the medical field there is a campaign for people to avoid these ‘faith-healers’ (Pigg 1996).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ESRC award (R000237061) ‘Himalayan Biodiversity and Human Interests’ 1997–8.