Places in Knots: Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond

by Martin Saxer

Overview

Tracing the experiences of mobile Himalayans across the globe, Places in Knots describes the ways in which Himalayan people relate to the multiple places they inhabit and the work and trouble of keeping their communities tied together. Martin Saxer describes global Himalayan ventures as a form of expansion of community rather than out-migration. Moving out does not sever the bonds of community. Instead, it is the pull that tightens the knot.

Coffee-table books and trekking agencies continue to advertise the Himalayas as remote "hidden valleys," and NGOs see them as fragile mountain ecosystems to be protected from global forces of destruction. Places in Knots shows how these tropes of remoteness inform development and conservation policies and thus shape the contexts in which Himalayan connections with the wider world are forged and maintained. Following Himalayan journeys between valleys in Nepal and beyond, Saxer draws a picture of globalization that emerges not from the centers or below—but rather from the edge.

Thanks to generous funding from LMU München, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501766862
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2023
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Martin Saxer leads a research group on contemporary forms of foraging at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, University of Munich. He is the author of Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Juggling Worlds
Introduction
Part 1: Locality and Community
1. Tying Places into Knots
2. Moving In, Moving Up, Moving Out
Interlude: A Son's Uncertain Ambitions
3. Binding Rules
Part 2: Pathways
4. The Business of Wayfaring
5. A Quest for Roads
Interlude: A Mound of Rice
6. The Labor of Distribution
Part 3: Interventions
Interlude: Kailash - Truly Sacred
7. Curation at Large
8. Landscapes, Dreamscapes
9. Mapping Mountains
10. Translating Ambitions
Epilogue: Navidad Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Sienna R. Craig

Moving between highland Nepal, Kathmandu, and New York City, Places in Knots is an original work of the highest caliber. It illuminates the ways that communities and individuals sustain and remake themselves in response to major forces of social, political, and economic transformation.

Emily Yeh

Beautifully written and delightful, Places in Knots makes important interventions into debates in sociocultural anthropology and human geography on remoteness and connectivity, globalization and place, transnationalism and mobility, and the importance of distribution in political economy and livelihoods.

Editorial Reviews

Places in Knots is a rich ethnography focused on the changing landscape of Nepal's Himalayan borderlands. Drawing from his extensive multi-sited field- work, Martin Saxer pushes back against tropes of 'remoteness' and 'local community' by showing how Himalayan peoples extend their sociality and entrepreneurship beyond the highland villages that help form, but hardly delimit, their social and economic worlds.

Inner Asia