Caring for glaciers : land, animals, and humanity in the Himalayas / Karine Gagné.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gagné, Karine, author.

Contributor:

George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Series:

Culture, place, and nature

Culture, place, and nature: studies in anthropology and environment

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Glaciers--Himalaya Mountains Region.

Glaciers.

Glaciers--India--Ladākh.

Human ecology.

Environmentalism.

Himalaya Mountains Region.

India--Ladākh.

Physical Description:

xxv, 231 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2018]

Summary:

"Set in the high-altitude Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, Caring for Glaciers looks at the causes and consequences of a transformation in people's relationship with the environment. It illuminates how relations of care and reciprocity-learned through everyday life and work in the mountains with the animals, glaciers, and deities that form Ladakh's sacred geography-shape and nurture an ethics of care for non-humans. The geopolitical context that has reconfigured Ladakh into a strategic border area in postcolonial India has transformed the fabric of everyday life. Simultaneously, the landscape of Ladakh is also being transformed by climate change. Ladakhi elders perceive this as a changing moral order, in which environmental depletion and social fragmentation are inextricably intertwined. As Glaciers Vanish contributes to the anthropology of ethics by examining the moral order that develops through the embodied experience of life and work in the Himalayas. While not divorced from Buddhist beliefs, this emerges not from religious doctrine but from beliefs and practices through which people engage with the environment. This book will be of interest to researchers in a variety of fields, including anthropology, geography, and sociology of religion. It will also appeal to scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and of borderland studies, to social scientists studying climate change, and to area studies specialists of India, South Asia, and the Himalayas"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Morality and an ethics of care in the Himalayas

The loneliness of winter : continuity and change in the high mountains

Arthalis and beyond : a crack in the landscape

Becoming sentinel citizens : the reconfiguration of Ladakh into a border area

"Father white glacier" : incommensurable temporalities and eroding filial bonds

Searching for Aba Stanzin : on the predicament of herders

Intimate glaciers and an ethics of care : mutual recessions

As glaciers vanish.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the George Clapp Vaillant Book Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Gagné, Karine. Caring for glaciers.

ISBN:

9780295744001

0295744006

9780295744018

0295744014

OCLC:

1043148467

Publisher Number:

99980200636