Upper Humla, an area in northwestern Nepal bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region, has lost much of its prosperity over the past five decades. The region's recent history has been shaped by modernization efforts and development initiatives on both sides. However, the author argues that, contrary to the common conception that Communist reform in Tibet dismantled the traditional economic foundation of trade-based Himalayan livelihoods, different forces were at work in the case of upper Humla. Three benevolent development initiatives in public health, wildlife conservation, and community forestry triggered the decline. The "second lives" of successful development, rather than the side effects of modernist planning, are responsible for upper Humla's current predicament.
This article discusses the contemporary cross-border trade in medicinal plants between Nepal and Tibet. As Tibetan pharmacy extensively relies on raw materials not native to Tibet, longdistance trade in medicinal materials is not a new phenomenon. However, with the recent creation of a Tibetan medicine industry in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the increasing demand for herbs from India and Nepal, the contemporary herb trade is facing new challenges. Surging trade volumes, notions of patient safety, growing ecological concerns, and the current political situation in Tibet have led to increased efforts at rendering legible and controlling the transit of traders and herbs across the border. The ethnographic account of a Tibetan plant trader's business trip to Nepal serves as a starting point for a discussion of these efforts and the traders' tactical manoeuvres to deal with them. The notion of 'border regimes' is introduced to analyse the regulations, their implementation and side-effects that condition the current situation.
Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading liberal voices, the world map today looks more rugged and uneven than it has in a long time. While some areas are smoothly connected to global capital and cultural flows, others are becoming more marginalised and ‘distant’, at least from the viewpoint of global centres of power. In this introduction, we build an analytical approach to remoteness as a social and political process rather than a primordial condition. We emphasise three key aspects of remoteness: its deep entanglement with forms of connectivity; its economic usefulness; and its amenability to ‘remote control’. In considering these aspects, we bring anthropology's long heritage of studying ‘marginal’ societies to bear on the political resurgence of remoteness in a new world disorder of proliferating global dangers, lucrative frontier economies and heritage‐making.
The production of Tibetan pharmaceuticals underwent a far-reaching transformation over the past decade. The introduction of good manufacturing practices (GMP) marked the beginning of rapid industrialization: new factories were built, and the companies re-oriented themselves to the requirements of the market. While officially regarded a great success, many doctors and pharmacists see GMP as fundamentally incompatible with traditional production methods and notions of quality. In this article, I address this incompatibility and examine where and how it affects the actual practice of producing medicines. While the problem exists, I argue that it does not stem from conflicting epistemologies but rather from the side effects of a quick and forced implementation, which often contradicts the spirit and letter of the regulations themselves. The case sheds new light on the way in which ideas about quality and safety, forged in the global arena, are locally recontextualized.
How does remoteness emerge from the very connections envisioned to unmake it? And how do connections arise from remoteness? In this article, I address these questions by taking remoteness and connectivity not as opposites but as entangled forces that condition each other. To explore this evolving nexus, I focus on provisions: the notion of provision denotes, at once, a foresight or visions of a better future, a rule or law, and supplies coming in from the outside. Looking into three junctures of cutting connections and forging ties in the Tajik Pamirs – the Soviet system of Moscow provisioning, wayfaring Pajero drivers and international trophy hunting – I show how provisions (of all three kinds) were instrumental in shaping the repeating return of remoteness in the region.
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