The Project

The concept of this book emerged from two conferences held in March 2013: ‘Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya’ and ‘Himalayan Connection: Disciplines, Geographies, and Trajectories’ – organized respectively by the India China Institute of the New School and the Yale Himalaya Initiative. Both conferences showcased a wide range of papers addressing historical and current topics from diverse ecosystems, human communities, and nation-states in the Himalayas. The inquiries pertaining to how we have conceived and are reconceiving Himalayan studies culminated in the keynote presentations and discussions of James Scott, Sara Shneiderman, and Charles Ramble. The themes centered on the conceptual interfacing of concepts of Zomia (Van Schendel 2002; Scott 2009; Michaud 2010) and the Himalayas, deconstructing and reconstructing disciplinary boundaries, and the historical and current shifting of borderlands and territories. First coined by Willem van Schendel, ‘Zomia’ is a term etymologically derived from Tibetan-Burmese languages spoken in the Himalayas and is used to refer to contiguous regions in Northeast India, Southeast Asia, Southwest China, and the Tibetan Plateau (Van Schendel 2002). Its subsequent evolutions by James Scott, Jean Michaud, and Sara Shneiderman have different geographical coverages, contributing toward rich theoretical ground.

While the interdisciplinary reconceptualizations of the complexity of bordered connectivity in modern High Asia underlined the core theoretical inquiries of the two conferences, it was also discernible that the default conception of the Himalayas as a region was centered mostly on the geography of the Himalayan territories of Nepal, Tibet, and India, limiting how we explore new frontiers and the diversity of Himalayan studies.