Mountains Are Commons, Grasses Are Divided”: Indigenous Environmental Governance Between Conservation and Democracy

“MOUNTAINS ARE COMMONS, GRASSES ARE DIVIDED”: INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE BETWEEN CONSERVATION AND DEMOCRACY

by PHURWA D. GURUNG M.A., Tribhuvan University, 2018

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Geography 2020

Committee Members:

Dr. Emily Yeh

Dr. Joe Bryan

Dr. Clint Carroll

Dr. Mara Goldman

ABSTRACT

Gurung, Phurwa Dhondup (M.A., Geography)

“Mountains are commons, grasses are divided”: Indigenous environmental governance between conservation and democracy

Thesis directed by Professor of Geography Dr. Emily T. Yeh

This thesis takes a political ecological approach to critically examine what happens when Dolpopa ways of knowing, being and governing their land and territories interact and mingle with state structures of conservation (and democracy) in Northwest Nepal. Through a resource- based approach, it first examines the ways in which state authority emerges and intensifies in Dolpo by discussing the role of Shey Phoksundo National Park in the contested governance of caterpillar fungus (Tib. yartsagunbu) in Dho Tarap valley. It then takes a relationship-based approach to explore alternate ontologies and governance practices of the Dolpopas that are conceived and carried out in their own terms, and that account for the agency of nonhumans and the maintenance of relationships with them. Drawing from three months of ethnographic field research as well as from the author’s engagements with Dolpo community over the past decade, this thesis argues that externally imposed imperatives of conservation materialize on the ground not only as an extractive regime of accumulation of resources like yartsagunbu but also as an emergent structure of dispossession of Dolpopa governance practices and ontologies. At the same time, though, the thesis demonstrates the robustness of Dolpopa governance practices and ontologies as they come into being and sustain themselves vis-à-vis conservation.

༄༅། རི་ི་རི་་བགོས་། གདོད་ལ་ལ་མིའི་ཁོར་ག་དབང་འཛན་ཏེ་བ་གས་ཁོར་ང་དང་བལ་ལ་དམངས་གཙའི་ལམ་གས་ལ་བངས་པའི་དོགས་དོད།།

དད་ོམ་འདིར་ཆབ་ིད་ེས་ཁམས་རིག་པའི་ཐབས་ལམ་བད་ནས་དོལ་པོ་པའི་འོ་གས་འག་ོལ་དང་ལ་ང་ིམས་ོལ་ིས་མཚན་པའི་རི་ང་ལ་ གམ་ལ་བདག་དོམ་ེད་གས་བ་གས་ཁོར་ང་གི་ོམ་གཞི་དང་འད་འཐབ་འེས་གམ་ེད་བས་་ང་བའི་གནད་དོན་ལ་དོགས་དོད་ས་ཡོད། ཐོན་ངས་ གཞིར་བཅོལ་ི་་ཐིག་ལ་བེན་ནས་ཐོག་མར་ལ་གང་གི་དབང་འཛན་དོལ་པོ་་མངོན་ངས་དང་དེའི་དབང་གས་ཇེ་ཆེ་་འཕེལ་ངས་ཤེལ་གས་གམ་མདོའི་ི་ིང་ གིས་མདོ་་རབ་ི་དར་་དན་འའི་འན་ོད་རང་བཞིན་ི་བདག་དོམ་ལ་ཐོན་པའི་གས་ེན་བད་ནས་བོ་ེང་ས་ཡོད། དེ་ནས་འེལ་ལམ་གཞིར་བཅོལ་ི་་ ཐིག་ལ་བེན་ནས་ས་གནས་རང་གི་འེལ་གས་མཚན་ཐབས་་གསལ་བའི་དོལ་པོ་པའི་འཇིག་ེན་འག་ོལ་དང་བདག་དབང་འཛན་གས་ལ་དེ་ཞིབ་ས་ཏེ་མི་དང་མི་མ་ ཡིན་པའི་སེམས་ཅན་ི་ཐོབ་དབང་དང་དེ་གཉིས་བར་ི་འེལ་ལམ་ོང་ཐབས་ལ་ཞིབ་འག་ས་ཡོད། ་ངོ་གམ་རིང་གི་ལ་དངོས་ོག་དོད་དང་ོམ་པ་པོའི་འདས་ བའི་ལོ་ངོ་བའི་རིང་གི་དོལ་པོའི་ལ་ེ་དང་འེས་པའི་འཚ་བའི་མཉམ་གས་ལ་བེན་ནས་དད་ོམ་འདི་ཡིས་ར་འགེལ་རང་བཞིན་ི་བ་གས་ཁོར་ང་ངམ་ཐོན་ ངས་གཉེར་ང་གིས་དོལ་པོའི་ལ་ེ་ཁག་་ཐོན་པའི་མངོན་གསལ་ི་མག་འས་ཤིག་ནི་བོགས་ལེན་པའི་བས་གགས་ཤིག་ེ་དར་་དན་འས་མཚན་པའི་ཐོན་ ངས་བ་གསོག་ེད་མཁན་ི་དབང་འཛན་ལས་ངས་ཤིག་་མངོན་པར་མ་ཟད། ཁོར་ང་ཐོན་ང་ནི་ང་དང་འང་བཞིན་པའི་དོལ་པོ་པའི་འཇིག་ེན་འག་ོལ་དང་ བདག་དབང་འཛན་གས་ི་བདག་དབང་འོག་ལེན་ེད་ཐབས་ི་ོམ་གཞི་ཞིག་རེད། ས་མངས་། ཁོར་ང་ཐོན་ང་ལ་ོས་ཏེ་དད་ོམ་འདི་ཡིས་དོལ་པོ་པའི་འཇིག་ ེན་འག་ོལ་དང་བདག་དབང་འཛན་གས་ི་གསོན་ོབས་དང་ཕན་ས་མངོན་གསལ་ིས་བན་ཡོད།

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Field research for this thesis was funded by the Solstice Graduate Research Award from the Department of Geography, Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grants, and the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS) Graduate Student Awards from the Graduate School at the University of Colorado Boulder. This thesis would not have been possible without the labor, creative insights, passion and care of many brilliant and generous people. First and foremost, I would like thank my advisor Dr. Emily Yeh who have generously supported and guided me throughout my time at CU Boulder, and whose works inspire me as an aspiring scholar. Dr. Yeh embodies all one could ask for in an advisor. I especially appreciate her consistently prompt yet detailed email replies and feedback. I am also grateful for conversations with and generous comments from my other committee members: Dr. Mara Goldman and Dr. Joe Bryan from Geography, and Dr. Clint Carroll from Ethnic Studies. At CU Boulder, I have benefitted immensely from graduate seminars with Dr. Joe Bryan, Dr. Tim Oakes, Dr. Jennifer Fluri, Dr. Bill Travis, Dr. Mike Dwyer in the Department of Geography, as well as a seminar with Dr. Carole McGranahan in the Department of Anthropology. I am particularly thankful to the participants of a thesis writing group that Dr. Yeh organized who provided valuable comments to the first article: Shae Frydenlund, Xi Wang, Dorjee Tashi, Lin Zhu, Darren Byler. Many thanks to Yuying Ren for helping with the maps presented in this thesis. I am also grateful to Rupak Shrestha, Lin Zhu, Shruthi Jagadeesh, Dorjee Tashi, Diego Melo, Richa Shakya, Ridge Zachary, Neda Shaban, Prakriti Mukherjee, Kripa Dongol, Kylen Solvik, Yuying Ren, Fedor Popov, Caitlin McShane, Tracy Fehr, Somtsobum and other friends in Geography and Tibet Himalaya Initiative (THI) for many conversations we shared and for your friendship throughout our time in Boulder. I am extremely thankful to fellow Dolpopas whose stories and unfinished struggles this thesis only begins to ascertain. I hope this research proves helpful in any way to the community. I am particularly grateful to the support and friendship of Gyalpo and Phurwa from Dho Tarap and Tashi Lama from Phoksundo, as well as Nyima Dorjee, Ngawang Lhundrup and Tsering Samdrup, and all who talked with me and offered many cups of butter tea and home-made barley beer. I am also thankful to the staff at Shey Phoksundo National Park headquarters in Suligad, especially then acting warden Pramod Yadav, Gopal Khanal and Chandra Hamal, as well as to the Direct General of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Kathmandu, for their interviews and/or providing helpful information about the park. Views expressed and any errors are my own. Finally, I am forever grateful to my parents, Nyima and Kunzom, as well as my sister, Lhamo, who has supported the field research of this thesis and beyond like a mother. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my immense gratitude to Action Dolpo and its founder Marie Claire Gentric without whose vision, generosity and commitment, I would not have made this far to graduate school in the first place.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………...1 2. Historical background of Dolpo…………………………………………………6 3. State restructuring, democracy, and indigeneity in Nepal………………………10 4. Methodology……………………………………………………………………15

II. DISPOSSESSING WHILE DECENTRALIZING: PARTICIPATORY CONSERVATION AS AN EMERGENT STRUCTURE OF DISPOSSESSION

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………18 2. Protected areas in perspective…………………………………………………21 3. Political ecology of participatory conservation………………………………..23 i. Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP)……………………………… 26 ii. SPNP Buffer Zone……………………………………………………..31 4. Caterpillar fungus governance in Dho Tarap………………………………….37 i. Maoist control (2003–2006)…………………………………………...39 ii. Local control (2007–2013)…………………………………………….40 iii. National Park control (2014–present)………………………………….46 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..49

III. “MOUNTAINS ARE COMMONS, GRASSES ARE DIVIDED”: INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL ONTOLOGY IN DOLPO

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………55 2. Seeing like a conservationist…………………………………………………..60 3. Indigenous environmental governance………………………………………...75 i. skya khrims: Sealing the valley………………………………………..77 ii. sngo khrims: Sealing the mountains…………………………………...79 4. Political ontology………………………………………………………………82 i. bstan skor: A ritual to bring rain and harvest………………………….83 ii. Founding myths, sacred geographies and reverse conservation……….94 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………102

IV. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………….105

V. REFERENCES………………………………………………………………….…….111

VI. APPENDICES………………………………………………………………………..119

1. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval letter……………………….…...119 2. Verbal consent form in Tibetan………………………………...... 120 3. Semi-structured interview aide-mémoire………………………………..…...122 4. Research permit from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, Babarmahal, Kathmandu, Nepal……………………...…...... 123 5. Research permit from Shey Phoksundo National Park, Suligad, Dolpa...... 125

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. Dolpo in the context of protected areas in Nepal…………………………………………7 Map 2. Map of Dolpo showing the overlapping boundaries of Shey Phoksundo National Park(SPNP) and its Buffer Zones with Shey Phoksundo and Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipalities…………………………………………………………...... 7

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

APF Armed Police Force BZMC Buffer Zone Management Committee CDO Chief District Officer CPA Comprehensive Peace Agreement DBRM Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipality DG Director General DNPWC Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation ICCA Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas ICDP Integrated Conservation and Development Program ILO 169 International Labor Organization’s The Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 NP Nepal Police NUG Nyasamba Buffer Zone User Group Committee NTFP Non-Timber Forest Products NEFIN Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities NFDIN Nepal Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities NMCP Northern Mountain Conservation Project PUG Phoksundo Buffer Zone User Group Committee PPI Plant and People Initiative RM Rural Municipalities SPNP Shey Phoksundo National Park UG User Group Committee UNDRIP United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples VDC village development committee WWF World Wildlife Fund YCL Young Communist League

A NOTE ON TIBETAN/DOLPO TERMS AND PHRASES

For Tibetan/Dolpo terms and phrases, I generally use Wylie transliteration rather than phonetic spellings save for a few common place names and proper nouns. This is because there are many dialects and a diversity of ways to say the same term, even within and between villages in Dolpo. Thus Wylie transliteration will allow the readers to ascertain the correct Tibetan spelling and hopefully relate across the Tibetan linguistic world. Tibetan/Dolpo terms and phrases are italicized throughout the text. Place names, proper names, and proper nouns are capitalized but not italicized. For all terms and phrases, I provide a brief description in English language on its first use. All the Dolpo sayings in the beginning of each section are however written in Tibetan script; I have translated them into English to preserve their meanings which unfortunately comes at the cost of forfeiting their original structure and meter.

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INTRODUCTION

གས་གངས་རི་ཆགས་པའི་ཆགས་ལ།། མདོ་གཙང་ཆབ་གས་པའི་གས་ལ།། [Let me tell everything] From the formation of the upper snow mountains to the flowing of the lower great rivers. —Dolpo saying

It was a crisp morning on June 4, 2014 when I woke up to a cacophony of distant noises outside my home in Dho Tarap, Dolpo, a high altitude region in Northwest Nepal. That morning, fellow villagers had gathered to discuss the imperative to collect a nominal fee from thousands of non-locals who travelled from all parts of Nepal to gather the rare, highly valued and globally traded caterpillar fungus, locally known as yartsagunbu (summer grass, winter worm).

Sometimes dubbed the “Himalayan Viagra”, the value of yartsagunbu reportedly exceeds the price of gold by weight making it the most expensive biological commodity in the world. The previous day, over fifty armed police officers, sent by Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP), had arrested seven local residents who were collecting fees from yartsagunbu collectors over the legality of collecting the fees. Later that day, local residents submitted a petition to the national park to demand immediate release of those detained but more importantly to affirm their customary rights to manage a local natural resource. However, the park staff refused to release the detainees and dismissed the complaint of the residents as “illegal”, and instead issued threats of violence for not complying with the park regulations. No sooner had the local residents made a final attempt to negotiate a deal by staging a peaceful protest, they were met with brutal force as police rained batons and bullets, and chanted racial slurs against them. Two local residents were killed and over fifty were injured in the ensuing police brutality that lasted the whole night.

Rather than a one-off event or turning point, the violence should be understood as a mere inflection of the broader relationship between the Nepal state and Dolpopas which is an evolving matrix of biopolitical neglect, marginalization, structural inequalities, natural resource extraction, violence, and dispossession. For me personally, the violent event was an important educational moment. I witnessed the incident first-hand and suffered minor injuries. Just when the police started throwing their batons and shooting towards the crowd, I was on a phone call with the vice

Chief District Officer (CDO), who commanded the police force, literally begging him to stop the imminent conflict. “Phurwa ji, just stay safe yourself. We need to take care of those reckless locals,” he advised before my phone flew into the air as a group of police started beating me with their boots and the butt of their guns. The incident also put me at the forefront of a small campaign for justice in Kathmandu. The incident and its long aftermath during which I got to gain an up-close view of the state structures, the persistent racial biases of the state authorities

(for example, upon hearing our demands for justice the Home Minister instead told us to be sympathetic to the police, and the National Human Rights Commission buried our case), the exceptional impunity that the military enjoys, and the deeper structures that undergird all of them radically changed the ways I think about institutionalized operations of power and difference.

Around the same time (2016), a massive wave of protests swept across the Terai plains in southern Nepal for the second time since the end of the Maoist war in 2006, where the Madhesis bravely confronted the violent police force to demand equal citizenship rights, devolution of state power, and rights to autonomy and self-determination. These protests, which were met with disproportionate police force that killed more than 46 Madhesis, culminated in a crippling border blockade with India cutting essential supplies to Kathmandu. State authorities, mainstream media, and many of the dominant so called high-caste Khas-Arya social group in Kathmandu

and elsewhere blamed India and dismissed the Madhesis protests as a foreign conspiracy, adding to the already pervasive racialized discrimination of the Madhesis as second class citizens in

Nepal. Although not as conspicuous or nationally discussed as the events in Madhes, state- society relationships in Nepal’s northern regions, particularly in Dolpo, have many parallels with

Terai. Both communities are treated as second class citizens, or ethnic Others who do not belong within the narrow blinds of nationalism and national identity that the Nepali state projects:

Madhesis are racially dismissed as Indians and the Dolpopas as Tibetans.

Further, it’s not an exaggeration to draw parallels around the world. Take for example, the post-war transformation of coastal landscapes in the Tamil heartland of Northeast Sri Lanka where I had the opportunity to study for six months. During this period, I learned how the Tamil fisher folks find themselves displaced from their homes time and again not only during the

Indian ocean tsunami or the civil war, but also after the end of the war. I saw how post-war development of tourism infrastructures, largely funded through Foreign Direct Investments and transnational travel agencies, dispossesses the Tamil fisher folks from their land and vital access to sea for fishing while painting a glossy picture of tropical paradise to the outside world. These ongoing processes of extraction and dispossession or to use Stuart Hall (1992) (and Ruth

Gilmore)’s phrase, the “fatal couplings of power and difference”, around/of us leave us with the pertinent question and the problem of what to make of them. There are no straightforward answers, of course, let alone easy solutions. This thesis is a working, critical exploration of the same question through a situated position of the Dolpopas.

In this thesis, I explore the interactions, struggles, and co-existences between state structures of conservation (and democracy) and Dolpopa ways of knowing, being and governing their resources and territories. Conservation, particularly the idea of national parks, has been

triumphantly celebrated in dominant national and global discourses that selectively project ostensible ecological threats in order to declare partial nature, often taken as representative samples of specific ecosystems, as a remedy to and refuge from what are pervasive and various forms of capitalist and colonial ruins. Building on a rich body of Marxist literature on enclosure and primitive accumulation, political ecologists have shown in diverse contexts yet consistently that these partial natures that are set aside as protected areas are often indigenous territories to begin with, and were created and continue to be sustained with, to use E.P. Thompson’s term,

“bloody” implications for indigenous and/or other disenfranchised peoples (Dowie, 2009; e.g. R.

P. Neumann, 1998; Peluso, 1992). Consistent with neoliberal reforms in resource governance in the 1990s, conservationists and governments have shifted gears from fortress conservation to incorporate a range of progressive languages including participatory conservation, integrated conservation and development, decentralization, or even democracy. Again, political ecologists and other critical scholars have shown that these celebratory discourses of conservation, whether in their fortress forms or participatory guises, not only erase the presence of indigenous peoples but also their complex ontologies and governance practices.

Drawing from and building upon these critiques, I explore the ways in which the state structures of conservation (and democracy) have materialized in Dolpo as an emergent structure of dispossession (article 1). Drawing from political ecology literature, I take a resource-based approach in the first article to analyze how external state structures affect local access to and control over resources. I focus on Shey Phoksundo National Park and its Buffer Zones or national and global conservation agendas more broadly although the analysis is ineluctably informed by the conjuncture of “post-conflict” political transformations in Nepal that go under the broad umbrellas of federalism and democracy. This resource-based approach allowed me to

analyze the effects of conservation on local socioecological lives, particularly its role in the contested governance of yartsagunbu in Dho Tarap valley.

However, despite the ever tightening state grips of conservation and democracy, particularly in the wake of the discovery and rise of yartsagunbu as the most expensive biological commodity in the world, Dolpopa environmental governance practices still remain vibrant and perhaps more germane today than ever (article 2). To this end, I take a relationship- based approach in the second article to explore alternate ontologies and governance practices that go beyond state structures of conservation. This relationship-based approach thus allowed me to provide a sketch of Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices that encompass yet expand beyond resources, and that take into account the agency of nonhumans as well as maintenance of relationships with them.

Although I had originally intended to focus on how the ongoing political transformations in Nepal unfold on the ground at a Himalayan “margins of the state”, I chose instead to focus on the historical and emergent forms of indigenous environmental governance in Dolpo as a counter to the excessive “State” story that dominate much of the political ecology literature on conservation. Nevertheless, I briefly discuss state restructuring process in Nepal in this introduction by way of providing a historical background to the broader political transformations taking place in Nepal. Next, I provide a brief historical background of Dolpo before turning to the broader political contexts of Nepal, and conclude with a reflection on my methodology.

Historical background of Dolpo

Dolpo is a mountainous region (the size of Delaware) in Northwest Nepal. Traditionally, it encompassed four units—Chharka, Dho Tarap, Bentsang, and Nangkhong— which were further subdivided into eleven and half subunits (dol phyogs gru bzhi tsho phyed rang bcu gcig) for tax purposes during/by the Sakya rule (late 13th century Tibet) (Bauer, 2004; Hazod, 1996).

The people from these four valleys are called the Dolpopas who constituted a total population of

6,676 in 2011 (CBS 2011) and share a common history, language, religious and cultural practices which they distinguish from those who live in the south of the region, both of which are part of Dolpa District, an administrative unit of Nepal. For administrative reasons, the Nepal state had divided the traditional four valleys into seven Village Development Committees

(VDCs) in 1975. VDCs were dissolved in 2017 when the region was further demarcated into three Rural Municipalities (RMs)—Chharka Tangshyong, Dolpo Buddha, and Shey

Phoksundo— under the current Federal state structure of Nepal. The current territories of Shey

Phoksundo and parts of Dolpo Buddha overlap with those of Shey Phoksundo National Park, created in 1984, and its Buffer Zones which covers over two-third of the total land area of Dolpo.

The root of the term “Dolpo” in Tibetan is dol, often interpreted as a “split” or “cleavage” which fits the widespread legends and origin stories of settlements across the Himalayas as sbas yul or “hidden valleys” that served as a sanctuary for religious practitioners and those escaping severe tax and other state persecutions in Tibet. The term was reported to be first mentioned in the 10th century in texts on the history of western Tibet as belonging to Purang under the

Kingdom of Ngari (Bauer, 2004; Hazod, 1996; Kind, 2002, 2012; Schicklgruber, 1996).

However, although there is no textual evidence, scholars suggest that together with the regions of upper Kali Gandaki, Dolpo was once part of the ancient kingdom of Zhangzhung before its

Map 1. Dolpo in the context of protected areas of Nepal.

Map 2. Map of Dolpo showing the overlapping boundaries of Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) and its Buffer Zones with Shey Phoksundo and Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipalities.

Maps produced by Yuying Ren with Phurwa Gurung.

subjugation by the Yarlung dynasty of Tibet in the 7th and 8th centuries (Heller, 2009; Jackson,

1978; Kind, 2012). Zhangzhung was associated with the spread of early Bon, or the pre-Buddhist practices that Stein (1989) calls “the nameless religion” of Tibet which, although distinct from present day Bon or Buddhism, have nevertheless influenced both (Kind, 2012). When the

Yarlung dynasty fell in 842 (bod sil bur thor ba), it splintered into smaller kingdoms including

Purang in western Tibet that controlled Dolpo until the 14th century (Bauer, 2004)

However, the political control of Purang in Dolpo was superseded by the kingdom of Lo

(current day Mustang and Kali Gandaki river valley in western Nepal), which was established by its first king, Ame Pal, in the 14th century. Dolpo was incorporated under the sovereignty of the

Lo Kingdom as a tax paying unit until the 18th century; during this time Dolpopas were forced to pay tribute to Lo in the forms of tax, labor, religious and other services (Bauer, 2004). By 1879, the Kingdom of Lo had fallen under the control of Gorkhas, and along with it, Dolpo became part of what is current day Nepal. Under the Gorkhas, Dolpo was assigned under the fiscal authority of Tripurakot, and later of Jumla. There is conflicting evidence but Bauer (2004, p. 65) suggests that the eastern parts of Dolpo (Chharka, Bentsang, Tarap) paid tax to the Nepal state through Mustang whereas the western parts (Phoksundo, Nangkhong) paid through Jumla.

Rather than the Orientalist myths of geographical isolation, remoteness, “fixed” borders, and “statelessness” which dominate discourses on the region (see Lopez, 1998), more dynamic processes of migration, mobilities, connectivity, fluid borders and overlapping sovereignties better describe the historical political economy of the region (Harris, 2013; Saxer, 2013, 2016;

Yeh, 2019). The most compelling example is the socio-economic process of trans-Himalayan trade in which the Dolpopas, along with other Himalayan peoples, acted as the middlemen in the salt and grain barter trade between highland Tibetans and lowland Nepalese. Elders still recount

that in the 1960s, Dolpopas in Dho Tarap made over 600% profit from this lucrative trade just by staying home. According to this arrangement, Tibetan drogpas (nomads) from Ngari region would bring Tibetan rock salt to Dho Tarap and exchange it for 3x less grain by volume, which the Dolpopas exchanged again for about 3x more grain with traders from lowland Nepal. In addition to salt and grain, the trade also included the flow and exchange of other goods, ideas, cultural and religious practices, as well as transhumance. However, this status and the larger livelihood it supported suffered a major setback and eventually collapsed due to a conjuncture of political and economic transformations in both the north (Tibet) and the south (Nepal), particularly the occupation of Tibet (when “the wheel was broken”) and the gradual closing of the northern border and the post-1960s dawn of development aid, specifically iodized Indian salt, from the Nepal state (Bauer, 2004; Saxer, 2013).

Since the 1960s, state visions of conservation and development have been key to the transformation of the region. These transformations, which were planned and implemented from the centralized structure of the Nepal state, have thus entailed the expansion and intensification of the state (Bauer, 2004, p. 134). One of the state policies towards the territorial management of region has been one of geographical isolation for geopolitical and conservation reasons including declaring the entire region as a “Restricted Zone” (article 2). Moreover, the discovery and rise of yartsagunbu as a highly-valued commodity since the late 1990s, which has become a lucrative source of revenues, has further attracted state attention to the region (article 1). Furthermore, major political transformations in Nepal since the 1990s, including a decade-long Maoist war

(1996–2006), followed by over a decade of “post-conflict” transformations have had major implications for Dolpo, which I describe next in brief.

State restructuring, democracy, and indigeneity in Nepal

Nepal was never colonized. However, what were many small principalities and kingdoms expanding across current day Nepal were violently or otherwise diplomatically conquered by a

Khas-Arya King from his native kingdom of Gorkha in the late 1700s-early 1800s. During the period of British rule in India, a small oligarchic family called the Ranas (who maintained close ties with the British Raj) marginalized the king and ruled Nepal for just over a hundred years until 1950. The King, in coalition with a democratic alliance of political dissenters, took over power from the Ranas but later established absolute monarchy under a ‘partyless’ (one party, i.e. the King’s party, to be more accurate) political system called the Panchayat, until 1990. The

Panchayat system is known for its unitary view of the Nepali nation and culture representing a triumvirate of Hinduism, Nepali language, and the Shah monarchy (Onta, 1996). The

Panchayat’s structural exclusion of the identities and livelihoods of over 123 officially recognized castes and ethnic groups speaking 125 languages eventually fueled the first People’s

Movement in 1990, which overthrew the absolute monarchy in favor of a multiparty democracy.

The first ever democratic constitution was drafted in 1990 creating space for various identity- and class-based politics.

The most extreme example is the Maoist revolution, launched as an armed struggle against the state in 1996. Starting from the mid hills of Western Nepal with two rifles formerly used by Tibetan Khampa fighters, the Maoists recruited members from marginalized communities including women and employed classic guerilla warfare to eventually force the state into a stalemate by the turn of the millennium (A. Adhikari, 2014). Amid frustrations and a complex host of contentious democratic politics, the King seized executive power in 2004. This partially led to an unlikely coalition of the Maoist insurgents and other political parties,

facilitated by India, culminating into the second Peoples’ Movement in 2006. A Comprehensive

Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed in 2006 ending both the 250-year-old monarchy and the decade-long civil war, which outlined provisions including those relating to the state restructuring process. A historic interim constitution was promulgated in 2007, considered by many the most progressive ever, with provisions such as citizenship from the mother’s side.

But the post-2006 period was marked by contentious politics rife with protests and strikes from disenfranchised groups in Madhes, Nepal’s southern belt. The first Madhes movement in

2008 swept across southern Nepal and brought forth debates around identity-based federalism

(Jha, 2014). Former Maoist leaders joined right-wing politicians to retain executive power, marginalizing their own cadres and those protesting on the streets. Meanwhile, dominant Khas-

Arya and Hindu reactionary politics gained ground (K. P. Adhikari & Gellner, 2016), as two

Constituent Assemblies were dissolved due to fundamental disagreements around identity-based federalism. In the aftermath of the catastrophic Nepal earthquake of 2015, the government ‘fast tracked’ and promulgated a new constitution in September 2015. The 2015 Constitution charted the contours of a restructured federal, provincial, and local governments, and announced elections to institute these newly declared government structures. Many activists, particularly from Madhes, criticized the restructured boundaries for being gerrymandered along dominant

(Khas-Arya) interests. In response to the new constitution, a second Madhes-based movement spread in southern Nepal culminating in a de facto border blockade with India which lasted for over six months.

Meanwhile, territorial restructuring and elections followed in 2017 which instituted the newly formed local and provincial governments. With few exceptions, the government merged several former village development committees (VDCs) to form larger municipalities, and

several districts to form provinces. The former local structure of VDCs were replaced by municipalities while districts were still retained within the new structure. In 2017, local elections were held across the country in two phases, instituting local government for the first time in twenty years. Dolpa district was partitioned into eight municipalities. The upper regions of the district, Dolpo, which were formerly comprised of seven VDCs were merged into three Rural

Municipalities (RM), namely, Tsarka Tangshyong, Dolpo Buddha, and Shey Phoksundo. This study considers Dho Tarap valley in Dolpo Buddha RM and Tsho Yul in Shey Phoksundo RM.

In Nepal, indigeneity is associated with the formation of policy, political rights, and processes of democratization (Frydenlund, 2017; Gellner, 2007; Hangen, 2009; Rai, 2013). The term “indigenous” was first adopted in Nepal by activists in the 1990s in the wake of the U.N.

Declaration of the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993 that was followed by the 1994

Declaration of the Decade of Indigenous Peoples (Gellner, 2007; Hangen, 2009; Shneiderman,

2015). The use of the term indigenous in political discourse in Nepal was further institutionalized by national legislative acts like the National Foundation for Development of Indigenous

Nationalities (NFDIN) Act of 2002, as well as by global documents on indigenous peoples such as the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the ILO Convention

169, the latter of which was ratified by the government of Nepal in 2008. In particular, the 2002

NFDIN Act had identified and recognized 59 “indigenous nationalities” (Nep. aadivasi janajati) in Nepal including the Dolpopas (as “Dolpo”) to fit a narrow list of nine categories. NFDIN’s criteria for qualifying as indigenous nationalities (specifically “traditional homeland or geographical area; own language, religion, tradition, culture, and civilization; written or oral history”) mirrored broader global understandings and mobilizations of indigeneity that tend to highlight territory and distinct cultural history (Frydenlund, 2017; Yeh & Bryan, 2015).

Although the relationship between ethnicity and territory in Nepal was often inscribed in essentialised, embodied terms rather than in the territorial terms (Shneiderman, 2015, p. 175), post-2008 politics in Nepal had largely been contested between ethnic activists, political parties, and the dominant groups (Pahadi Bahun/Chhetri or Khas Aryas) along demands for and opposition against identity-based federalism. After a protracted period of transition, identity- based federalism was officially discarded by the 2015 Constitution of Nepal. Along with the category of indigenous nationalities, the 2015 Constitution of Nepal defined all Nepalis including the dominant Khas Aryas (Bahun, Chhetri, Thakuri, Sannyasi) as deserving of special provisions for their protection, empowerment, and proportional representation in all levels of the government under its “principle of inclusion” and “social justice”. These constitutional provisions thus ossify and reaffirm the persistent “problem of indigeneity” in Nepal that

“…indigenous peoples do not exist in Nepal; or if they do, the majority of the Nepalis are indigenous, including many of the Bahuns and Chhetris” (Pradhan, 1994, p. 45 cited in

Shneiderman, 2015, p. 177). As a political category, indigeneity is therefore moribund in Nepal.

However, I use the term “indigenous” conceptually in two ways. First, following indigenous scholars from North America (e.g. Carroll, 2015; Coulthard, 2010; L. B. Simpson,

2017), I use the term indigenous to evoke relational modes of knowing, being, and governing that contradict and are often foreclosed by colonial onto-epistemologies and governance structures. This is most reflected in the second article where I turn my attention towards relationship-based practices in indigenous environmental governance and political ontology particular to Dolpo.

Second, my use of the term indigenous follows the analysis of indigeneity as “without guarantees” (which draw from Stuart Hall’s phrase “Marxism without guarantees”), one that is

open-ended, contingent upon, and articulated within geographically and historically specific conjunctures (Frydenlund, 2017; Li, 2000; Tsing, 2005; Yeh & Bryan, 2015). While recognizing the very coloniality of the term indigenous, I think indigeneity without guarantees allows for more geographically and historically situated analyses and politics while navigating the essentialist question of “authenticity” or its current fate in Nepal as a moribund political category. Indeed, Dolpopas have rarely been a proactive actor in the indigenous movements in

Nepal although there is a “Dolpo” offshoot of Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities

(NEFIN), the umbrella organization of the 59 indigenous nationalities of Nepal. The Dolpo offshoot, however, has been criticized by many Dolpopas for its exclusive control by a family in

Kathmandu until recently and for its general failure to connect with and represent the broader interests of the Dolpo community (see Zhu, 2015). However, despite their arguable disconnect from the national identity politics in Kathmandu or NEFIN, Dolpopas in Dho Tarap had evoked

UNDRIP and ILO Convention 169 in their petition to SPNP prior to the violence in 2014 to articulate their claims to manage a local resource. Many Dolpopa activists and youths continue to use the term “indigenous” and self-identity as “Dolpopas” to articulate their politics and situated experiences of marginalization, biopolitical neglect, and dispossession by the Nepali state. These use of the term indigenous speak to the ways in which Dolpopas articulate their experiences of dispossession at specific political and historical conjunctures as a global language familiar to the state, particularly in relation to resources like yartsagunbu.

Methodology

This work is mostly based on qualitative data collected during three months of field research conducted between mid-May and mid-August 2019 in Dho Tarap, Tsho village in

Phoksundo, Suligad and Dunai, and in Kathmandu. In addition to the data collected during the field research, I also draw from my experiences and knowledge not only as a community member but also from my involvement in the community in various capacities including working for and leading an NGO called Action Dolpo in Dho Tarap for four years. During this period, I participated in many community meetings and other events in which a range of issues from the governance of yartsagunbu, regulating use of other natural resources, organizing festivals, and matters of community development were discussed, contested, and carried out in the absence of an elected local government recognized by the state.

During the field research, I conducted thirty-one semi-structured interviews with residents of Dho Tarap and Phoksundo, Shey Phuksundo National Park (SPNP) staff, the

Director General of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC), a

WWF staff and a writer in Kathmandu. Of these, eleven were women and the rest were men. The views represented are thus inadvertently male-dominated. Interviews with the residents of Dho

Tarap and Phoksundo were conducted in the respective villages in the local language, whereas interviews with park staff and others in Suligad, Dunai, and Kathmandu were conducted in

Nepali language. By interviewing multiple people representing various positions, I was able to gain a better understanding of people’s lived experiences and situated perspectives on the national park, conservation, and management of yartsagunbu, as well as about their own

(world)views and views of others who were participants to the issues in question. After a few interviews into the research process, I realized that these interviews did not necessarily reveal

much, particularly given the formal nature of the settings in which I audio recorded or took written notes. So in addition to adjusting the structure of the interviews, I usually followed up on key themes or questions through informal conversations after the interview. Many late night conversations over butter tea, local barley beer, and during long walks and horse rides with fellow Dolpopas helped me get a deeper understanding of particular topic or events.

Along with semi-structured interviews, I employed participant observation to gain a better grasp of the everyday conversations and the settings under which they occurred. However,

I felt quite uncomfortable merely observing fellow community members and about positioning myself as a “researcher” aloof from the social context and commitments I am tied to. Despite my attempts, I was never really able to “make the familiar strange.” This discomfort turned my participant observation more participant-oriented than observation-oriented. Through this, I was able to better reflect about myself and how my positionality influenced my relationship with and response of others all of which contributed to the research as what Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai

Smith calls “a humble and humbling activity” (Smith, 2012, p. 5). The practice of taking field notes based on participant observation helped me to gain and provide a better picture of events, atmospheres, and interactions that I would otherwise take for granted. I also conducted a focus group discussion in Dho Tarap among the representatives of the local government, local buffer zone user group committee, and women’s group on the topic of environmental governance including management of yartsagunbu. The discussion concluded, quite unintentionally, with the representatives of each group, who had not gotten together much prior to the discussion, realizing the importance of coordinating amongst each other and planning for another gathering to discuss the management of yartsagunbu, grazing pastures, and waste.

The burdens (and blessings) of “native” researchers are numerous, although the category of “native” is always shifting and relational rather than the absolute binaries of outsider/insider or observer/observed (Narayan, 1993, p. 671). The most difficult ones are perhaps questions of

“relational accountability” (Wilson, 2008) and “ethnographic refusal” (A. Simpson, 2007) (in

Carroll, 2015, pp. xii–xv). Relational accountability speaks to “the ongoing familial and relational commitments many Native researchers must maintain during and after the research process…In other words, the research must be accountable in terms of its applicability to community needs” (Carroll, 2015, p. xvii). While I was immediately accepted as a social actor and therefore held accountable for speaking to the issues the community has been grappling with, particularly the loss of control over yartsagunbu to the national park, I have also had to come to terms with implicit critiques community members tossed here and there regarding my physical estrangement from the place.

Further, I am still figuring out what the benefits (phan thogs) of this research are, if any, to the community, which several community members were keen to know when I interviewed them. Given the need to “research back” (Smith, 2012, p. 8) against both colonial structures

(conservation and democracy in my case) and colonial scholarship, this research is significantly compromised by lack of adequate critiques of the internal structures, conflicts, and hierarchies.

However, I have been attentive to them and address them in other ways. Although “to critique is not to invalidate” (McGranahan, 2010, p. 35), I think an overtly critical stand of the community is perhaps unnecessary within the scope of this research and in the spirit of “ethnographic refusal”, not discounting the risks that it could be weaponized to further demonize and dismiss indigenous ontologies and governance practices.

article 1

DISPOSSESSING WHILE DECENTRALIZING: PARTICIPATORY CONSERVATION AS AN EMERGENT STRUCTURE OF DISPOSSESSION

་གསར་པ་ལས་འེ་ིང་པ་དགའ།། Old demons are better than new deities. —Dolpo saying

1. Introduction

On June 3, 2014, a violent clash between residents of Dho Tarap in Dolpo and police resulted in the deaths of two local residents and injuries of three dozen more. The police brutality was a result of a conflict between Dolpo residents (Dolpopas) and Shey Phuksundo National

Park (SPNP) over who had the authority to collect fees from harvesters of caterpillar fungus

(Tib: yartsagunbu) in the Dho Tarap region. The violence erupted after officials from Shey

Phoksundo National Park (SPNP), backed by over fifty members of the Armed Police Force

(APF), deemed then-existing local practices of governing yartsagunbu “illegal” in order to assert its exclusive authority to revenues collected from taxes on harvesters. Community members defended their practice of collecting fees from non-local harvesters as a customary and indigenous right to manage a local resource, particularly in light of the recognition of the

Dolpopas as one of the 59 indigenous nationalities or adivasi janajati by the government of

Nepal under the 2002 Nepal Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN)

Act. They submitted a petition, evoking articles from international conventions such as the

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and ILO Convention

169, to the park officials and staged a protest on the site before the violence. After the violence, local residents followed up through formal and informal negotiations at the National Park

headquarters, as well as through press conferences, sit-in protests, rallies, and a delegation to the

Home Ministry in Kathmandu. No conclusive outcomes, neither to redress the violence nor any formal arrangements for autonomous local management, emerged from these protests and negotiations. Instead, the violence instituted the monopoly of SPNP over the governance of yartsagunbu sidelining indigenous practices of resource use and governance long prevalent in the valley.

Despite the rhetorics of participatory conservation and the stated aim of the state restructuring process to devolve power to the local levels, protected areas in Nepal remain firmly under the control of the central state and are governed by strict conservation policies and militarized governance structures. Top-down conservation agendas and governance structures often conflict with existing resource use and governance practices at the local level, limiting access to and control of natural resources by the resident populations (Campbell, 2005, 2013;

Stevens, 1997; Stevens, 1993; Thing, 2019). In Dolpo in particular, protected areas have severely undermined an existing system of caterpillar fungus governance, which should be understood as a form of governance that is rooted in indigenous conceptions of the environment, territory, and livelihood. This article considers the contested governance of yartsagunbu, a high-value commodity at the center of Dolpo’s political economy, between the state and residents of Dho

Tarap. Drawing on political ecology analyses of conservation and resource governance, I argue that protected areas are not only extractive regimes of accumulation of resources but also emergent structures of dispossession that marginalize indigenous systems of environmental governance. To illustrate this, I discuss shifting dynamics in the governance of yartsagunbu at a conjuncture of Maoist insurgency, national democratic politics, conservation, and the boom in caterpillar fungus trade.

Although a rich body of literature is emerging on “post-conflict” state transformation in

Nepal, especially focusing on ethnic politics, territorialization, and democratization, there has been little systematic research on how they unfold at the local level, or from the Himalayan

“margins of the state.” Although some of the classic political ecology literature addressed customary rights and customary law (Jacoby, 2001; R. Neumann, 2005; Peluso, 1992; Spence,

1999; Thompson, 1975), much of the political ecology literature on Nepal seem to privilege an analysis of state authority that takes state governance structures for granted (Nightingale et al.,

2018, 2019; Nightingale & Ojha, 2013). In doing so, they do not sufficiently address the dynamic systems of resource use and environmental governance practices already in place, some of which have been internationally recognized as Indigenous Peoples’ and Community

Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs) (Stevens, 2013). I seek to fill some of these gaps by investigating the ways in which (pre)existing forms of environmental governance interact with and are marginalized within the overlapping jurisdictions of protected areas and local governments from the perspective of a village in Dolpo. The point is not to reify or romanticize any (pre)existing system but to emphasize their plurality, fluidity, complexity, and effectiveness in regulating local resource use and spurring meaningful local development. To this end, I take a relational approach to understand the ways in which and to what effect the superimposed structures of conservation and democracy overlap with and impact the existing systems to produce hybrid, actually existing systems.

My arguments are based on three months of ethnographic field research between May and August 2019 at multiple sites in Nepal: Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipality (DBRM), Shey-

Phoksundo Rural Municipality (SPRM), Suligad, Dunai, and Kathmandu. I conducted 31 semi- structured interviews consisting of 80% Dolpopas, 15% National Park staff and bureaucrats, and

5% others. Of these, about a third of the Dolpopas were women but none of the bureaucrats working at the National Park headquarters or remotely deployed by the state were women. As a result, the views represented are inadvertently male-dominated. Several of the community members I interviewed straddled multiple roles as National Park or local government representatives which significantly influenced their perspectives.

I will begin by discussing the political ecology of participatory conservation to illustrate key concerns around the politics of decentralization. Next, I will ground the insights from this literature by providing a brief social history of SPNP in the context of decentralization in Nepal.

In the second half, I will discuss the governance of yartsagunbu following the legalization of its harvest and trade in 2001. Within two decades, the governance of yartsagunbu attracted attention from multiple non-local authorities, particularly the Maoist insurgents and the national park.

Both sought to extract revenues by allowing access to thousands of non-locals to harvest the lucrative fungus. Contrasting both the Maoist and national park control over yartsagunbu with a sustained period of local control in between, I highlight and make a case for the effectiveness and importance of the local control and governance in the face of extractive conservation and intensification of state authority in the Himalayas.

2. Protected areas in perspective

The first national parks were created in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yosemite Wildland Park, created in 1864, and Yellowstone National Park, created in 1872, were the first protected areas in the world. Sold as “America’s best idea,”1 the idea of national parks travelled far and wide. The United States Wilderness Act of 1964

1 The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, PBS, a documentary series produced by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan.

explicitly define national parks as wilderness areas undisturbed by human occupation. This fortress conservation precluded the facts of historic human inhabitation of the designated protected areas, particularly by indigenous peoples (Cronon, 1996; Hecht & Cockburn, 2010;

Spence, 1999). Governments throughout the world have historically employed significant violence to evict people from their settlements in order to enclose commonly held land and resources for national conservation agendas (R. P. Neumann, 1996, 1998; Peluso, 1992, 1993;

Spence, 1999; West, 2006).

Protected Areas in Nepal reflect the historical experiences of North American parks, but also reveal important differences. The fortress “Yellowstone model” strongly influenced the establishment and governance of protected areas in Nepal (Bauer, 2004; Stevens, 1997). The promulgation of the National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act in 1973 provided the legal basis for the creation of national parks, and the establishment of the Department of National

Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC) in 1980 formed the central governing body for all protected areas in Nepal. The first national parks in Nepal, Royal Chitwan and Sagarmatha, were created in the 1970s against the backdrop of global concerns around the impact of population growth on environmental degradation. To date, Nepal has 20 protected areas including 12 national parks, 1 wildlife reserve, 6 conservation areas and 1 hunting reserve, which account for nearly a quarter of the total land area of the country. Although these areas were strategically partitioned to protect representative samples of Nepal’s ecosystems and endangered wildlife, the

Himalayan region has been disproportionately carved up as land reserved for protected areas.

Five Himalayan national parks and five conservation areas account for 83% of the total land area of the Himalayan region (Stevens, 2013). These territories constitute the traditional homelands of over a dozen different indigenous peoples including the Dolpopas. The DNPWC has

implemented a bifurcated policy regarding the relationship between protected areas and the local inhabitants. Following the wilderness paradigm, the existing inhabitants were largely moved out of the national park territories in the Terai region which were mostly forested areas (Bauer, 2004, pp. 142–143). The inhabitants of the Himalayan national parks were however allowed to reside within the newly imposed park territories through a special Himalayan National Parks

Regulation 1979, albeit with strict restraints on their resource use and self-governance.

3. Political ecology of participatory conservation

In response to the fiscal crises of the developmentalist states in the 1980s and the collapse of socialist economies after 1989, governments around the world started implementing neoliberal reform policies centered around the language of decentralization (Larson & Soto, 2008; Ribot et al., 2006). Decentralization was also a response to the failure of centralized state-governed nature conservation and resource management regimes which increasingly faced international criticisms and local hostilities in the 1990s (Bixler et al., 2015). Decentralization encompassed a host of resource management regimes that entailed the transfer of powers to the lowest level of governance (Larson & Soto, 2008), often through community participation (Bixler et al., 2015).

They were driven by the underlying logic that local knowledge and participation would generate more efficiency, inclusion and accountability (Ribot et al., 2006), as well as by the rationales of democratization and justice (McCarthy, 2005). However, comparative case studies suggest that decentralization of natural resource management has rarely achieved its desired outcomes.

Studies have revealed, for example, that in contrast to their rhetorics, central states often create barriers to the decentralizing institutions (Agrawal, 2001; Ribot et al., 2006) and that the dynamics of knowledge and power are not always decentralized (M. Goldman, 2003).

Community forestry was Nepal’s version of this global turn towards decentralization in natural resource management. However, community forestry did not apply to protected areas where the conversation centered on participatory conservation. After a brief background of community forestry, I therefore focus on participatory conservation, specifically the institutions of buffer zones within the national park system.

The constitutional monarch centralized all forests as national forests in 1957 and implemented strict regulations against forest use rights among resident populations. In addition to undermining the existing local systems of forest management, this centralized policy entailed weak monitoring and enforcement mechanisms that resulted in adverse effects, including widespread deforestation. The Community Forestry program, implemented in the 1980s and widely considered to be one of the most successful resource management systems in the world, was instituted as a policy response to the earlier centralization of forests. The Community

Forestry User Groups were formed at the local level under the auspices of the District Forest

Office to regulate forest use and redistribute revenues. Notably, the Community Forestry

Program had specific geographical limits. The program was widely implemented in the Middle

Hills of Nepal but excluded large parts of the Terai and the Himalayan regions. While the high

Himalayas did not contain much commercial forest coverage, the decision to exclude the Terai region where commercially valuable forests are located reflected the Nepal state’s unwillingness to devolve authority where opportunities for generating national revenues are lucrative (Ribot et al., 2006, p. 1872). Additionally, Community Forestry in Nepal has been critiqued for its private- sector led commercialization (Paudel, 2012), overreliance on aid agencies and technocrats

(Nightingale & Ojha, 2013; Ojha et al., 2016), and power hierarchies along the lines of gender, caste, and ethnicity (Nightingale & Ojha, 2013).

Although decentralization and participation are not always the same, in the context of

Nepal’s protected area system, participatory conservation emerged as the geographically specific iteration of the broader trend toward decentralization. Participatory conservation, in turn, implied several policy changes to allow extractive uses and public participation in resource management through the creation of two specific institutions: Conservation Areas and Buffer Zones (Heinen

& Mehta, 2000). Conservation areas emerged as a new category of protected areas seeking to integrate conservation and development (Bauer, 2004; Stan Stevens, 1997). Buffer Zones were created within and adjacent to the existing territory of national parks through an amendment of the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act in 1993. The Buffer Zone Management Rules were subsequently formed in 1996 which outlined guidelines for the formation of Buffer Zone

User Group Committees (UGs) at the local level, and the collection and redistribution of

National Park revenues for community development projects for communities living in the newly designated buffer zones. The key component of the regulation was the provision to redistribute

30%-50% of the total revenues collected by the park for community development through the

UGs.

Although appearing to allow for new forms of participatory conservation and benefit- sharing, the regulation had the effect of extending the managerial authority of the National Park

Warden over all conservation and development programs in the buffer zones. The regulation gives discretionary power to the warden to form and dissolve the UGs, prepare the buffer zone management work plans, oversee the redistribution of funds to the UGs and audit their accounts, fine UG members for violating the management plans or their responsibilities, and stop actions within the buffer zones as he deems necessary. Without much authority to make decisions and plan projects, the UGs only function as the warden’s foot soldiers invested only with the

implementation of projects as instructed and planned by the warden. Thus, despite the rhetoric of participatory conservation under buffer zones, the establishment of buffer zones incorporated more territories and settlements under the fold of protected areas. In particular, this entailed the territorial expansion of protected areas as well as the intensification of state authority in areas that were newly incorporated into the protected area system (Heinen & Mehta, 2000).

The Himalayan National Parks, where both the supposedly lenient Himalayan National

Parks Regulation of 1979 and the “participatory” Buffer Zone Management Rules 1996 apply, have been disproportionately affected by these broader trend of neoliberal participatory conservation. Case studies in Sagarmatha National Park (Stevens, 1997, 1993) and Langtang

National Park (Campbell, 2005, 2013) show that the National Park administration often overlooks community participation and marginalizes existing systems of environmental governance. As more areas were secured within the territories of protected areas in the wake of the participatory policies, it is pertinent to explore how and to what extent the rhetorics of decentralization have actually resulted in further expansion and intensification of state authority and centralization of resource management. Below, I examine how these policies and their effects have unfolded in the Buffer Zones of Shey Phoksundo National Park.

3.1. Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP)

Shey Phoksundo National Park, established in 1984, is Nepal’s largest national park with an area of 3,555 square kilometers extending across the districts of Dolpa and Mugu. Arguably driven by the government’s geopolitics to bring this border region into its territorial fold while secluding it from foreigners,2 the park was established with the key objective of protecting

2 Dolpo was restricted for foreign tourists until 1994. Since 1994, tourists have been required to pay a permit of $500 for ten days, a rule that is still in effect. In April 2019, the government of Nepal again declared Dolpo along

endangered snow leopards and blue sheep (Bauer, 2004, p. 145). Other objectives include the preservation of the dazzling Phoksundo lake, cultural heritage sites such as the sacred Buddhist pilgrimage route of Shey Rivo Drukta (Dragon Roar Crystal Mountain) and over thousand years- old Bon and Buddhist monasteries in Upper Dolpo. Some of the influential figures who drew the attention of then-His Majesty’s Government of Nepal to establish the national park included conservationists Per Wegge and John Blower, botanist Tirtha B. Shrestha, naturalist Karna

Shakya, wildlife biologist George Schaller, and novelist Peter Matthiessen. The park was designed following the Himalayan National Parks model. A small park administration assisted by a regiment of the Royal Nepal Army was tasked with enforcing conservation regulations.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been involved in the conservation project in SPNP since 1994 most notably through its Northern Mountain Conservation Project (NMCP) and Plant and People

Initiative (PPI).

The first warden of SPNP was Nyima Wangchuk Sherpa, one of several Sherpas trained in wildlife conservation in New Zealand, who is still remembered fondly by Phoksundo elders for his cultural competency and favorable stance towards the locals. The subsequent wardens, in contrast, are remembered for their hostilities against local residents, and their imposition of strict and arbitrary regulations on resource use, including everyday resource use by locals like collecting firewood or harvesting buckwheat in their farms. From its inception, the park has not employed a single local resident in any administrative positions. This structure I argue not only excludes the resident population based on their ethnic and cultural differences but also perpetuates coercive conservation.

with a number of other mountain regions as restricted areas to allegedly prevent “anti-China” activities in Nepal: https://www.recordnepal.com/category-explainers/when-it-comes-to-civil-liberties-kp-oli-is-starting-to-look-like- the-tyrants-he-once-fought/

The headquarters of SPNP was originally located at the confluence of two streams called

Polam, below Phoksundo Lake where it drains out. Phoksundo elder Tsukphuk Lama remembers seeing up to eleven staff at a time at the Polam headquarters, assisted by a team of Nepal Army soldiers stationed about three kilometers further downstream at Sumdo. This headquarters was set on fire by Maoist insurgents in 2004 who viewed the SPNP as an extractive state structure that oppressed ordinary local people. The headquarters were subsequently relocated further down, two days walking distance from Phoksundo, next to the Nepal Army base in Suligad and the district headquarters, Dunai. The Maoists’ destruction of the SPNP headquarters at Polam and its subsequent relocation at Suligad has had mixed effects. From the perspectives of ordinary local resource users like Tsukphuk Lama, it is a welcome change that kept the obstructive SPNP staff at bay: “For me, it’s better to have them as far away as possible so we can go about our daily lives without fear.” However, from a conservation perspective, it is a major setback that spatially limited the implementation of conservation goals. In an unpublished report from 2016, wildlife biologist George Schaller points out that, “Park headquarters and its staff are located in the far southern edge of the park, many days of trekking from the major portion in the northern uplands. Furthermore, the staff seldom leaves headquarters… As a result, there is little awareness of what is happening in most of the park.” From a development perspective, the removed location of the SPNP headquarters implied its neglect of community development projects although it still pursues its extractive interests. Phoksundo resident Mingmar KC quips about this dynamic between the neglectful and extractive state: “the SPNP appears and disappears like clouds.”

Enclosure of private and commonly held land continued after the relocation of the headquarters despite the lack of sustained presence of the park in the highlands. In Tsho village,

Phoksundo, for example, nearly all households lost their registered land at the shore of the lake when the SPNP arbitrarily prohibited cultivation. They national park first constructed an Army base at the corner of this enclosed land circa 1987 and later built an office block next to it circa

1997. Before completely prohibiting cultivation, local accounts recall that the SPNP staff and soldiers harassed local residents when they worked the fields. The park authorities routinely insulted the locals verbally before confiscating their rakes, shovels, ploughs, hoes and sickles.

They were told it was “illegal” to use metallic tools to till the earth. Eventually, the SPNP declared the entire area a “no cultivation zone” in order to “protect” the lake from the local residents. A wall was constructed around the space in 2016, and the enclosed area near the lake is now a designated camping site for tourists. The locals, who still hold land titles to the space, have not yet been paid any compensation nor have they been offered any satisfactory explanation that justifies the enclosure and effective expropriation of their farmland.

In addition to the enclosure of these private lands, villagers in Tsho were prohibited from their traditional practice of cultivating common lands. Tso villagers practice shifting agriculture, traditionally through techniques of systematically burning certain patches of forested areas for cultivation. They spatially rotate crops between buckwheat, wheat, potatoes and mustard seed to increase yield as well as to regulate management. After the park was established, swidden cultivation practices were criminalized, forcing the locals to subsist from the existing land. When

I was conducting fieldwork in the summer 2019, mustard and potatoes were cultivated on the fields across the village on the other side of the river, buckwheat in and around the settlement, and wheat on the fields above the village. A large swath of the cultivable fields above the village was washed out by floods in 2016, reducing the already limited agricultural fields for the village, which has doubled in population in just the past decade. Although the locals were never solely

reliant on agriculture as they also participated in pastoralism and trade, they are nevertheless concerned by the shrinking agricultural land. They are also concerned about increasingly strict restrictions against use of timber. Since its establishment, the park has been implementing regulations against collection of timber and cutting grass for fodder. Local residents from buffer zones inside the national park area can, in theory, obtain a permit from the park in order to access timber. However, the warden has discretionary power to limit and restrict timber extraction.

Residents of buffer zones adjacent to the park, such as the residents of Dho Tarap, have been completely restricted from accessing timber from the park.

The most negative impact on local livelihoods has resulted from the park’s restrictions on their access to and control over yartsagunbu. Until 2001, when yartsagunbu harvest and trade was legalized, local harvesters risked persecution by park authorities who organized frequent mountain patrols. After its legalization, soldiers still instill fear among the harvesters as they patrol the pastures and put up random surprise checkpoints between May and June, the peak months for yartagunbu harvest. I have heard many stories recounting how yartsagunbu harvesters, locals and outsiders alike, sneak around treacherous mountains to steer clear of soldiers, both before and after 2001. This sometimes results in fatal incidents like an incident in

2013 when one person died falling off of a cliff while running away from soldiers at night in a pasture called Chuthang, between Phoksundo and Dho Tarap. After the legalization of yartsagunbu in 2001, for about five years, locals in Phoksundo and Dho Tarap were caught between the Nepal Army soldiers and Maoists insurgents, the latter of whom collected tax from harvesters and traders. After the end of the Maoist insurgency and the confusion of a protracted transition, the park reasserted its authority through the deployment of Army and Armed Police

Force. I will discuss yartsagunbu governance in detail in section 4, but my main point here is that

local traditions and practice of resource use and governance were severely undermined whether in the name of revolution, scientific conservation, or democracy.

3.2. SPNP Buffer Zone

SPNP Buffer Zones were instituted in October 1998, two years after the Buffer Zone

Management Regulation was passed. The Buffer Zones constituted a total land area of 1,349 square kilometers extending across Dolpa and Mugu districts. Although settlements inside the existing national park boundary were also defined as Buffer Zones, most of the Buffer Zone area were composed of adjacent territories that were newly incorporated into the national park system. The Buffer Zone extends across four Rural Municipalities (RM) and two Municipalities, formerly eleven Village Development Committees (VDCs). Of these, only Shey Phoksundo RM was already inside the national park boundary. Three more RMs including Dolpo Buddha RM and two municipalities, that constituted the majority of the human settlements across the entire district, were incorporated into the national park system through the declaration of Buffer Zones.

The creation of Buffer Zones thus signified a second wave of enclosure of community lands, after the establishment of the National Park, through further expansion of protected area territory.

SPNP Buffer Zones currently include seventeen Buffer Zone User Group Committees

(UGs) that function as “grassroots organization” under the umbrella of the Buffer Zone

Management Committee (BZMC). The UGs are further broken down into sub-committees, including a committee each for anti-poaching and snow leopard conservation. These organizations are tasked with the dual responsibility of implementing conservation and development projects under the supervision of the warden. The programs are supposed to be

funded by 30-50% of park revenues redistributed to the community through these organizations.

The SPNP Buffer Zone Management Plan (2018–2022) outlines the objective of BZ programs as

“… institutional development (social capital), alternative natural resource development (natural capital), capacity/skill building (human capital), financial management (financial capital), conservation education and awareness, gender and special target group mainstreaming.” Below, I discuss the formation, workings, and concerns specific to two of the seventeen UGs in SPNP:

Nyasamba Buffer Zone User Group Committee (NUG) in Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipality, which is outside the core national park boundary, and Phoksundo Buffer Zone User Group

Committee (PUG) in Shey Phoksundo Rural Municipality, which is inside the core national park boundary. The latter is one of three UGs in Shey Phoksundo Rural Municipality. Although the seventeen UGs span across lower parts of Dolpa District as well as Mugu District, I analyze

NUG and PUG because they are representative of the UGs outside and inside the core national park boundaries in Dolpo, or the upper regions of Dolpa District.

Dho Tarap valley and its territories were incorporated into SPNP in 1998 when its Buffer

Zone was formed. The valley was outside the proper national park boundary which follows the ridge of a mountain range separating Tarap river valley from Phoksundo river valley. Along with other settlements and territories adjacent to the SPNP, the creation of a Buffer Zone also extended the jurisdiction of the national park to the entire territory of Dho Tarap VDC. Not a single resident of Dho Tarap I interviewed recalled the national park conducting any formal meeting or consulting the locals before or during the incorporation of its territory into the national park. All made brief mentions of the vague role of a local leader in declaring the valley as a buffer zone, who was later appointed as the first chairperson of NUG. Through the leader, villagers were promised access to otherwise restricted timber from Phoksundo as well as a range

of development projects as the benefits of becoming a buffer zone. However, consistent with the objective of buffer zones as a mechanism to reduce pressure on resource use in the core national park area, access to timber from Phoksundo was never legally allowed to the residents of buffer zones outside the national park. Only the residents of Phoksundo and Saldang, buffer zone areas inside the national park boundary, were allowed access to timber in the core area. Given the already strict national park restrictions, it would seem that Phoksundo residents had nothing to lose and potentially much to gain by becoming a buffer zone. This partially explains why the current chairperson of PUG was enthusiastic about the Buffer Zone, “It is more beneficial for the locals to be part of the national park as a buffer zone. We get 30-50% of the park revenues to invest in community development.” However, he admitted that only the villages and privately owned land areas were left under the exclusive domain of the local residents. All the communal lands and territories were enclosed by the national park. “We are isles of communities in the sea of the park,” he added. This was cartographically cemented by the state restructuring process, which assigned Shey Phoksundo RM only an area of 123.07 square kilometers, in contrast to its actual size that accounted for nearly a quarter of the entire Dolpa district (7,889 square kilometers area).

Both NUG and PUG have eleven members in the committee, who are all local residents of the respective villages. They also have a snow leopard conservation committee each with the same members switching the primary roles of the chairperson, secretary and treasurer. The key role of UGs in Dho Tarap and Phoksundo is to act as “a bridge between locals and the national park” regarding the management of caterpillar fungus and the implementation of development projects. The chairperson is required to attend three meetings at the national park headquarters to receive budget and report its accounts before the end of the fiscal year. The chairpersons of both

NUG and PUG were not able attend the meetings regularly, or were late because they were informed of the meeting only a day or two before, too short for the three-days travel distance between the villages and the national park headquarters. These meetings were also required to receive the revenues that the park redistribute for community development through the UGs.

Although the Buffer Zone Management Regulation outlines that this redistribution should account for 30-50% of the total revenues collected from the park, UG members I interviewed told me that the actual funds that go to the UGs is subject to the discretion of the warden. The budget is also fragmented and should theoretically only be spent on specific programs planned by the warden under five categories: conservation, community development, income generation, conservation education, and administrative cost. Moreover, the entire budget is often withheld or frozen due to the inability of the SPNP to implement the projects, as was the case in the fiscal year 2018-19 when they failed to conduct elections for the UGs and BZMC.

For PUG and NUG, this redistribution has amounted to just a nominal amount negligible to the total revenues that the park collects from its territories. NUG received two hundred thousand rupees in 2015, followed by a desktop computer in 2016, and a budget for building a buffer zone office in 2017, all of which involved complex bureaucratic procedures that further waned the total amount which materialized at the end. PUG received similar amounts which they used to repair trails and bridges, and dig trash pits. Although the park warden claimed that these amounts were equivalent to the maximum of the 30%-50% of the total park revenue, they are negligible compared to the total revenues collected from caterpillar fungus from the two villages.

For example, the park collected a revenue of 13 million and 7.5 million from the territories of

Dho Tarap and Phoksundo from yartsagunbu in 2019. However, the amount that PUG and NUG received in the previous years on average amounted to only about two hundred thousand rupees,

including the funds allocated for constructing infrastructures for the park itself in the village such as a building in Dho Tarap. The park justifies this disproportionate revenue sharing arrangement by arguing that PUG and NUG share the 30-50% equally with all the 17 UGs of SPNP, many of which do not even have yartsagunbu or substantial revenues from natural resources. In addition to organizing local territories on the basis of the national park rather than the local government, the narrative also represents a general attitude of the national park that erase and disregard local autonomy, resource rights, and governance practices in favor of a centralized resource regime homogenized along a skewed rhetoric of an equal rights of all citizens to access all resources anywhere in the country. Dolpopas, under this framework, thus do not exercise any exceptional control, access to and benefits from their own resources. Anyone from anywhere in Nepal can come and obtain access to yartsagunbu just like the local residents.

The national park collects its revenues from caterpillar fungus harvesters, tourists, traders and locals for other resource permits directly from the national park headquarters, or remotely.

Caterpillar fungus is by far the biggest source of revenue for the park. Thus, for a duration of one to two weeks during the peak harvest period, the park deploys its staff and soldiers at several points across the national park and buffer zone territories. In Phoksundo, most revenues are collected at the national park headquarters which is the point of entry from the south to pastures in Phoksundo and Saldang. In Dho Tarap, the park had deployed a team of twelve soldiers and three game scouts in 2019 who collected tax and stayed around for two weeks. In 2019, the national park collected Rs 500 each from buffer zone resident, Rs 2000 from residents of Dolpa and Mugu districts, and Rs 3000 from those outside the two districts. The local UGs only facilitate and support the teams deployed by the national park by arranging their food and accommodation. The team of park staff and army soldiers deployed from Suligad collect tax,

report it to the national park headquarters, and deposit them to the account of the National

Treasury. The UGs were however allowed to collect a nominal amount of Rs 500 each as a

“service fee” from all harvesters including the residents of the buffer zones. In contrast to the regular tax that goes directly to the National Treasury, the UGs have powers to use all of the amount collected through the service fee in their own communities. The local UGs utilize this fund to dig trash pits in the pastures and villages, repair trails and bridges, and carry out other projects under their own discretion. For the resident Phoksundo and Dho Tarap, this nominal fund has thus become more consequential than the share of revenues redistributed by the national park according to the Buffer Zone Management Regulation.

Local residents I interviewed raised several concerns regarding the UGs. Many accuse the UGs of lack of transparency and accountability to the community, for their inabilities to represent local voices in the national park headquarters and attend regular meetings, and lack of coordination with the elected local government. As an offshoot organization of the national park, they are held only upwardly accountable and are required to report to the national park. UGs are not formally required to coordinate with the elected local government. Nor are they obligated to report and answer to the local community. In terms of collecting tax, I have shown that NUG is only nominal and does not participate in decision making. Despite the inclusion of community members, the participatory conservation model of buffer zones thus serves to recentralize authority and governance in the name of decentralization in Dolpo.

4. Caterpillar fungus governance in Dho Tarap

Control over caterpillar fungus is the central political contestation between the state and society in Dolpo. The emergence of caterpillar fungus as a high-value resource within the past two decades has intensified state presence in a region otherwise referred to as a “hidden valley” or “a world far away from the political centers” (Kind, 2012, p. 164). Although yartsagunbu has historically been used in the region to prepare traditional Tibetan medicine, residents in

Phoksundo and Dho Tarap started collecting yartsagunbu for commercial purpose only circa

1996 due to the growing demand from China. Due to “much collection mount[ing] up from different districts” corresponding to rise in its value, the government had imposed many provisions to ban and restrict its collection and trade including the Nepal Forest Act of 1993 and the Forest Regulation of 1995 (Devkota, 2010, pp. 94–95). However, because of the growing demand, in the late 1990s, young adults had collected the fungus for brief periods between agricultural work; during this period of time, each piece fetched between two-four rupees. It was so abundant then that each person was able to collect anywhere between fifty to several hundred per day. I remember collecting at least fifty and sometimes over a hundred piece on the side in a day myself while herding yaks in late 1990s. Local residents remember selling the fungus to the first Khampa traders without brushing off the dust. The fungus was then sold to Tibetan traders who crossed the border from China. Because of the regulations, local residents had to avoid soldiers and national park authorities who were occasionally present in the national park territories. Dho Tarap was not part of the national park then, but residents of Phoksundo had to travel to the pastures at night and hide their picks. There was no systematic management of the fungus, and harvesters were mostly locals. Only a small number of harvesters from outside the

district began to appear as contract harvesters for local traders; these non-locals were required to sell the fungus they collected to local traders at a pre-determined price.

All of this changed with the turn of the millennium when the government of Nepal legalized the collection and trade of caterpillar fungus through a regulation called Nepal Gazette

2001, which also determined an export tax of rupees 20,000 per kilogram. Meanwhile, the international price of caterpillar fungus, driven almost entirely by demand in China, increased astronomically, that is, by ~900% between 1997 and 2008 in Tibet and by ~2300% between

2001 and 2011 in Nepal, making it more expensive than gold by weight and the highest-priced biological commodity in the world (Shrestha & Bawa, 2013; Yeh & Lama, 2013). Yartsagunbu quickly became the major contributor to household income in the region, with one study attributing to it 53.3% of cash income and 21.1% of total household income in lower Dolpa

(Shrestha & Bawa, 2014). It has since become the biggest source of revenue among all Non-

Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) accounting for 40.5% of total revenues from NTFPs in Nepal

(GoN 2011).

In Dho Tarap, which contains nearly a quarter of the total pasture area of the entire Dolpa district where yartsagunbu is found, these transformations have been locally experienced as the influx of thousands of harvesters from across Nepal and increased presence of state authorities.

The first external authorities who controlled the harvest after legalization and rapidly rising prices were the Maoist insurgents who had overthrown the existing local government and pushed the national park authorities to the south in the district headquarters. After the Maoists joined the government following a peace process in 2006, the local community took matters into their own hands and developed systems to collect fees, regulate harvest, and oversee community development projects. This de facto control by the local community was curtailed after the

violent clash with the national park in 2014, and eventually discontinued following local elections and formation of local governments in 2017. Below, I trace the shifting control over yartsagunbu over the past two decades in Dho Tarap.

4.1. Maoist control (2003–2006)

The decade long (1996–2006) Maoist insurgency in Nepal was experienced relatively late in Dho Tarap, where Maoist cadres, composed exclusively of lowland residents and those from outside the district, recorded sustained presence only starting in 2003. Although the residents of

Dho Tarap and Phoksundo were forced to support the Maoists including serving as local representatives in a local governance structure they imposed, none from Dolpo had joined the

Maoists. Caterpillar fungus can be seen as the key reason for the insurgents’ interest in Dho

Tarap. When they took control, the Maoists effectively terminated the local governments and pushed all government authorities, including the national park staff, to the confines of the district headquarters in Dunai. Capitalizing on the burgeoning yartsagunbu economy, the Maoist insurgents controlled access to and trade over yartsagunbu between 2003 and 2006. This was done by imposing a tax on harvesters and traders, either in cash or yartsagunbu itself. Local residents in Dho Tarap were charged one yartsagunbu per person, and those from outside the valley were charged up to five per person. Traders were charged anywhere between 10,000-

30,000 rupees per kilogram. In exchange for the royalties, the Maoists provided security to the traders across the border to China and promised to carry out community development projects.

Those who refused to pay the amount were severely punished using force. In addition to controlling yartsagunbu, the Maoists also instituted a de facto local government with representatives from marginalized members of the community. They excluded the local elites in

the new mechanism some of whom were routinely harassed for their alleged corruption as a part of the earlier government. The few Maoist cadres, backed by a small group of the newly empowered locals, thus effectively governed caterpillar fungus between 2003 and 2006.

The Maoist management of yartsagunbu included declaring the dates for opening the pastures, regulating social behaviour including gambling, conflict management, providing security, and controlling access to who harvested and traded the fungus. They also delimited and facilitated the entry of Khampa traders from across the border by charging extra tax. The Maoist control and governance was periodic and operative only during the summer between May and

September when yartsagunbu harvest and trade with Tibet occur. When the Maoist cadres left the valley in winters, the local structures they instituted fell back as locals took back control. In contrast to their rhetorics of equality and social change, the Maoists were however accused of corruption, use of violence and threats, and dictating social lives. They were also accused of not redistributing the revenues collected from harvesters and traders for community development with the only exception being a one-time seed capital for a cooperative that sold butter from

Tibet in Dolpo for a subsidized price. Instead, locals argue they were not only forced to pay taxes to access their own territories but also obligated to feed the Maoist cadres for months and years on end. The Maoist control over the collection and trade of yartsagunbu was thus driven by its interest to extract revenues from the lucrative yartsagunbu economy.

4.2. Local control (2007–2013)

In November 2006, the Maoists signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the Nepali state to end the decade-long civil conflict and formed a government. The Maoist cadres left their bases in rural areas to temporary cantonments and concentrated their politics in

Kathmandu. The resulting political lacuna at the local level left open the question of control over yartsagunbu governance in Dho Tarap. Local residents dissolved the Maoist instituted local government to form their own de facto local governance structure. After a series of meetings, locals elected six village leaders and fifty youth members to support them. The youths were mobilized in case the Maoist youth wing called the Young Communist League (YCL), who had terrorized national and local politics at the time, turned up again in Dho Tarap to try to control caterpillar fungus. The locally formed de facto government not only sought to manage caterpillar fungus but also oversaw mundane community matters including dispute resolution, grazing and farming regulations, and environmental governance. As such, it acted as a fully-fledged community governance mechanism in the absence of a state authorized local government, one that residents compared to historical community governance in the valley prior to and in spite of state governance structures such as the Panchayat (which I discuss in next article). Although this community governance emerged from the political lacuna at the local level at the particular period of time, it also drew from the historical forms of non-state community governance in the valley.

Before the start of the caterpillar fungus season in May 2007, local residents conducted a series of meetings to discuss the management of yartsagunbu. They collectively decided to collect fees from thousands of harvesters from outside the valley and regulate the collection of yartsagunbu in their territories. In the absence of a “legal” authority, local residents decided to collect fees through a welfare organization, believing its status as a registered organization under the Social Welfare Council would provide some legal grounds for collecting fees. Although the explicit aim of the welfare committee was generally non-political activities (such as providing community spaces for celebrating festivals together) and for social skid dug (joy and sorrow)

gatherings, locals strategically mobilized it to carry out political functions including governing caterpillar fungus. Local residents used the official status of the organization to authorize the collection of entry fees. They printed the fee receipts under the name and registration number of the organization. Additionally, locals also strategically phrased the fees to be collected as

“donations” instead of “tax”, in order to avoid the legal baggage and implications of the latter, which is classically a function of the government. There were rumors that the National Park and district authorities in Suligad and Dunai were upset with local control of yartsagunbu and attempted on several occasions to file a case against them at the district court. This legal action did not gain purchase partially because the authorities lacked material evidence that the locals collected tax.

Through the welfare organization, local residents formed governance mechanisms. These included deciding and communicating the dates for opening the pastures, the categories and amount of fees to be collected, inclusion and exclusion criteria for harvesters, regulations regarding grazing and livestock, sale of alcohol, designation of campsite and waste management, and use of the sum collected from the tax. A key distinction made through local governance was the delineation of pastures under different categories of religious and livelihood importance. The mountains which had religious importance and those containing winter pastures were protected from outside harvesters, but locals were still allowed.

For the first two years, a fee of 500 rupees was collected from harvesters from outside the valley. This was followed by Rs 1,000 per person for the next three years, and Rs 1,500 the following three years (1 USD ~ Rs 100). It was reduced to Rs 1,000 in 2014 before the collection was thwarted by the national park, which I will discuss next. Additionally, a fee of Rs 5,000 was collected from each tent shop that sold alcohol. Interestingly, there was no fee for traders who

traded yartsagunbu, a contentious issue which some locals attribute to the fact that “the leaders are also traders.”

The community set several criteria to regarding who qualifies as a resident member for the purpose of gaining free access to pastures and benefit from the revenues collected. These included at minimum the fulfillment of the following criteria: 1) Own land and/or house in the village 2) are permanently settled there prior to the yartsagunbu season. If they had migrated from elsewhere they were required to change their residential address, basaai saraai and 3) regularly participate in obligatory community rituals including making offerings to and organizing the annual prayer ceremony nyung nas at the village monastery. Those who met all three criteria qualified as residents. Community members who married outside the village did not qualify, but outsiders who married into the community did. Additionally, outsiders who owned land and/or house but who did not participate in the obligatory religious rituals did not qualify.

Several teams of locals, often accompanied by Nepal Police, collected the designated fees. As of yet, not a single Dolpopa has joined Nepal’s security forces including Nepal Police and Army, which are composed exclusively of non-locals from lowland Nepal who are unfamiliar with Dolpo language, culture and way of life. A small group of Nepal Police force is stationed temporarily for only about 2-3 months during the summer months when yartsagunbu collection and trade occurs. For the rest of the year, there are no police force or other state officials (all non-locals) stationed in Dolpo. Notably, locals mobilized the Nepal police force who were temporarily stationed in the village to its collect fees and enforce its regulations to harvesters from outside during this period of local control. Neither the state nor the park is monolithic. Isolated from the district headquarters and rendered fully dependent on the local community for firewood, food, housing, other necessities, the police deployed by the state are

forced to maintain subordinate relationship vis-à-vis the local community. Additionally, the police often justified their participation in collecting the fees as helping its citizens (locals) by providing the service of “security”. The local teams also ran random patrols in the pastures on their own to check the payment of fees, sale of alcohol, and the management of waste. The community compensated the local fee collectors for their time and provided incentives to the police such as food, firewood, or cash.

At the height of the yartsagunbu boom, especially between 2006 and 2011, anywhere between four to six thousand harvesters from more than thirty districts of Nepal came to Dho

Tarap alone for a period of about a month between May and June. Depending on the number of harvesters, locals were able to collect a revenue of approximately 2 to 7 million rupees per year.

The fee collectors reported the total sum in a meeting attended by representatives from each household. Once the remuneration for the fee collectors was deducted, villagers discussed the specifics of where to invest them. The meeting often turned contentious and dragged on for days.

Between 2007 and 2012, nearly half of the amount collected was used to pay for subsidized rice delivered by the government through China across the border from Maryum Pass. A significant amount was donated to the local school for several years, followed by renovation of monasteries and stupas, and paying the salary of a traditional medicine practitioner or Amchi. A large amount was also spent on communal projects through collective decisions including building fences and bridges, repairing irrigation canals, waste management, community events and festivals, etc. The community distributed the amount left after all these programs equally among all households who qualified as community members. Like in Nubri and Tsum in Gorkha district (Childs &

Choedup, 2014), but at much larger scale, the income and revenue from yartsagunbu allowed the community to improve household income and undertake remarkable community development

projects independent of state-sponsored development initiatives. Although state and park authorities in the district headquarters considered this form of local governance “illegal,” they rarely showed up in Dho Tarap or took actions against the local residents during this period of time. However, the small group of Nepal Police (NP) mobilized during yartsagunbu season were complicit in the collection of fees by the locals, including in 2014 until a group of Armed Police

Forces (APF) violently suppressed the locals as described in the beginning of this article. It is quite uncertain to know how the actual practices of the police force align with commands from above. But it is not unusual that the Police who are mobilized in Dolpo almost always get away from any consequence for engaging in unlawful activities themselves including allowing Tibetan

Khampa traders to remain in the valley by taking huge sum in bribes, hunting wild animals, and arbitrarily charging tax from traders returning from their travel to markets across the border in

Tibet.

During this period, the park operated remotely through the local buffer zone user committee, NUG. A few members of NUG facilitated the collection of tax on behalf of the national park in collaboration with the de facto local government. They brought print copies of receipt pads from the national park headquarters, collected tax alongside locals, and reported it back to the park. At this point, national park fees were only nominal: 100/300/500 rupees for locals, residents of Dolpa and Mugu districts, and outsiders respectively. But many harvesters refused to pay the national park fees during this period. This was partly because only the local fee was sufficient to gain access to pastures in the physical absence of park staff and soldiers.

Local fee collectors and attendant police personnel regulated control over access by conducting regular checks and imposing fines on those who evaded the entry fees. The authority of the de facto local government, recognized by the harvesters through their payment of the fees and

obeying local regulations, was thus more dominant than the park regulations. Further, locals took the relative absence of and neglect by the park authorities as an indication of tacit approval of local control over yartsagunbu between 2007 to 2013.

The role of the NUG members, like those of local authorities and police, blurred the unstable state-society boundary. Throughout this period, NUG members had to navigate their tricky roles as both representatives of the park as well as the community. They were the dual mediums through which the park repeatedly attempted to take control of the fees and locals communicated their assertions of rights and control over the fees. The NUG navigated their tenuous positions by answering to the park (by partially collecting and reporting the tax) while siding with the community members in the local governance. This did not appease the park authorities who decided to take matters into their own hands in 2014. The park mobilized APF to violently suppress the local initiative and establish its monopoly over the collection of tax from yartsagunbu harvesters including the local residents.

4.3. National Park control (2014–present)

The violent clash in 2014 between the park and residents of Dho Tarap recounted at the beginning of this article should be read as an inflection point in the uneasy relationship between the state and Dolpopas regarding control over yartsagunbu. The national park authorities, supported by over fifty members of the APF, declared the existing local governance of yartsagunbu “illegal” and violently suppressed the collection of fees. Prior to the violence, the park authorities confiscated over a million rupees and detained eleven locals who were collecting the fees. The park authorities asserted their legal authority to collect tax and ordered the locals to completely halt their practices. In response, local residents defended their practice as a

customary and indigenous right by evoking several international conventions in a petition, signed by representatives from over 270 households. They staged protests on the site before the violence as well as at the district headquarters and Kathmandu in the aftermath. Despite the local protests, the violent event marks a turning point when the national park asserted its control over yartsagunbu in the valley. The park deployed APF and employed violence to curtail the local fees and to implement its own tax. The same year, the national park tax was suddenly increased by nearly tenfold. At the time, there was not yet any separate legal mechanism regarding the management of yartsagumbu. However, in 2016, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife

Conservation (DNPWC) authorized national parks to collect tax from yartsagunbu through a directive called Yartsagumba Bebasthapan Nirdeshika 2073 (Yartsagumba Management

Directive 2016).

Multiple significant transformations have unfolded since 2014. First, the national park began to deploy its staff and Nepal Army soldiers from the headquarters for a duration of one to two weeks in the beginning of yartsagunbu season to collect tax from harvesters. Second, the criteria for access to pastures and taxation categories changed. Local residents were now also required to pay taxes to access their own pastures. Third, local fee collection was not completely halted but was incorporated into the national park system as “service fees.” Fourth, NUG, rather than the de facto local government, were authorized to collect the service fee. NUG have discretionary powers to use the service fee. Fifth, the national park collected the tax that went straight to the National Treasury. The redistribution will theoretically happen through the national park mechanism according to the Buffer Zone Management Regulation. Sixth, local elections and the formation of new local governments in 2017 dissolved the existing de facto local government. Important questions on who should govern natural resources like yartsagunbu

have emerged at multiple levels of governance after the formation of local governments whose boundaries overlap with those of protected areas. In Dolpo, the local government has not yet been involved in governing caterpillar fungus as of 2020.

Finally, despite the national park control, locals have since strategized other ways to reclaim control over the pastures. When the National Park suppressed local governance and prevented them from collecting fees since 2014, locals worked strategically to declare and delimit certain pastures as winter grazing areas. Outsiders, who were previously allowed to harvest yartsagunbu in these pastures, were restricted from accessing them since 2014. This sparked protests from harvesters from outside the district who were, of course, doubly affected by the new change in yartsagunbu governance. On the one hand, they had to pay an increased

(tripled) national park tax, and on the other, the spaces and pastures they could access had decreased. But the local residents won the SPNP authorities over to informally agree to the restrictions which allowed the locals to seal off a sizeable territory for their own resource use.

There were rumors that key members of the park received incentives to support this arrangement in the aftermath of the violence. This arrangement, which is based on informal agreements and tacit support from the park authorities some of whom have already left, is therefore fragile. The locals are anxiously aware of this, and are alarmed and concerned by the urgency of solidifying it by legalizing it. Phurwa Lama, the chairman of the buffer zone user committee, is actively forwarding this agenda to the National Park and is attempting to register the winter pastures as charan chhetra, a legal status that would allow preferential local use and control.

However, much of this high stake arrangement hangs on informal arrangements and rumors. One of the wardens of SPNP had told locals that a similar arrangement exists in

Langtang National Park. When I asked the acting warden at the SPNP headquarters about such

an arrangement, he was dumbstruck and expressed no knowledge of it. I realized that he had never ventured outside the park headquarters and knew little about what actually is happening in a large part of the national park. So I asked the vice-warden, an outspoken man who has visited several villages in upper Dolpo. He was aware and hesitated to talk about it at first, but later told me that such an arrangement is strictly “illegal” in the eyes of the state. He added that he and his staff at the park have intentionally turned a blind eye on the issue. “The locals of Dho Tarap are rebellious and will turn to fight against us [as they have done before in 2014] if we take action against it” he added. When I asked the same question to the Director General (DG) of DNPWC in Kathmandu, he also had no knowledge of it. This informal arrangement and its varying degrees of awareness and complicity of the national park authorities not only show that the national park is not monolithic but also illustrates the creative ways in which local residents use and modify state structures to advance and sustain socioenvironmental projects of their own.

5. Conclusion

It was a late Saturday afternoon in mid-July, 2019 at the SPNP headquarters in Suligad.

The day was cloudy with patchy drizzle. The monsoon, which arrives late in this rain shadow, had intensified that week. The night before, a few houses and a water mill were swept by flash floods in Kalika, a village in lower Dolpa, killing 10 people in their sleep. The park staff were working even on their weekend. They had only a few days to submit the annual financial reports as the fiscal year drew to an end. I found myself in the middle of a charged conversation between the SPNP warden and Chainga Baiji, a resident of Phoksundo. “No, we don’t need your money.

The state does not need money at the cost of Nepal’s green forests,” remarked the acting Warden of SPNP, Pramod Yadav, flipping through pages in a lokta paper folder.

The warden’s comment came in reaction to Chainga Baiji’s request for a timber permit for the local school to construct a classroom building. Chainga is a resident of Tsho village in

Phoksundo and chair of School Management Committee at Tarpiza School, one of the reputed government schools in Dolpo that runs successful secondary education with the support of a small NGO based in Switzerland. I was surprised by Chainga’s muted position in relation to the warden’s remark, especially as he had given a long and emphatic speech a week prior at Tapriza

School Parents’ Day in which he had pledged to do all he could to resolve the school’s ongoing timber crises with the National Park. The school had found itself at the receiving end of the park’s recent wave of hostility against local residents regarding access to natural resources.

When I walked by the school two days prior, the construction of the four-room classroom building was complete except for the ceiling, doors, and windows, all parts that require timber.

The National Park had refused to grant a timber permit to the school despite repeated requests by the headmaster, the managing director, and members of the school management committee. The impending monsoon had aggravated the situation as the school awaited the timber permit in limbo, roofless. Chainga stood surprisingly silent as the warden admonished him for acting as the school’s mouthpiece. The school, the warden suggested, had enough “foreign dollars” to ferry timber on helicopters from Surkhet or Nepalgunj, referring to Terai forests in southern Nepal – a preposterous proposition given the distance and cost. He further accused the school headmaster, a government employee, of participating in “politics” and threatened to “handcuff” him. “The national park regulation supersedes administrative powers within our jurisdiction,” he asserted.

He added that the warden has authority to take legal action against anyone who does not listen to the park, irrespective of whether they are local residents or government teachers.

Showing a thick book of a compilation of regulations relating to protected areas in Nepali language, the warden asked me to read out and explain the rules to Chainga on his behalf. He had bookmarked it to sub-rule 1 of rule 24 of the Himalayan National Park Rules 1979 whose translation in English read: “If the local person desiring to take (obtain) wood, firewood for making or repairing the house has paid the required fee, as pursuant to the prevailing Rules on sales of forest products, the warden may provide a slip (Purji) to such a person as prescribed in

Schedule – 5 by allowing to obtain wood / firewood.”3 He handed over the book to me challenging that as a community member who researches conservation I should be able to convince a fellow community member. He then turned towards Chainga and added, “you can double-check the regulation with Phurwa if you do not trust the park staff.” He explained that there is no mention in the book of any provision on granting timber permits for community development projects. I interjected noting that the rule does not specify the word “house,” and could be interpreted to cover public structures such as monasteries, health posts and schools.

Perhaps propelled by my comments, Chainga finally spoke, “I am here as a parent [not a mouthpiece] because the school [construction] is incomplete, the monsoon has already started and children need a roof to study under.” The warden ignored his point and instead engaged in a long polemic against the school administrators. As a parting note, he further instructed Chaigna to relay the message to the school that they should “reduce the size of school building to just two rooms, and acquire ready-made windows and doors from Nepalgunj on helicopters,” a preposterous proposition given the distance and cost. When I asked the chairman of local buffer zone, PUG, regarding the timber permit he expressed that he is helpless in the situation. Apart

3 Himalayan National Park Rules, 2036 (1979)

from the power to write a letter verifying the need for timber to the park, PUG have no authority to regulate the use of natural resources.

In addition to the shifting and contested governance of yartsagunbu analyzed at length in this article, these interactions between the warden and Chainga speak to the two interrelated arguments I am making. First, I complicated how the rhetorics of decentralization and participatory conservation unfold in practice. In the name of decentralization, I showed that the central state (park authorities) appropriates and centralizes control by asserting state authority in its “high frontiers” (Bauer, 2004). The superimposition and expansion of state authority began through territorial incorporation, first through park establishment and later through incorporation of more territories as buffer zones. In particular, the creation of buffer zones—implemented as a form of participatory conservation— territorially extended state/park authority in communities previously external to the jurisdiction of protected areas. Moreover, the rhetoric of decentralization is complicated by the discretionary authority of the warden and the arbitrary manner in which, for example, he interprets and dictate laws and regulations regarding conservation to resident populations. This is further reinforced by the organization, structure and functioning of the local Buffer Zone UGs who are sharply constrained by the warden in their abilities to make decisions on matters concerning the governance and redistribution of revenues collected by the park.

Finally, I showed some of the local implications of the expansion of state/park authority in the Himalayan “margins of the state.” I suggest, in Dolpo, that protected areas materialize as an emergent structure of dispossession in relation to both access and control of natural resources, as well as in terms of its effects on Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices. Even a highly influential government school in the region can hardly obtain access to timber due to the park

regulations. Although spectacular, this is illustrative of the general ongoing enclosure of resources by the national park outlined above, which started since its establishment in 1984.

Although the creation of buffer zones was hailed as participatory and locally promised as a harbinger of development and other park related benefits, they have since emerged as a structure through which the park has asserted exclusive control over environmental governance and extract revenues. Exclusive authority over access to and control over natural resources by the national park, enforced through a militarized structure, has been dispossessing resident populations from their land, resources, knowledges, and systems of environmental governance.

Moreover, it has deprived the resident population of the financial and other material benefits from their natural resources by violently suppressing them to extract its own revenues.

Specifically, I showed that the boom of caterpillar fungus economy has turned Dolpo into a lucrative site for generating revenues for the state. Capitalizing on such an opportunity, a range of external actors have appeared in yartsagunbu hotspots like Dho Tarap since it was legalized in

2001. Maoist insurgents and the national park have, at different periods within the past two decades, suppressed existing local systems and enforced their own mechanisms of resource control and revenue collection. The national park in particular has more recently appeared as the hegemonic authority in governing natural resources. Finally, as a result, the national park has dispossessed the resident population from their own systems of environmental governance with serious implications in both material terms (livelihood, community development, income and revenues from yartsagunbu) and ontological terms (conceptions of nature, human-nonhuman relationships, rituals, and socio-political governance).

In 2017, local elections were held and local governments formed with the objective of devolving power to the local level, or democratic decentralization. The Federal restructuring of

Nepal comes as a culmination of a decade of Maoist insurgency followed by another decade of a protracted “transition” period. These moments were punctuated by several waves of social movements that sought to undo the historical marginalization of Nepal’s indigenous peoples and other minorities. However, in Dolpo most of which falls under the territory of SPNP and buffer zones, I argue that these democratic “gains” have been upended by conservation agendas.

Despite the formation of local governments, the national park retains exclusive authority to control access to and extract revenues from valuable resources as of 2020. There exist neither clear boundaries nor specific legal stipulations that underline the relationship between national parks and local governments. In Dolpo, they do not coordinate on matters relating to governance or fiscal expenditure for development projects. Instead, they run parallel governance within the overlapping territories. The new local governments, tasked with hefty governmental responsibilities and enmeshed in bureaucratic confusion, have barely explored assertive grounds of policy-making and political negotiations with the provincial and federal governments for local autonomy and indigenous self-determination regarding environmental governance. This incipient local government structure, despite its democratic promises, has for now allowed the centralized regime of protected areas to further marginalize the local community from participating in meaningful socioenvironmental projects of their own.

article 2

“MOUNTAINS ARE COMMONS, GRASSES ARE DIVIDED”: INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL ONTOLOGY IN DOLPO

་མ་དགའ་ན་མི་མི་དགའ།། མི་འགས་ན་་འག། When deities are not happy, humans are not happy When humans are disturbed, deities are disturbed. —Dolpo saying

1. Introduction

I first learned about the word “nature” as a part of a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Eco-

Club meeting around 2000 at my primary school in Dho Tarap in Dolpo region of Nepal. WWF

Nepal provided the seed fund, educational materials and awareness toolkits to establish Eco-

Clubs throughout schools in Dolpo to teach Dolpopas (people of/from Dolpo) about nature conservation (Nep. Batabaran Samrakchyan) through the school children. During weekly Eco-

Club meetings, our teachers talked about rivers, mountains, air, and wildlife such as snow leopards, as a part of the nature that we ought to learn to appreciate and preserve. We were bewildered but enthusiastic as we cleaned villages, made artistic posters with slogans in English, and aimlessly hiked mountains on weekends. WWF also sponsored several excursions including a trip to see the nearby Phoksumdo Lake, followed by guided tours of Chitwan and Bardia

National Parks in southern Nepal. Students explored and learned about national parks, wildlife and the importance of conservation during these excursions.

Prior to the Eco-Club events, I did not know the word “nature conservation” either. My early childhood was spent in a nomadic lifestyle, mostly in Dolpo but also for three years across

the border in Tibet. This entailed travelling with animals and changing pastures with seasons.

Given these, the concepts and vocabulary taught as a part of the WWF program conflicted with my understandings of nature. My conception of nature was shaped by legends and stories that elders tell which animate the lived environment surrounding us, particularly the presence of nonhumans who inhabit water springs and specific landmarks. These stories and legends ultimately carried moral instructions about our conception of and relations with a multitude of nonhumans who cohabit the earth with us. They include individual practices of acknowledging their presence and seeking permission from the nonhumans, as well as communal rituals to foster these relationships. Individual practices include, for example, whistling and uttering the phrase baaa nga lug-rzhi yin no (baaa I’m a shepherd) before drinking from a spring while shepherding.

Collective rituals include bstan skor, which I describe in detail later, that seek to propitiate nagas

(Tib. Klu) and territorial deities (sa bdag and gzhi bdag) who were in turn believed to reciprocate back with rainfall, good harvest, and health. Despite my attempts to consolidate these varying conceptions of nature, they increasingly appeared incompatible.

This article grapples with the interactions and struggles between these contrasting conceptions of nature both of which advance their own versions of environmental governance but with radically divergent ontologies, governance practices, and material consequences. In doing so, I tease out the relationships between “indigenous environmental governance” (Carroll,

2014, 2015), particularly focusing on the continuum of resource- and relationship-based practices of the Dolpopas, and “political ontology” (Blaser, 2009, 2014), specifically concerned not only with the existence and coming-into-being of Dolpopa ontologies but also with the

“power-laden negotiations” and “conflicts that ensue as different worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as they interact and mingle with each other” (Blaser, 2009, p. 11).

Despite their differences, I understand that the concerns of both ‘indigenous environmental governance” and “political ontology” overlap in terms of their emphasis on relational modes in indigenous governance and ontology, both recognizing the agency of nonhumans and the maintenance of relationships with them. To this end, I am also inspired by two related recent calls in political ecology as well as in post-humanist and material geographies with regard to engagements with indigenous ontologies.

The first concerns the place of indigeneity in political ecology. In their review of

“Indigeneity”, Emily Yeh and Joe Bryan (2015) ask, “Can multinaturalism be compatible with political ecology?” (Yeh & Bryan, 2015, p. 539). By “multinaturalism,” they are referring to the

Amerindian idea that inverts the Western “multiculturalist” approach that there is “the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures” to instead posit “a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity” or “a constant epistemology and variable ontologies” (de Castro, 1998, p. 470). Their question partly emerged from the ostensible incompatibility and mutual critiques of works in political ecology and indigeneity. While geographers and anthropologists of indigeneity (Blaser, 2009;

Coombes et al., 2012) often criticize political ecology “for failing to take either nature or culture seriously by reducing both to expressions of how external structures affect “local socioecological lives”” and therefore “missing the deeper significance of “resource conflicts””, political ecologists might equally “critique the former for not paying adequate attention to the coercive power of capital and the subject-making power of various forms of violence” (Yeh & Bryan,

2015, pp. 538–539). After pointing out generative works in both political ecology (e.g. Bryan,

2011; M. Goldman, 2007; Nadasdy, 2011; Yeh, 2014) and the emerging field of “political ontology” (e.g. Blaser, 2009, 2014; de la Cadena, 2015) that treat radical difference seriously by taking indigenous peoples at face value as interlocutors of theory, Yeh and Bryan (2015) argue

that there is much to be gained from engagements between the two, not least to “widen” politics and the potentials for liberatory projects that supplement, rather than ignore, forms of dispossession.

The second call entails the role of nonhuman entities in post-humanist and material geographies. Various new “turns” in geography and anthropology such as material, ontological and post-human/nonhuman turns destabilize and break down dualisms like nature/culture, human/nonhuman, subject/object, et cetera, showing them instead to be relational, hybrid, quasi- object, and always in “the processes of becoming-together with and in relation to other species”

(Yeh, 2017, p. 146). One of the overarching objectives of these turns seems to be to “flatten” the vertical hierarchy of the modern, dualist ontologies of “the Modern Constitution” (Latour, 1993) by challenging human exceptionalism and incorporating the agency of a range of nonhumans.

However, some geographers have argued that such engagements with post-humanism, particularly in the discipline of geography, tend to reproduce “power-knowledge hierarchies” and

“colonial ways of knowing and being” while making claims of social justice in this world

(Gergan, 2015; Sundberg, 2014; Yeh, 2017). In particular, these approaches tend to privilege specific types of nonhuman entities as legitimate matters of concern while writing out, subordinating, and in some cases dismissing (Stengers, 2010; Whatmore, 2013) other nonhumans such as Gods, djinns, spirit matter, as well as nagas and territorial deities (Blaser, 2014; Gergan,

2015; Yeh, 2017). In response to these tendencies of the new turns to “glorify” technoscience and privilege certain human-nonhuman assemblages, Emily Yeh (2017) thus pointedly asks: “do the nagas (klu), underground serpentine deities that manifest as frogs and fish under water, and territorial deities (gzhi bdag) who reside in particular mountains, both of which cause floods and crop infestations and skin diseases, have a place in the materialist turn, separate from the frogs

and fish and mountains with which they are associated?” (p. 147).

This article simultaneously responds to and follows both of these calls/directions by engaging with indigenous environmental governance and political ontology in Dolpo, Nepal. In the process, I engage with indigeneity in two ways. First, following indigenous scholars from

North America (e.g. Carroll, 2015; Coulthard, 2010; L. B. Simpson, 2017), I use the term indigenous to evoke relational modes of knowing, being, and governing that contradict and are often foreclosed by colonial onto-epistemologies and governance structures. Second, I follow the analysis of “indigeneity without guarantees” which is more open, relational, contingent, and articulated in geographically and historically specific contexts rather than fixed as an autonomous condition or stuck in questions of authenticity (Frydenlund, 2017; Li, 2000; Tsing,

2005; Yeh & Bryan, 2015). The term indigenous here is therefore “at once historically based and emergent in relation to new political situations, its meaning drawn in relation to the non- indigenous” (Yeh & Bryan, 2015, p. 534). By “indigenous environmental governance” I am therefore referring to both relational modes of knowing, being and governing, as well as to the historical and emergent forms of community governance in Dolpo that are divergent from, although they interact and mingle with, externally imposed regime of conservation. I also engage with alternate ontologies beyond the “Western” nature/culture binary and nonhumans other than the “technoscientific”, particularly the agency of nonhumans like nagas or water spirits (Tib. klu) and territorial deities (sa bdag and gzhi bdag). However, I explore the divergent ontologies of the

Dolpopas not as some romantic, static, and bounded ways of knowing and being but as both historical and emergent. Additionally, the ontologies I explore and the indigenous governance practices they inform are shaped by and interact with broader political economies, particularly the ongoing state-led processes of nature conservation and extraction of resources in the region.

I begin by discussing how conservationists and park staff, who are all outsiders to Dolpo, view nature and represent Dolpo and the Dolpopas to underline some of major dynamics that define “seeing like a conservationist.” I then juxtapose “seeing like a conservationist” with place- based indigenous environmental governance to demonstrate ontological divergences and their implications for environmental governance in the same territories. To this end, I outline a patchy sketch of “indigenous environmental governance” in Dho Tarap that accounts for the continuum of resource- and relationship-based practices, and that entails both the “protection” of the environment and associations with nonhuman world. I discuss a selective body of agro-pastoral regulations in Dho Tarap that entail “sealing” the valleys (skya khrims) and mountains (sngo khrims). I then move to explore “political ontology” in Dolpo for the rest of the article. Under this section, I first provide a brief ethnographic portrait of a communal ritual, bstan skor, conducted in Dho Tarap, Dolpo in the summer of 2019. I conclude the section by exploring the founding myths of Thasung Choling monastery and legends of the Phoksundo lake in

Phoksundo, Dolpo.

2. Seeing like a conservationist

Drawing from interviews with park officials and conservationists based in Kathmandu, this section discusses how conservationists view nature and indigenous peoples who reside in protected areas, and how these perceptions inform the regime of conservation. A substantial body of political ecology literature on conservation have analyzed how protected areas depend on the discursive and material alienation of indigenous peoples from their territory (R. P.

Neumann, 1998; Peluso, 1992; West, 2006; Ybarra, 2018), particularly through the colonial imaginary of “wilderness” (Cronon, 1996; Williams, 1980). While these literatures often employ

Marxian and social constructionist critiques to frame conservation as enclosure and primitive accumulation, they do not fully take into account how conservation entails the erasure of indigenous ontologies, particularly of territories as relationships or identity (Carroll, 2015;

Coulthard, 2010; Ybarra, 2018). Further, the discourse of “wilderness”, that begot scientific conservation in the first place and continues to strongly influence it today, is predicated on the modern, dualist ontology of nature/culture. Below, I discuss how this modern wilderness imaginary emerges and unfolds through attention to what nature is (ontology), how conservationists view Dolpo and the Dolpopas, geopolitical concerns, and what conservation entails from these positions. I show that conservation perspectives in/on Dolpo are predicated on and reinforce a separate (pristine) Nature in need of protection, while simultaneously constructing the Dolpopas, who complicate such perceptions, as “noble savages” and “reckless rebels.” In contrast to popular representation of resident populations in protected areas elsewhere as landless, encroachers, or migrants (Cronon, 1996; R. P. Neumann, 1998, 1998; Ybarra, 2018), the Dolpopas have been represented instead as “noble savages,” and more recently as “reckless rebels” given their changing subjectivities and resistance vis-à-vis state resource governance. But as I will show, these representations come with no lesser violence, particularly to the Dolpopas’ complex perceptions of nature and governance practices. I therefore argue that the contrasting representations of the Dolpopas as “noble savages” and “reckless rebels”, along with the depoliticization of conservation and geopolitical concerns, serves to justify fortress conservation and to advance state initiatives to “discipline” them into becoming good citizens. In so doing, they naturalize state authority and the impositions of nature/culture through conservation on the one hand, and erase Dolpopa conceptions of nature, as well as their place-based, historical and emergent forms of indigenous environmental governance on the other.

At the end of a long day performing a communal ritual called bstan skor, discussed below, in Dho Tarap valley, I visited the Caravan Hotel with some friends to get snacks. It was mid-June, the middle of the yartsagunbu season, when people had left the village to camp out in the pastures. The Caravan Hotel was one of only a handful of places open where travelers could stop over for lunch, drinks, or an overnight stay. It was also a good place to meet people who were in the valley. That evening, I ran into the SPNP and Nepal Army officials who were in the valley for a few weeks to collect tax from yartsagunbu collectors. By then, I had been repeatedly trying in vain for two weeks to get a hold of them for an interview. Present in the room were

Mani Krishna Pandey, a senior game scout who was leading the small team of NP staff, and

Udaya Khatri, a warrant officer and second in command of the Nepal Army unit deployed in

Dho Tarap. Like all government officials assigned in Dolpo, they are not Dolpopas and are culturally and geographically alien to the place. I asked them if I could interview them while we got our snacks. They agreed. Rather than a two-way interview per se, the “public” setting in the presence of over a dozen people, including Dolpopas, transformed it into a free flowing discussion. It started with the state officials’ curious incomprehension of a communal ritual conducted earlier in the day called bstan skor, which involves the propitiation of nonhumans like nagas (Tib. Klu) and territorial deities (gzhi bdag) for rain and harvest. They were quick to cast the ritual as “superstitious” and characterize the locals as “reckless” and “ungrateful” to the state.

Their reactions reflected the general state attitude towards the Dolpopas and their ways of knowing, being, and governing their territories. The Dolpopas in the room, however, refused to accept the authority of the park staff and their perceptions of nature even as they were forced to comply with them. In other words, this particular encounter and the general imposition of state structures of conservation (and democracy) in Dolpo underline the importance of ontological

conflicts (Blaser, 2013; Escobar, 2017) in play as much as they highlight contestations of authority and citizenship.

Neither of the officials were happy to be in Dho Tarap, where they were tasked with patrolling the vast, mountainous pastures and the surrounding communities on their own. They described their assignments as overwhelming due to the “difficult geography” and “stupefying” local realities, compared with their previous assignments to other parts of Nepal. Mani Krishna

Pandey, the senior game scout, had worked for three years in Community Forestry in his home district of Jumla before taking the civil service examination to become a game scout at SPNP. He confessed to ending up in the current position with SPNP to fulfill the requirements of mandatory civil service in the rural areas, not out of any prior knowledge and interest in wildlife or nature conservation per se. For the past eighteen months, he had been assigned to various posts in SPNP in both Dolpa and Mugu districts, but he said he had long wanted to come to Dho

Tarap because of its prominence as a yartsagunbu collection and trading center in Dolpo. So he was quite excited at first to be assigned to collect tax from yartsagunbu collectors in Dho Tarap.

Apart from collecting tax, his chief responsibilities included regulating “illegal activities” in the pastures, controlling trafficking of contraband wildlife items, and “raising local awareness” about wildlife conservation and development. Udaya Khatri joined the Nepalese Army about a decade ago and has since served in many districts, mostly as guards in national parks. Both found

Dho Tarap hard to comprehend, and were bewildered by the terrain and the people living in it.

They were no less confused by Dolpopas’ general apathetic attitude towards the state that often bordered on outright hostility. That attitude compounded their difficulties understanding local language and culture. They found the geography of Dho Tarap too vast to “manage” for a small team of just 3 park staff and 10 soldiers, all of whom came from the lowlands and were

unfamiliar with the vast high altitude geography. The Dolpopas were the frequent target of their frustrations. “We have been deployed here to control such reckless and ungrateful locals,” Khatri interjected (emphasis mine). As mentioned above, both Pandey and Khatri complained that the

Dolpopas were “reckless and ungrateful,” only talking “about their rights without understanding who they are and what their responsibilities are.” In other words, they saw the Dolpopas as having a “reckless” disregard for SPNP regulations, and as “ungrateful” for greedily demanding a share of tax the park collects.

Dolpopas however saw things differently. From their perspective, their conflict with park officials pivoted around the questions of what is nature, and what should be protected. While nature for the park staff entailed resources, particularly yartsagunbu, that they can selectively and seasonally control and manage to extract revenues, it was more than resource to the Dolpopas.

As I will demonstrate later in this article, nature for the Dolpopas contained a range of both humans and nonhumans that are intertwined in relationships of reciprocity. Under this conception, yartsagunbu and its management was only a part of broader indigenous environmental governance practices that community members carry out on their own terms vis-

à-vis the state and its regime of conservation. They were also contesting the governance of yartsagunbu, specifically who should have the authority to collect tax for collecting yartsagunbu, who should pay (locals or non-locals), and what to do with the revenue. The second contention is related to authority and citizenship, discussed in the first article. I argue that these questions of authority and citizenship also shape and were shaped by contrasting conceptions of nature, territory, and identity. Several striking exchanges between local residents and the park officials followed in this regard. To begin with, the park staff took it as given that they were the legitimate authority to collect tax and control access to yartsagunbu pastures, an assertion the locals

challenged and refused straight away. In addition to assuming their exclusive authority to collect tax, the park staff sent from the park headquarters expected the local buffer zone user group committee (UG) to provide local support to the park staff and soldiers for the duration of their stay. According to Pandey, the support expected from the UG included dividends from the service fee collected by the UG; logistical support such as housing, food and supplies, blankets, solar lights, utensils; and for them to act as local guides and informants about the geography of practices relating to yartsagunbu collection.

The Dolpopas, in the eyes of the park staff, were thus ineligible to and incapable of making decisions on matters relating to collection of tax from yartsagunbu harvesting, let alone governing and protecting their own territories. In response to these lofty expectations of the park to provide local assistance for apparently no benefit to the community, one of the Dolpopas in the room, who was quietly listening until that point, threw a curveball in the local language,

“What are they saying? Who gave them the authority to collect tax here in our land? We did not.” Although Pandey and Khatri did not understand the language, his point is simultaneously a critique of the national park staff regulations and refusal to accept the exclusive authority of the park to collect tax from what the Dolpopa consider their land despite the fact that they are often compelled to pay the tax and abide by the national park regulations. This critique and refusal thus signals the importance and robustness of indigenous environmental governance practices despite/amidst the hegemonic authority of the state and conservation.

In addition to Pandey and Khatri, I interviewed eight others who were either employed with SPNP or had played roles in its establishment or operation at some point in time. I consider three here: the warden of the park, a retired WWF staff who worked for many years in SPNP, and a self-proclaimed conservationist-entrepreneur based in Kathmandu. All three shared similar

perceptions of nature and the Dolpopas. Pramod Yadav, the acting warden of SPNP, singled out

Dolpopas from Dho Tarap as “reckless rebels who wouldn’t spare an opportunity to engage in violence against park staff.” He is referring to the 2014 violence between Dho Tarap residents and SPNP staff described in Chapter 1 over the collection of fees from yartsagunbu collectors.

Two residents were killed in the resulting police brutality, the likes of which had never been seen before in the valley. Despite the fact that I am from the same village and had written about the arbitrary and disproportionate force used by the police during the conflict, the warden continued to denigrate Dho Tarap residents as violent and subversive. The vice-warden also concurred, and added that they have been relatively lenient towards Dho Tarap to prevent similar confrontations.

The warden also pointed out that the residents of Dho Tarap and Saldang villages were irresponsible and short-sighted with regard to conservation. According to Yadav, the two villages were the primary cause of deforestation in Phoksundo.

His comments drew from a long career in conservation, working a variety of positions in nearly a dozen national parks around the country in various positions including Langtang, Parsa,

Sagarmatha, Koshi Tappu and Chitwan. Originally from Janakpur in the Terai, he had completed a certificate in Forestry before joining the national park services. In Phoksundo, Yadav was tasked with collection of state taxes on yartsagunbu. Like his predecessors, he was confounded by local claims to territorial “rights” that they insisted gave them the authority to regulate yartsagunbu. At one point during our interview, Yadav posed a rhetorical question to me: “If

Nature and biodiversity in Phoksundo were destroyed, where would the future generations go?”

His question needs unpacking to understand the underlying assumptions and implications. First, the scale of deforestation Yadav references is not reflective of the historical local timber use, most of which is small scale and used to frame traditional mud and stone houses. Residents of

Saldang and Dho Tarap trekked three to seven days, one-way and without road, to get to the forests, a distance that made large scale extraction of timber not feasible. It was only in the past two decades, with the boom of yartsagunbu economy and other state and non-state development projects, that there has been dramatically increased timber use. Even then, such larger-scale logging has been mostly carried out for park and state development projects or community projects like schools and monasteries. All of these activities were directed by well-off traders and local politicians, rather than by ordinary Dolpopas. By blaming the ordinary Dolpopas for this alleged deforestation, the warden assumed moral stewardship and legal authority to “protect” the forest, and nature more broadly, from them. Again, Nature here is conceived as separate from people, the Dolpopas, who were perceived instead as threats to this separate, external nature.

Additionally, like his staff deployed in Dho Tarap, the warden also rendered the locals incapable and indolent, as well as ungrateful to the state and greedy for “rights”:

People are not jagaruk (aware and concerned) like me and do not care about biodiversity and nature conservation. But they come looking after their rights when yartsagunbu is concerned. They do not appreciate what they have [biodiversity] but instead ask for rights when the state collects revenues from yartsagunbu.

National and global conservation imperatives reinforce park staff’s representations of the

Dolpopas, justifying state-imposed environmental governance as illustrated by my interviews with Dhana Rai, a retired WWF staff member who had worked in SPNP as a field officer for nearly two decades, and Karna Shakya, an influential forester-turned-entrepreneur who was involved in surveying for the creation of Nepal’s first national park, Chitwan. Dhana Rai had worked in SPNP since 1997, when he was first hired to manage a WWF project called Northern

Mountain Conservation Project (NMCP). Funded by the USAID, NMCP was launched a year after the creation of buffer zones and was intended to institutionalize participatory conservation in SPNP by adopting the model of “integrated conservation and development program” (ICDP).

The project specifically focused on environmental education and local livelihood in Dolpo with programs such as tree plantations, a Micro Savings Credit program, the formation of Women’s

Groups in villages, and Eco-Clubs at local schools such as the one at my primary school mentioned in the beginning of this article.

Despite WWF’s important move to include the Dolpopas and their knowledges

(particularly through its “Plant and People Initiative”), its projects were nevertheless informed by the colonial wilderness imaginary and associated representations of the Dolpopas. To begin with, the primary objectives of WWF’s Eco-Club and the Women’s Group were, in the words of Rai,

“to teach the locals about the importance of biodiversity and motivate them to contribute to nature conservation.” Ken Bauer draws attention to a major assumption underlying this well- intentioned WWF project in Dolpo in his book High Frontiers. In its proposal to the USAID in which he was involved as a consultant, Bauer notes that the “WWF sounded a note of alarm—a conservation crisis—in Shey Phoksundo National Park and decried the impacts of local people on natural resources, particularly faulting the inadequacy of their management practices”

(Bauer, 2004, p. 5) (emphasis mine).

Dhana Rai’s ideas are also echoed in Karna Shakya’s 1979 travelogue Dolpo: The World

Behind the Himalayas. Like most books and films on Dolpo, Shakya’s work is full of Orientalist representations. In the introduction, he writes, “Dolpo is a Dream World. In the French expression, it’s a “le fleur bleue” -blue flower; the flower which one cannot attain, but which one always longs for.” Elsewhere in the introduction, he writes, “The romance of Dolpo and its wilderness enthralled my passion to addiction,” which ends with an emphatic appeal, “Let us not spoil the endemic ecosystem, pristine wilderness of the world’s highest unspoilt human settlement” (all emphasis mine). Like the WWF proposal for the NMCP project, Rai and Shakya

implicitly posited the Dolpopas as both “noble savages” and threats to conservation, rendering them incapable of conserving nature even as they live in it and their management practices inadequate.

Shakya’s and Rai’s ideas of wilderness also echo dominant understandings that contrast it with the industrial and the urban, setting it within broader colonial understandings of Nepali people. Their understanding adheres to Raymond Williams’ (1980: 77) characterization of wilderness as “unspoilt but also [it is] settled: a kind of primal settlement” (77). Willams’ line comes from his book Culture and Materialism that outlines a social history of the idea of

“nature” in which he traces the changing meaning of nature in English from “a definition of quality” to “a description of the world” (Williams, 1980, p. 67). In the context of the industrial revolution and agricultural improvement in 18th century England, particularly noteworthy is a key distinction of “nature as separate from man” from what was then “Nature as God’s deputy”, primarily to make way for its alterations and interventions for human purposes. It was at this historical conjuncture of industrialization and urbanization when humans intensively exploited nature that another popular conception of nature emerged, which is relevant to our discussion here. This was a conception of “nature that was not man”, or untouched nature. Wilderness. This wild nature, which appealed to the so-called nature lovers or admirers, contrasted but existed alongside the improver’s ideas of nature as the mixing of labor with the earth, or “nature as separate from man.” Consequently, such nature, in the words of Williams, “fled to the margins: to the remote, inaccessible, the relatively barren areas. Nature was where industry [and the urban] was not” (80). Williams points out a bitter irony on the part of the admirers of nature, some of whom he calls plain “hypocrites”: they benefit from exploitation of nature (profits and wealth) while at the same time seeking to escape its products (“the smoke and the spoil”) by

fleeing to unspoiled nature. Further, this perception of nature directly feeds into contemporary ideas of global conservation and protected areas, which should be understood in this context as such hypocritical attempts to preserve partial nature as a refuge from what are pervasive and various industrial and urban ruins.

Reflecting on Williams’ ideas of nature, I could not help but characterize Karna Shakya as one such plain “hypocrite”. In addition to his idealized admiration of Dolpo’s “pristine” nature, he proudly told me during an interview that “my bread and butter is tourism but my passion is conservation,” as if they were unrelated. Dhana Rai, on the other hand, is certainly genuine about his commitment to preserving nature in Dolpo as well to improving local livelihoods. Given his involvement in Dolpo for nearly two decades and his knowledge of the realities on the ground, he is less attached to the idea of wilderness. Despite these minor differences, the perception of nature that both Rai and Shakya subscribed to is one of wilderness, which simultaneously sees nature as rural or exterior to the industrial and the urban (thus erasing the presence of Dolpopas), while at the same time, recognizing the settlement of the Dolpopas in so far as they justify conservation. This is why both took issue with emerging questions of development and democracy, and to their dismay, the changing subjectivity of the Dolpopas.

When I asked what threatened nature and biodiversity in Dolpo, both Rai and Shakya admitted that Nature prior to the establishment of the park was “pristine” and that the locals followed rules without any resistance because they were scared of the park staff in its early years. More than once, Rai and Shakya characterized the locals as “natural conservationists”, thus reinforcing a romantic view of the Dolpopas as “noble savages.” As described above, such a view renders the Dolpopas as incapable of conserving nature even as they live in it and their management practices deficient. This is precisely the reason both Shaya and Rai considered state

projects of development and democracy as the major threats to the “wilderness” of Dolpo and key obstacles to achieving national and international conservation goals. Karna Shakya, in particular, pitted development (tourism and yartsagunbu) against conservation and regretted that

“the conservation philosophy hardly wins the ideological war with development.” By development, he was clear that it meant “opening” Dolpo to tourism as well as forms of community development such as physical infrastructures. This is also implicit in his argument that the “fragile” cultural and physical landscape of Dolpo is a tourism “trump card” that the government of Nepal ought to use wisely for the posterity of its tourism industry. This entailed the preservation of Dolpo as “a blank spot on the world map of tourism” through careful planning of development projects and restriction to tourists. Wilderness, as Shakya states, do not necessarily entail anti-development per se but the posterity of more capitalist development. It is a future “capital” that the state ought to exploit wisely, even if that means denying the Dolpopas their livelihood needs such as roads and tourism.

Indeed, and what is not discussed much in the literature on the region, is the geopolitics of the production of Dolpo as a wilderness area. The Nepal state’s geopolitical stand towards

Dolpo has been one of strategic (dis)engagement through the production of the region as wilderness, an ecology in need of both conservation and security. Both objectives are pursued by declaring the entire region as off-limits to “foreigners” as well as from mainstream national development and political transformations.

Although the neighboring region of Mustang was the ground zero of its operation, the

Tibetan resistance movement funded by the CIA (see McGranahan, 2010) was also active in

Dolpo between 1960 until its end in 1974. Until recently, physical traces of Chushi Gangdruk

(four rivers, six ranges), the unified name of the resistance army, could be found in Dolpo, such

as an old water mill in Dho Tarap. Stories abound of the Chushi Gangdruk who are represented in both favorable and negative fashions in local accounts. In some cases, they were considered the de facto protectors and arbiters of disputes, particularly among the Tibetan refugees who had then settled in the valley. In addition to these concerns regarding Tibetan refugees and the

Tibetan resistance movement from Nepali territory, the Nepal government then had legitimate reasons to fear China’s aggressive territorial expansion in the aftermath of its incorporation of

Tibet which borders Dolpo.

As a result of these geopolitical concerns— which are expressed through and compounded by the imperatives of conservation in the context of Dolpo— the government had thus put a blanket restriction preventing foreigners from entering Dolpo until 1994. Even today, foreigners are required to obtain a special permit from the Department of Immigration and pay

500 USD for ten days to travel to the region which is still designated as a “Restricted Zone.”

Nepal, which was once a haven for Tibetan refugees has dramatically turned hostile to them in recent years in favor of China’s “One-China” policy. This has major geopolitical implications for the Himalayan people in Nepal’s northern territories, nearly all of which were declared again as

“restricted areas” in April 2019 (Record, 2019). Although the geopolitical gears are shifting, it remains that Dolpo, along with other mountain regions of Nepal, have been geopolitically reproduced as wilderness areas restricted from “foreigners.” The production of Dolpo as a wilderness thus occurs in two ways: first, the Nepal government selectively projects threats such as travel of “foreigners,” geopolitical sensibilities (such as Chushi Gandruk), and conservation crises. This interpretation of threats then provides the justification for its intervention, most notably the declaration of the region as “restricted zones” and the creation of protected areas.

Together, I argue, they enable the reproduction of nature as wilderness in Dolpo.

Relatedly, it is important to note that the production of nature in Dolpo as a “wilderness” is also predicated on preserving its status quo, that is, the region as remote and the people as primitive yet loyal state subjects, even if that entailed secluding the region from mainstream development and national discourse of democracy. This is why Shakya and Rai’s perspectives on socio-political transformations in Dolpo were extremely critical. They regretted that the advent of tourism, yartsagunbu economy, and other state sponsored development projects have

“empowered” the locals to the point that it risked turning them into subversive subjects. This tendency, according to them, has been further fueled by “democracy”, or a host of political changes associated with the “post-conflict” state transformation in Nepal. Adding to Pandey,

Khatri and the SPNP warden who represented the Dolpopas as “undisciplined” or “reckless”, Rai and Shakya blamed the institutions of democracy as anarchic— a system in which, in the words of Rai, “everyone started acting like experts.” Moreover, in dismissing the emerging institutions of democracy (Shakya and Rai) and the ideas associated with it such as “rights” (the park staff) which appear out of place in Dolpo, they collectively sought to depoliticize conservation as outside the mainstream national political transformations. This is best illustrated by Karna

Shakya’s polemical quote below:

Conservation is not politics. In Nepal, we want to politicize everything. One reason why the Nepali state is failing is because of the irresponsibility of the people; they want to do everything. In conservation, there should be strict rules and regulations which the inhabitants may or may not like. There should be zero tolerance for chadapan (recklessness). This is the case [for national parks] everywhere in the world. Take, for example, American National Parks. You can’t do whatever you want there. People should be disciplined and follow park rules and regulations.

Although many international conservationists, and in this case even park staff, often see themselves and conservation as apolitical (Ybarra, 2018, p. 48), political ecologists have long argued that there is no such thing as apolitical ecology (Carroll, 2014, 2015; Peet et al., 2010;

Robbins, 2012). What then is the problem with the depoliticization of conservation? Like the pressures wrought by geopolitical concerns, the contradictory and problematic notion of apolitical conservation also makes possible the imposition of wilderness and the justification for the exclusive regimes of conservation. The production of nature in Dolpo as a wilderness through the contradictory logics of geopolitics and the depoliticization of conservation, and the associated representations of Dolpo and the Dolpopas, collectively define what I call “seeing like a conservationist.” Importantly, seeing like a conservationist not only allows the production of nature in certain ways and the justification of state interventions, but also denies the agency of the Dolpopas and erases their complex ontologies and governance practices. Examples of the first effect has been extensively explored in diverse contexts, particularly through Marxian critiques that often frame conservation as enclosures and primitive accumulation. However, as

Ybarra (2018) argues, such critiques implicitly accept that the settler colonial projects of alienation is settled and that it “might call for reparation, but it does not call for decolonization”

(53). Although I am not exploring the Nepal state as a settler colonial state, the analytical call for decolonization is worth examining. For the rest of the chapter thus, I explore and discuss some of the conceptions of nature among the Dolpopas in Dho Tarap and Phoksundo and their governance practices, both historical and emergent.

3. Indigenous environmental governance

Dolpo has historically been an agro-pastoral society. The term “agro-pastoralism” refers to a subsistence mode of production in which “both animal husbandry and agriculture play major roles in economic and cultural life” (Bauer, 2004, p. 11; Goldstein, 1975). Although subsistence in Dolpo historically consisted of diverse modes of production including the lucrative trans-

Himalayan trade, labor, and a host of crafts, the synergy between agriculture and pastoralism

(alongside yartsagunbu) remains the economic mainstay even today. Social and environmental governance have thus centered around agriculture and pastoralism through a range of social institutions, regulations, and practices that outline the management of both farm and off-farm activities. While rhetorics of conservation and development like to sound alarm bells regarding conservation and development crises in the Himalayas and the inadequacy of local management practices, research in northern Nepal have documented local economic organizations, territorial sealing and resource governance, both religious and secular (Bauer, 2004; Huber, 2004; von

Fürer-Heimendorf, 1975).

This section discusses two interrelated regulations governing agriculture and pastoralism in Dho Tarap valley which are, like the bstan skor ritual, increasingly bypassed and erased by the regimes of conservation (and democracy). Although I discuss two specific agrarian and pastoral regulations here, it should be noted that they are only a part of much larger systems of territorial governance across the Himalayas and in Tibet that often go under the broad umbrella of ri rgya klung rgya sdom pa or “Sealing the Hills and Valleys” (Huber, 2004). In Dho Tarap, they are called ri klung sdom pa. Toni Huber (2004) has suggested that these “sealing” regulations can be traced from at least the 12th century to until the 1950s in Tibet (p. 128). Further, Huber (2004) shows that territorial sealing had a number of applications, both religious and lay (although the

boundary between the two is blurred in the Tibetan and Himalayan contexts). These include primarily the prohibition of hunting and fishing, to close off sacred mountains (gnas ri), as well as to appease territorial deities who dwell in the mountains, rivers, springs and the subsoil by preventing extraction of resources or ritual pollution by humans. They were also associated with lay practices of regulating the access, maintenance and use of common resources such as grazing, timber, fuel, hunting and gathering (Huber, 2004, p. 142).

In this article, I am particularly interested in the second application, which Huber (2004) seems to relegate to places that are peripheral to the authority of the central government in Lhasa where “political control and law and order [were] fragmented and localized” (p. 142). Huber

(2004) also suggests that these regulations have largely disappeared since the 1950s (p. 128).

However, while Dolpo is perhaps further than any of the places in Tibet that he was referring to as peripheral to Lhasa government, these “sealing” regulations are still widely practiced vis-à-vis

Nepali state structures of conservation and democracy. Hence, these regulations are not static bodies of archaic knowledges but rather a dynamic set of practices that inform socioenvironmental governance in the village, both historically and today. Through a survey of regulations related to sealing hills and valleys, Huber (2004) states that such regulations were often enforced through divine means such as respect for the religious and political authority of a

Lama or monastic institution, as well as through evoking the malevolent powers of wrathful deities. They were also enforced by state authorities and lay officials through specific state legislative acts and codes. Moreover, Huber (2004) argues that the territorial sealing “do entail, in some fundamental way, a claim upon or control over territory, whether temporary or permanent, plus the intent and ability of its enforcement” (139).

Below, I briefly discuss two interrelated regulations, skya khrims and sngo khrims, that when “sealed” (bsdoms pa), govern social life and resource use in the valley and mountains respectively.

3.1. skya khrims: Sealing the valley

Even though Dho Tarap is located at an altitude of 4200 meters above sea level in an arid landscape, agriculture is a major part of the local economy. The primary crop is barley, although small quantities of mustard seed as well as tubers such as potatoes, radish and turnip are also grown. Given the high altitude geography and its climate in the rain shadow of the massive

Dhaulagiri range to the southeast, there is only one crop cycle lasting for about four months between mid-May to mid-September. Barley is both a food crop, mostly consumed as the local staple Tsampa or fermented into beer (chang) and liquor (arak), as well as a “cash” crop, exchanged traditionally with salt in Tibet and buckwheat and millet in lowland Nepal. Indeed,

Dho Tarap is known for its barley both in the region and across the border in Tibet. Often described as smug khra shig shig (tanned and dazzling), barley from the valley received a higher exchange rate than all other grains from the region in the traditional salt-grain barter trade with

Drogpas (nomads) across the border in Tibet. Despite the fact that the salt-grain barter trade has now transformed into a cash based commodity market, particularly with the advent of yartsagunbu economy, barley still retains its value as the primary source of livelihood. Given the livelihood value of barley, Dho Tarap residents often treat it as a norbu or jewel which is why regulations regarding the cultivation of barley are central to local governance.

The body of regulations regarding the governance of cultivated land are called skya khrims (agricultural regulations) which “seals” (sdom pa) the valley from May, when the fields

are cultivated until September, when the ripened barley is harvested. This set of regulations contains a range of rules and enforcement mechanisms that govern the conduct of social life, livestock mobility, cultivation, irrigation, weeding, and harvest. When they come into effect, the entire valley is sealed from a range of activities. The particulars of the rules might vary from year to year such as the amount of fines per livestock but the general rules have changed little despite the influence of state governance mechanisms. These general rules, along with sngo khrims

(pastoral regulations), are written down in meeting minutes, signed by the headman of the village and other local leaders, and folded into a small package called chad tshes. The chad tshes is passed from household (grong pa) to household in turn for enforcement until the completion of the harvest when the regulation expires.

The general rules include the regulation of livestock and social life in the valley.

Regarding livestock, it is mandatory that villagers move all livestock to designated pastures by a specific date. The rules regarding the conduct of social life include prohibitions of gambling, cremating (water or sky burial is thus more popular during this season) and shouting, among others. Along with other regulations in the valley which were often mandated by the King of Lo prior to the 1950s, the second set of regulations regarding social behavior seems to have been strictly enforced before the 1950s. Today, they are rarely enforced although elders still talk about and make references to them when discussing the sealing regulations. The regulation also outlines specific fines for transgressing the rules, particularly for different categories of livestock

(sheep and goats, cows and dzos, yaks and horses) that stray into the fields.

The enforcement is done through the chad tshes. When a household gets the chad tshes letter, it is responsible and accountable for guarding the valley for the day before passing on to the other household to guard for the next day. If a violation occurs, the household in-charge has

the authority to levy fines according to the regulation. The household is held accountable both by allowing them the incentive to keep half of the fines to themselves, as well as by holding them answerable when they fail to guard the field during their designated date.

3.2. sngo khrims: Sealing the mountains

In addition to agriculture, pastoralism is a major part of the economy in Dho Tarap. Until recently, almost every household owned livestock such as sheep and goats, cows, yaks and horses. Goats and yaks were the Himalayan “beasts of burden” that facilitated the lucrative trans-

Himalayan barter trade between Dolpopas and Tibetan nomads, as well as with the Tijironbas or lowlanders. The agility of goats and their ability to withstand higher temperatures allowed the

Dolpopas to travel deep into the south and trade in lowland Nepal, whereas yak caravans and horses were used to trade across the border in Tibet. With the boom of the yartsagunbu economy in the last two decades, many households have sold their other livestock and kept or bought more yaks and horses. Despite these transformations, pastoralism is still an important part of the economy and many families still rely on it. Livestock are kept not only for trade, dairy and meat products but also to produce manure for the farms and for fuel. Given the prominence of pastoralism in the local economy, the “sealing” regulations also apply to the mountains which are considered commons, specifically to govern aspects of pastoral life and use of common resources. Given the importance of grasses as the primary resource, these regulations are also called sngo khrims (pastoral regulations) in Dho Tarap. Sngo khrims can be literally translated as

“rules regarding plants” which includes grasses, chives, and other wild plants that Dolpopas utilize. The regulation specifically “seals” the mountains beginning from the cultivation of the

fields until harvest during which cutting grasses and other wild plants such as mountain chives, sea-buck thorns, et cetera are strictly prohibited.

Additionally, the regulation also encompasses the conventions regarding the use and sharing of animal enclosures (lhas), summer and winter grazing lands (gyar sa dang dgun sa), division of pastures and grasses, and division of manures and fuel dung from sheep, goats and yaks. The rules regarding the “sealing” of mountains are mostly oral. They are often contested, communicated, enforced through local sayings and proverbs. The most common proverb that governs the use of common resources in the mountains is ri spyi ri rtswa bgos rtswa which can be translated as “Mountain, the common property; grass, the divided resource,” or shortened as:

“Mountains are commons, grasses are divided.” I heard this saying most recently in the summer of 2019 when interviewing Dawa Phuntsok, a resident of Dho village, about the management of a winter grassland in Lang village where we were collecting yartsagunbu. According to him, the phrase refers to the rules regarding access to resources in common lands. He evoked the phrase to argue that, “just because the mountains are commons doesn’t mean you can use the resources however and whenever you want.” Instead, he suggested that there are many rules regarding when to access the resources such as the winter grazing land we were sitting on. For example,

Dho villagers who were camped just below the winter pasture at Te Lumo to collect yartsagunbu were not allowed to graze their horses and yaks in the winter grazing land. They were allowed to graze only in specific areas, particularly north-facing pastures that remain snow-covered in the winter. This saying captures the broad ideas of sngo khrims that regulate the use of common resources and is often evoked when disputes occur regarding the (mis)use of the commons.

Although mountains are considered commons, the use and governance of common resources are

strictly regulated and enforced through the sngo khrims unlike the scenarios of unregulated chaos presented by Garret Hardin’s (1968) infamous “tragedy of the commons” thesis.

As the title of this article goes, mountains are commons but the resources are divided among households and between different villages within the Dho Tarap valley. They include grasses that villagers cut and store for winter from grasslands, grasses in summer or winter grazing areas, animal enclosures in the mountains, manure and fuel dung from the mountains and animal enclosures, and more recently yartsagunbu from the pastures where they grow. In order to obtain access to these resources, a household should hold membership to the community which entails becoming a patron to one of the two village monasteries (sphyi dgon) as well as to one of the seven community monasteries (sde dgon) in the valley. As seen in the context of the bstan skor ritual too, monasteries were the apex social(rather than solely religious) institutions in

Dolpo. In addition to upholding membership to the village and community monasteries, households are also required to participate in mandatory community rituals such as bstan skor, provide volunteer labor as required by the community, make obligatory prostrations and offerings to the monasteries (which were treated as local equivalent of tax), and follow the local regulations.

Meeting all the inclusion criteria and upholding membership to the community alone do not guarantee free access to the common resources. Moreover, access to common resources is relational and contested. First, common resources such as grazing lands are divided between villages and among households on a rotating basis through lotteries (rgyan). Households can negotiate their outcomes but the general principle of rotational division is to ensure equitable access to resources over a longer period. The use of rgyan is also popular in other aspects of governing common resources, such as irrigation water (Jest et al., 2000), pastures and animal

enclosures (Bauer, 2004), collection of manures and fuel dungs, among others. Disputes are not uncommon though. Indeed, while I write this article (May 2020), Dho and Tokyu villages are disputing the use of a grazing land. Partly fueled by Tokyu residents’ alleged failure to respect

COVID-19 quarantine regulation, Dho residents have accused Tokyu of grazing in its pastures without permission and threatened to levy penalties. Such disputes regarding the use of common resources within the valley, particularly between Dho and Tokyu are quite common and are mostly resolved through local mechanisms.

4. Political ontology

Ontological turn’s engagement with indigeneity and alterity, particularly the works of

Viveiros de Castro and Philip Descola in anthropology, have been critiqued on several fronts. In particular, the tendency to fixate on ideas of ontology as “bounded and knowable wholes” have rendered their work highly apolitical as they obscure the ongoing processes of colonialism, extraction, violence and dispossession (Yeh, 2017, p. 147). Additionally, their focus on and insistence of radical difference run the risks of romanticizing some essentialised Others.

Therefore, any engagements with ontology that take radical difference seriously while accounting for ongoing process of colonization, capitalism, extraction, and dispossession should foreground both politics and critiques.

This is a direction that works in “political ontology” takes up (Blaser, 2009, 2014; de la

Cadena, 2015; Sundberg, 2014). “Political ontology”, to quote Mario Blaser (2009), “recast[s] political economy and political ecology’s traditional concerns with power and conflict in light of the notion of multiple ontologies that is emerging from ethnographic works on indigenous ontologies and scientific practices” (p. 11). Put differently, political ontology simultaneously

implies political commitments to the “partially connected unfolding of worlds” and a modality of critique that is concerned with “reality-making” as multiple ontologies interact with each other

(Blaser, 2014, p. 55). The task in political ontology—which this article attempts to pursue— thus is not to explore the existence of multiple ontologies that are hermetically sealed-off from each other but rather how they interact, co-exist, and struggle with each other and through processes including of capitalist extraction, colonial projects of conservation, and more (Yeh, 2017, p.

148).

4.1. bstan skor: A ritual to bring rain and harvest

On July 16, 2019, the eve of the full moon of the fourth month of Tibetan calendar (the holiest day of the year, saga dawa chespa chonga, for Tibetan Buddhists), all residents of Dho

Tarap halted yartsagunbu collection in the pastures and descended down to the valley. The local government had prohibited yartsagunbu collection for five days in order to perform communal rituals to propitiate nagas or water deities (klu) and territorial deities (lha and gzhi bdag) for rain, harvest and overall well-being (harmony) of humans and nonhumans in the valley. This ritual and the following discussions on indigenous governance practices, legends and founding myths of the sacred geographies, illustrates the Dolpopa conceptions of nature as not only inseparable from but also more than human. In particular, Dolpopas believe that there are a host of nonhumans that cohabit the earth with us, such as lha, klu, and gzhi bdag.

When humans disrespect and disrupt these nonhumans through pollution, unsustainable extraction of resources, and failure to conduct proper rituals to propitiate them, they respond through multiple ways including bringing disasters like drought, floods, illness, loss of crop and livestock, and hunger. Thus, restoring relationships with the nonhumans is of central imperative

for the Dolpopas, not least for sustaining their resource dependence on nature. This section will chronicle a bstan skor ritual, which is one of several rituals conducted to restore relationships with the nonhumans, to discuss the continuum of resource- and relationship-based practices within indigenous environmental governance in Dho Tarap valley, Dolpo. Bstan skor can be translated as “the circumambulation of the Tengyur (the commentarial canon which are the

Tibetan translations of early Indian commentaries to Buddha’s teachings).” Bstan skor is conducted by carrying the Tengyur texts on the backs and circumambulating the entire village.

Dho Tarap valley constitutes ten villages but has been historically subdivided into three territorial clusters for local governance: Dho, Tokyu, and Lang. Although they collectively decide the occasion for communal rituals, they perform the rituals separately. I followed the rituals in Dho in summer 2019, not only because it is my home village but also because the ritual in Dho is considered the biggest and most elaborate in the valley. The valley comprises dozens of vast pastures within its traditional territory where yartsagunbu grows. The majority of the Dho and Lang residents camp out seasonally at a river delta called Te Lumo, which is about five- hours trek at local pace from Dho, and an hour away from Lang. The rest of the residents camp out at a pasture called Sho Ru, which is about the same distance but across a high altitude mountain pass. Travel time to these locations has been recently cut short by the construction of biking trails which are frequently plied by motorbikes brought from China. These two locations are strategic sites to access some of the ‘best’ pastures for yartsagunbu in the entire valley, which have thus been restricted for harvesters from outside the valley since 2014 (see Chapter 1). The restriction of outsiders to these two pastures have made community governance in the pastures convenient.

Just two days earlier, five elected local leaders gathered at the far edge of Te Lumo, away from the noise of the camp ground and overlooking the confluence of two streams below. They discussed the impending dry weather while concurring on their observations of the unusually dry texture of the pastures, the delayed yartsagunbu growth, and the dark blue cloudless sky. After a brief discussion, they proceeded to decide on the customary course of action: the Bstan skor ritual, a historical and customary ritual performed every year to address adverse weather conditions like untimely rainfall, crop failure, frost and hail. They went from tent to tent in Te

Lumo and arranged for someone to ride a horse overnight to Sho Ru to inform everyone about the decision. Everyone was required to halt the collection of yartsagunbu for five days, and each household was required to send a person to the valley to participate in the communal ritual on the full moon day and to work on constructing a trail as part of the local government’s infrastructure development initiatives for the remaining four days.

However, the head lama of the village had refused to preside over the rituals on the grounds that the abbot of the village monastery had disregarded his role on both sacred and secular matters relating to the administration of the monastery. But the abbot was away in

Taiwan where he is mostly based and rarely resided in the village, an absence that spurred further criticism from the locals. This uneasy relationship between the lama and abbot was not recent, but this year the lama had taken a stern position not to officiate any communal rituals unless the villagers looked into the matter seriously. For a long time, the local leaders had chosen to ignore the conflict so as not to dismay either of the two, a position they would not change on this occasion either. However, the fate of the ritual about to take place in two days loomed uncertainly. Long and heated discussions ensued but no resolution appeared in sight.

Finally, to everyone’s surprise, the head lama from the Bon community offered to preside over the ritual under the condition that it was performed in the Bon tradition. This came as a surprise because the ritual had only been presided over by the village Lama and performed in the

Buddhist tradition for a long time; a handover to Bon tradition would be an unprecedented event.

After a brief but cracking silence, someone in the crowd finally spoke up, “If you are up for it, we will follow; for us, Bon and Buddhism are equal and one.” Others followed, and they eventually decided that the ritual would take place in the Bon tradition. Although this was an unprecedented event in the context of the ritual, it is by no means unusual. After all, these nonhumans, particularly lha, klu and gzhi dag, that have influenced both Buddhism and Bon today predate them and have origins in pre-Buddhist animist religions that Stein (1989) calls “the nameless religion.” Despite their distinct ritual practices, institutions and philosophy, and claims by their practitioners such as the Bonpo Lama that they are distinct from each other, residents in the valley treat Bon and Buddhism as commensurate to each other. Many Bon and Buddhist rituals are conducted alongside each other, although never together. Indeed, Bon and Buddhism have cross-assimilated into each other to the point that Bon has been recognized as one of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

On the morning of the full moon day, Dho village, which had been a ghost town just two weeks prior when I arrived from Kathmandu, returned to life as rays of smoke from chimneys spiraled into the crisp morning air, shining against the clear blue sky sunrise. Villagers were summoned to convene at 8 am at Shipchok Bon Monastery to conduct the Bstan skor ritual.

Shipchok village, which has about ten households, is the only Bon village. However, the Bon monastery has patrons throughout the valley making a sizeable Bon community of about thirty households. I struggled out of bed around 7 am, and after having breakfast that my sister had

kindly prepared, I headed out towards Shipchok. But no one was out yet. I ran into a group of young men who were repairing a motorbike who laughed at my punctuality and asked me instead to join them for some morning drinks. We had spent a full hour hanging out before I managed to insist that everyone should leave for the ritual. By the time we reached Shipchok around 9:30 am, there were only a handful of men gathered (only men participate in the ritual although women are not forbidden). Others gradually showed up. The ritual started only around 10:30 am, two and half hours after the scheduled time, which is not unusual but the norm in Nepal.

Once inside the monastery, participants carefully removed texts of the Bon Kangyur, wrapped in traditional wooden covers and yellow cloths, from the shelves. Each person stacked together 2-5 texts, tied with yak hair ropes, and carried them on their backs. Before setting out, the monks read specific prayers from the texts, accompanied by ritual music and juniper incense.

Elder people, women, and children waited outside in queues to receive blessings, which they realized by touching their heads against the left end of the texts (right in the Buddhist tradition).

Ritual music, prayers and chants by the monks joined the rhythmic shouts and whistles of the laymen who collectively invite rain, fortune (g.yang), health and harvest. The entourage set out in anti-clockwise direction, following the Bon tradition of circumambulation, encircling the cultivated land of the entire valley.

The circumambulation took about four hours including multiple stops along the way to perform specific prayers and make offerings to nagas near water springs and to territorial deities at specific landmarks. Along the way, villagers welcome the entourage with offerings of food and drinks, and bow their head to touch the texts in gestures of obtaining blessings. The ritual comprises several sub-rituals, specifically those that propitiate nonhuman entities such as nagas and territorial deities. When the ritual ended with the completion of the circumambulation of the

valley around 2:30 pm, dark clouds hovered over us. It soon started to drizzle for the first time in months. Everyone rejoiced in the immediate prospect of rain, yet again reaffirming their collective belief in the power of the ritual to restore relationships with the nonhumans who reciprocated with the rain. Everyone left Shipchok in a rush, most riding on motorbikes or horses down the valley before the rain turned into a downpour!

During and after the ritual, I sat down with several of the participants to talk about how they interpret the ritual. Lama Rigzin, who was presiding over the ritual, explained that the ritual is a historical tradition to invoke rain when the spring weather fails and crops begin to wither. It involves the unveiling and circumambulation of Buddhist (Bon this year) scriptures, offerings to propitiate klu, and chod practice to pacify territorial deities in order to solicit rain and blessings.

The central focus here are the nagas or klu who inhabit water bodies and sway rainfall. When you propitiate klu, it brings timely rainfall and the ground water springs flourish. When you disregard klu through pollution, over extraction, or not conducting the obligatory rituals, he added, they move away to other places causing less rainfall and the existing water springs to dry up. This further erodes forms of life through causing disease, crop failures, hunger, and conflict.

Lama Dhargye, who was the village head lama in the Buddhist tradition, provided a detailed explanation of the history, meaning, and significance of the ritual. He traces the history of the ritual to the founding of the village monastery, Ribumpa, which was consecrated by

Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche himself in the eighth century. According to legends, Guru

Rinpoche passed through the valley in his pursuit of several demonesses who fled from Mustang.

After taming one of the demonesses in Dho Tarap, he marked the sacred geography of Dho by consecrating three vessels (bumpa) around the valley where body parts of the demoness are believed to be buried. Additionally, Dhargye added that Guru Rinpoche, and accomplished

Lamas subsequent to him, had tamed the malevolent territorial deities (sa bdag and gzhi bdag) who were bounded in a sort of sacred contract (bdam la dam pa) whereby they would not bring any harm to humans. According to this interpretation, routine rituals such as bstan skor are conducted as reminders of this divine contract to the nagas and territorial deities.

Dhargye argued that the sacred geography of Dho Tarap consecrated by Guru Rinpoche and his taming of malevolent deities together offer the valley protection from hail and frost, disease and hunger. However, it is believed that the protection only extends to territories and land whose owners/users uphold membership to Ribumpa, the village monastery of Dho. Locals claim that a stark line of hail and rain can be observed at the border of fields marking Dho and

Tokyu lands near a place called Ramjo because Tokyu village make offerings to a different village monastery called Jampa Gonpa. The village monasteries are the central social and political institutions governing the valley. Thus, though seemingly divine and mystical, these rituals and the material consequences they entail are highly political in nature, as discussed below.

Dhargye’s explanation of the meaning and significance of the ritual was based on

Buddha’s “sublime teachings” (dam p’I lha chos) but has significantly different interpretations, specifically in light of its “mundane concerns” (‘jig rten mi chos). He alluded to Buddha’s differentiation of disciples into three levels: the advanced (rabs) who access the teachings through hearing (thos), contemplation (bsam) and meditation (sgom); the intermediate (dring) who access through reading (klok ‘don) and admiration (rjes su yi rang); and the beginner

(mtha’) who access through sight (mthong), sound/hearing (thos), and touch/contact (reg).

According to him, sentient beings (sems can) in the three lower realms (animals, hungry ghost, and hell beings) fall under the beginner category. In particular, klu which belongs to the animal

realm (often embodied by snakes, frogs, and fish), and gzhi bdag which are considered hungry ghosts, access the teachings through sight, sound, and touch.

In the context of the ritual, Dhargye suggested that plants can be considered a form of sentient being (sems can) although it contradicts the conventional Buddhist view. Sentient beings, in the Buddhist conceptualization, are endowed with consciousness (shes pa) defined as

“clear and knowing” or cognition (gsal zhing rig pa). Plants are not considered sentient in this sense. However, Dhargye insisted that plants are equally capable of benefiting from Buddha’s teachings in the context of the ritual which specifically seeks to nourish them through not only physical factors like rainfall but also through the blessings of the Buddha.

The Bstan skor ritual, which engages the sight, ritual sound and physical contact with scriptures, thus specifically appeals to plants and sentient beings of the lower realms. It offers an occasion to “free” themselves from worldly sufferings. In contrast to the Buddhist conception of

Samsara (‘khor ba), the sufferings Dhargye was referring to are immediate and material: drought, frost and hail, hunger and disease, among others. While the causes of suffering in

Buddhism are attributed to the three root poisons (anger, ignorance, and clinging), the sufferings in this ritual are rooted in disturbance of the nonhumans by humans (contents) in nature

(container) caused primarily through failure to properly conduct rituals to propitiate the nagas and territorial deities. Plants, although considered a part of the container (Yeh, 2017, p. 148), are akin to the sentient nonhumans and can equally benefit from the ritual in this context. Moreover, as stated earlier, Dhargye’s interpretation of these “mundane concerns” (‘jig rten mi chos) marks a clear distinction from the “sublime teachings” (dam p’I lha chos) of Buddhism.

Gyurmey, one of the householder Bonpo monks, noted that the ritual also offers an occasion for the community members to make offerings and obtain blessings. Although

traditionally voluntary, the offerings of food, refreshments and other expenses were organized by the local government this year. Gyurmey added that in addition to the ritual, key to the fruition of its intended goals are peoples’ faith in the ritual and collective prayers. More importantly, he explained that the path of the circumambulation should strictly follow the edges of agricultural fields, stupas, monasteries, mani walls and other directional markings within the cultivated territories of Dho village. Similar to how the partial protection against hail and frost extended by the village monastery works, bstan skor marks and reaffirms notions of territoriality in Dolpo and sheds light on the political nature of the ritual. Membership to the community and recognition of territoriality is organized around a patron-priest relationship in which a household is required to holds dual membership to a village monastery, as well as to the larger community monastery.

Material contributions in the forms of donations and labor, and participation in rituals including bstan skor are obligatory to hold membership in the monasteries, and by extension the community. These social memberships further affirm the inclusion of one’s land into the communal territory, which entails the benefits of protection to one’s crop from natural hazards like irregular weather, frost and hail, as well as human caused risks like stray livestock. While the performance of this ritual is aimed to seek protection from natural hazards, the community also enforces various social regulations to mitigate human caused hazards to crops such as skya khrims (agricultural regulations) and sngo khrims (pasture regulations) described before.

Monasteries have long been the apex social, religious and political institutions around which politics and economy are organized in Dolpo. Thus, they are also the institutions through which environmental regulations and governance are framed and enforced (section 3). Hence, it is not

surprising that there are nine functioning monasteries within Dho Tarap valley that date back to over six hundred years.

Another Dhargye, one of the lay participants, said the immediate reason he came to perform the ritual was the extended dry weather, delayed green-up, and decrease/delay in yartsagunbu growth. Temba, who is the chairman of the current local government, was concerned more with the paradoxes of changing traditions and relations of production. In concert with the spirit of Saga dawa, the fourth month of Tibetan calendar, which is traditionally dedicated to accumulating merit, Temba underscored the need for environmental protection amidst the “gold rush” triggered by the boom of yartsagunbu economy. Yartsagunbu season coincides with Saga dawa. “Due to yartsagunbu and influx of thousands of people, Saga dawa has become no different from Dashain (the major Hindu festival when animal sacrifice is rampant),” he added. He went on to link the failure of yartsagunbu harvesters to respect these relationships with nonhumans to environmental degradation, symbolized in the context by the dry weather. He pointed out that several non-local harvesters were slaughtering sheep to feast on at the very moment locals were conducting the ritual and observing Saga dawa. For him, these actions represent not only the failure of non-locals to respect local traditions but also mark a fundamental difference in ontology. Whereas non-locals view the environment in question as an inert site for resource extraction, locals find themselves inextricably tied into interdependent relationships with nonhumans who share an animate earth. Although contextual, this ontology is not unique to Dolpo but pervades much of the Himalayan and Tibetan world where the relationship between nature and beings (humans and nonhumans) is often conceived as an equilibrium of “the container and its contents” (Lama & Yeh, 2010; Yeh, 2014, 2017); or phyi snod kyi ‘jig rten dang nang bcud kyi sems can, in Tibetan.

The Bstan skor ritual demonstrates two of the key points I am making along the continuum of resource- and relationship-based approaches to indigenous environmental governance. On the one hand, it represents a collective performance of the broader, interdependent relationships between humans and nonhumans in animate nature. On the other, it can be read as an immanent critique of political economy that is at once historical and emergent.

In terms of relationships, the ritual symbolizes the imperatives of human respect for and interdependence with nonhumans who inhabit— and own— the environment. Nature is not an inert, passive provider of resources. Rather it is constituted by human and nonhuman ‘contents’, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Moreover, the conception of nature illustrated here is one of respect and subsistence rather than dominance and accumulation. Indigenous environmental governance in Dolpo, at least in its relationship-based approaches, thus “account for agency of nonhumans and the maintenance of relationships with them”(Carroll, 2015, p. 8).

These modes of relationships, as demonstrated above, are collective, span myriads of nonhuman beings, and are oriented towards fostering more life in place.

In terms of resources, the ritual is at its core material as has been noted above.

Specifically, it is tied to land and other means of production. The ritual is usually conducted in

June, several weeks after residents have finished cultivating barley and when the anticipation for the much awaited monsoon in this arid Himalayan rain shadow turns pressing. The ritual invokes more life and abundance in the valley not just through rain, but also through enriching groundwater bodies. Rain, and water in general, is linked to the well-being of not just humans but also nonhumans like nagas and territorial deities, who are all in turn interdependent on each other. Rain and plentiful water on earth also means abundance of life: crops, herbs, plants, and livestock.

Ethically, this ritual echoes what Glenn Coulthard calls “place-based ethics of reciprocity” in which “humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes …

And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time”

(Coulthard, 2010, p. 80). As Dhargye remarked, Dolpopas more recently draw connections between the health and availability of yartsagunbu to the maintenance of these relationships.

Moreover, the ritual enacts a local theory and practice of territory that is centered around not only the performance of social membership and obligation to the political institutions of monasteries but also involves the renewal and maintenance of relationships with nonhumans in nature. In addition to better harvest and livestock production, the ritual also invokes abundant production of non-domestic products like fodder, berries, medicinal plants, and moreover, yartsagunbu. In particular, the decision to halt the collection of yartsagunbu to conduct this ritual is tied, not opposed, to the residents’ wish to collect sufficient yartsagunbu. In that moment, it all depended on rain and environmental well-being. Moreover, the ritual, although historical and customary to the valley for a long time, nevertheless does not operate outside government control. The fact that democratically elected local government had organized the ritual, which was also conducted this year in the Bon tradition, shows that the ritual is constantly changing and shaped by broader political and economic forces.

4.2. Founding myths, sacred geographies and reverse conservation

This final section discusses legends and founding myths that animate the sacred geographies of Dolpo. I focus on Tsho village in Phoksundo, the settlement on the shore of

Phoksundo lake where it drains out. There are multiple versions of the legends of the lake

depending on who you ask and whether they are adherents of Bon or Buddhism. I follow the version told to me by Lodroe Lama, a resident Bonpo monk in the village monastery. Moreover, these legends have also been subjects of several anthropological and religious studies on the region all of which explore in depth the “Bon Landscapes” of Tsho and Pugmo villages in

Phoksundo, particularly the histories and social meanings of mountain cults and territorial deities

(Hazod, 1996; Kind, 2002, 2012; Schicklgruber, 1996). These works have already elaborated in depth the histories of the legends, so I won’t describe them in detail here.

Similar to the bstan skor ritual, my intention is to briefly analyze these legends that animate the sacred geographies of the region as an important part of Dolpopa ontologies with implications for how Dolpopas understand nature and why they are inseparable from historical and emergent practices of indigenous environmental governance in the region. I also show the ways in which these ontological positions and governance practices they inform emerge as

“reverse conservation” that serve to critique “Western” conservation from the perspectives of the

Dolpopas while at the same time advancing Dolpopa notions of “conservation” (although they never frame it that way) in their own terms and that are rooted in their ontologies. In doing so however, I do not intend to assert a unique and singular Dolpopa ontology. Instead, this analysis builds on the works of Tibetologists who have analyzed the political significance of mountain cults (Karmay, 1996), sealing regulations (Huber, 2004), and political ecology of geopiety in the

Tibetan contexts (Coggins & Hutchinson, 2006).

Tsho village was a ghost town in early June when people were still in the pastures collecting yartsagunbu. Lodroe Lama was one of the only few who were still in the village. He resides in the village monastery, Thasung Tsholing, about ten minutes’ walk from the village.

When my friend Tashi and I strolled past the monastery which is located on a rocky cliff that

sharply drops into the turquoise blue lake below for an afternoon walk, Lodroe Lama invited us over for tea. We sat on a green lawn overlooking the lake and ended up having a long conversation on the history of the lake, mountain deities and the monastery. He argued that the social history of Tsho village is incomplete without the history of the monastery, which is further entangled with the legend of the lake and the origin of the village. He claimed that Thasung

Tsholing monastery was established 600 years ago, a timeline that was also mentioned by Hazod

(1996) and Kind (2012, 2002).

Although the monastery should be understood within the broader context of Bon tradition as a scion of the famous Samling Bon monastery in Dolpo which in turn is an offspring of klu brag monastery in central Tibet (Hazod, 1996, p. 92), Tsho locals often attribute the establishment of the monastery to the prohibition of hunting. It is said that, in former times, hunters would corner their game at the spot where the monastery is built, which is the last stretch of the shore before steep rocky cliffs that surround the rest of the lake. The name of Thasung

Tsholing monastery in Tibetan “mtha’ srung mtsho gling” can be translated as “protecting the edge” of the lake. Mtah’ in Tibetan also refers to trap in the context of hunting, particularly rocky cliffs where hunters corner their games using hunting dogs before killing them, and srung means protection. As the story goes, Treton Tsewang Tsultrim, the first Bonpo lama in Tsho village, established the monastery in order to prohibit hunting on the current spot, and by implication, the entire territory upon which the monastery held religious authority.

This social history of the monastery echoes Huber’s (2004) analysis of territorial sealing

(ri rgya klung rgya sdom pa) by Buddhist kings from at least the 12th century in Tibet where the monastic and religious were crucial to issuing and enforcing “sealing” regulations specifically intended to prevent hunting and fishing. Lodroe Lama stated that the enforcement of hunting in

Phoksundo was carried out by the monastery through a range of rituals to propitiate nagas and territorial deities which were intended to prevent their wrath that could lead to hail, frost, disease and hunger, as well as through punitive measures such as prostrations to the monastery and fines in the form of material offerings. From this ontological position, Lodroe Lama embarked on a critique of the national park and conservation as shallow, partial, arrogant, and grossly inefficient. Following Emily Yeh’s framework of “reverse environmentalism” that subverts the tendency to evaluate indigenous knowledges and claims from the perspective of Western environmentalism rather than from the perspective of the indigenous people themselves (Yeh,

2014, p. 195), I briefly analyze below how the imperatives of national and global conservation measures up to cultural standards and understandings of the Dolpopas.

I follow Lodroe Lama’s critiques here but I would like to underscore the fact that these critiques are also widely held among elders, as well as some youths. Further, some of the critiques also overlaps with those explored by Yeh (2014) among Tibetan environmentalists in

Kham and Amdo regions. First, Lodroe Lama argued that the imperatives of conservation advanced by the national park, which are primarily driven by material or aesthetic values of the environment and resources, are shallow and partial. This is why, he adds, the park has been complicit in allowing thousands of non-locals to collect yartsagunbu who trample and pollute the sacred mountains without regard for the nagas and the multitude of territorial deities. Moreover, he also alluded to the fact that both the hunters and conservationists are outsiders who were often hard to distinguish from each other. Besides, he added, the park separates and emphasizes only partial territories delineated by its arbitrary boundary, and privileges only certain spectacular landmarks like the lake and snow mountains, resources like forests and yartsagunbu, and wildlife like the snow leopard. This critique was further compounded by the fact that his repeated

requests to the park to support the reconstruction of the monastery was met with their response that the park is only concerned with deforestation and protection of wildlife. The ideal partial conservation that the park advances, Lodroe argues, is not only discriminatory against the expanded sacred geography and all sentient beings of the six realms but also of the local residents from their development needs.

Second, he described the principles of conservation and the attitude of the park staff as arrogant. According to his observation, the park staff came in with custom-made conservation toolkits that were based on the assumption of the entire territories as empty and dry (ri stong skam po) or wilderness (albeit a settled one). This in turn informed their attitude which is one of being burdened by the need to “protect” the environment and educate the Dolpopas regarding conservation. He finds these attitudes that conservationists and park staff impose onto the

Dolpopas and their territories particularly arrogant, especially given the complex understanding of the environment and ideas of conservation (although he did not use the term “conservation”) embodied by the history of the monastery he just elaborated. Moreover, the heavy burden of protecting the environment that conservationists personify, as Yeh (2014) argues, suggests a false separation between the environment and humans which is better conceptualized as the interdependent arising of the vessel (snod) and beings (bcud) in the Tibetan, as well as Dolpo, contexts.

Finally, Lodroe’s last critique concerned the effectiveness of conservation. Although well-intentioned, Lodroe Lama opines that “the actions of the national park do not match their words.” By this, he was specifically referring to two cases. First, he was alluding to a massive forest fire that lasted for nine days and engulfed much of the forest near the monastery in January

2017. The fire was set by hunters who fled the scene and was finally controlled when all the

residents of Tsho present in the valley fought with their bare hands. The national park staff were nowhere to be seen, either in the capacity of arresting the hunters who disappeared or to help extinguish the fire and save the forest. Second, he was pointing out the irony of conservation when it comes to collecting yartsagunbu. According to him, the national park turns a blind eye to the environmental destruction caused in the wake of yartsagunbu collection by thousands of people because their underlying logic for its justification is based solely on “money”. He shares,

“I heard they collect hundreds of thousands of rupees from yartsagunbu collectors in return for allowing them to go to the pastures.” The yartsagunbu collectors, in his observation, inadvertently “cut trees, camp in high pastures, and engage in social crimes including robbery and hunting.” These two specific cases reveal the gap between their words and actions, and speaks to the general inefficiency of the national park when it comes to “protecting” the environment.

When I asked what “conservation” looked like within Dolpopa cosmologies and understandings of nature, Lodroe Lama started narrating the legends of the lake. Phoksundo lake has been described as the deepest glacial lake in Nepal and has become a major tourist destination. However, local texts and oral histories describe the lake as a “poison lake” (dug mtso). Indeed, Lodroe Lama described that the shape of the lake resembles an outstretched skin

(dbyangs shik) of a human-like demoness (srin mo) when viewed from above. In contrast to the mountain, which is considered the domain of male spirits such as mountain deities (yul lha and gzhi bdag), the lake is considered the domain of a female spirit, usually a supine demoness (bdud mo) but also nagas (klu mo). Within Tibetan cosmology, the mountain (e.g. Kailash) and the lake

(e.g. Manasarovar) are masculine and feminine counterparts that complement each other to make up the broader sacred geography. The “cult of the lake”, to use Hazod’s phrase, should therefore

be understood as complementary to the “cult of the mountain” as much as they are opposed

(Hazod, 1996, p. 99). Hazod (1996), Kind (2012, 2002) and Schicklgruber (1996) discuss the

“cult of the mountain” in Phoksundo elsewhere in detail. Here, I only discuss the legends of the lake.

The dominant legend regarding the origin of the lake is tied to the story of one of the four demonesses who, along with her three sisters, ran away from a lake in Lo in current day Mustang to Dolpo upon hearing about the arrival of Padmasambava or Guru Rinpoche, the 8th century

Buddhist master from what is sometimes believed to be current day Swat Valley in Pakistan (ao rgyan yul), and who is known across the Himalayas and Tibet as the subduer of many demons and the propagator of Buddhism. They each set off to different parts of Dolpo (Bentsang,

Nangkong, Tarap and Phoksundo) with the intention to submerge the valleys by damming the rivers. Guru Rinpoche pursued them, killing each of them using his trident (kha khram) and dagger (phur pa). The demoness of Phoksundo was the last to be tamed, which was why the demoness had already submerged the entire village when Guru Rinpoche arrived, save for the tip of a few trees and a flag staff upon which crows and cats were sitting. He killed the demoness with his trident and drained the lake by striking the rocky dam with the dagger, which locals identify today with the smaller of the two waterfalls that comes off from the lake. Sitar Baiji, a resident of Tsho Yul who also narrated a version of the same story to me, said that if you are blessed, the trident (kha khram) can still be seen protruding from the lake when it partially freezes in the winter. He further stated that the trident will sink and the lake will overflow at the end of the universe.

Hazod (1996) argues that the story of Phoksundo lake fits the classic myths of flood and drainage widespread across the Himalayas and in Tibet proper. These stories should thus be

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understood as a local cosmogony that describe the origins of the cultivated world in which the lake was originally “primal waters” turned habitable for humans through demiurge-like act of drainage (Hazod, 1996, p. 102). Guru Rinpoche appears as the “demiurge” in this legend who is popularly associated with Buddhism and whose birth as a “lotus-born” is shrouded in mystery.

However, Lodroe Lama contest the birth and “true identity” of Guru Rinpoche from the Bon perspective as the younger son of the Bonpo Lama Dranpa Namkha. According to the Bon tradition, the water of the lake and the symbol of kha khram protruding from the lake— which is specified in the Bon tradition as the divine Juniper tree— are created by the goddess gnam phyi gung rgyal [mo] (Hazod, 1996, p. 103). While the water of the lake is considered poisonous,

Juniper is considered the divine antidote to it. Moreover, the entire lake is marked by four nagas

(klu) who inhabit the four corners with the juniper tree as its imaginary center. Lodroe Lama even pointed out to me a specific juniper tree by the lake which appeared distinct from the surrounding junipers which he believed is inhabited by one of the klu. At this point in the story,

Lodroe Lama evoked the ontology of the klu and other nonhumans to make his remarks on

“conservation” from the Bon perspective.

The environment, according to him, is conceptualized in Bon tradition as a conditioned co-production of the five elements that also constitute human bodies, and by extension, the entire universe. Explaining the environment through the metaphor of the human body, he suggested that the earth (sa) should be understood as flesh and bones, the water (chu) as blood, the fire (me) as body heat, the wind (rlung) as breathing, and the space (nam mkha’) as the emptiness within.

He emphasized that the klu is but only one of several nonhumans that inhabited— and owned

(bdag po)— the environment. If water is the domain of nagas (klu), then earth is the domain of territorial deities (sa bdag and gzhi bdag). Humans, therefore, do not own anything but are

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instead obligated to seek permission from these nonhumans through various rituals. For the nagas, the rituals include klu tor, and for the territorial deities, the rituals include sa grol

(releasing land) and bsang gsur (burning juniper incense and tsampa). Similarly, there are fire rituals like sbyin bsregs to appease the fire deities, and hanging prayer flags (rlung rta) to bless the wind. Moreover, as I have argued in the case of bstan skor, the rituals are not some mystical or symbolic performances but rather a part of everyday life with both immediate and long term material consequences. When the rituals are not properly conducted, the nonhumans take reprisals by causing drought, hunger, disease, and even death. When they are properly carried out, the nonhumans reciprocate by bringing rain, harvest, health, and abundance of life and wealth.

5. Conclusion

Lodroe Lama discussed the material implications of the legends of the lake and the nonhumans, particularly the klu, in the here and now (‘phral). These human-nonhuman associations and the conceptions of nature that they inform, I have argued, have major implications as simultaneously a critique of “Western” conservation and assertions of Dolpopa notions of “conservation” and governance. Lodroe Lama recounted two incidents on the lake that highlight some of these implications in the immediate sense. In the first incident, a group of school children from the lowlands organized a picnic on the shore of the lake. Unaware of the klu in the lake, they slaughtered a sheep for the picnic and spilled its blood into the lake. Some children reportedly saw a snake slithering through the lake near the shore where they were picnicking. Not long after, several of the children reportedly fell ill and suffered from skin diseases. In the second incident, several members of the Nepal Army unit stationed at the village

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saw a consistent apparition of a female body at the shore of the lake. Those who saw the apparition similarly fell ill. Not knowing how to remedy the peculiar illness, the predominantly

Hindu army group invited Bon monks from the village monastery including Lodroe Lama to perform rituals to treat the illness. According to Lodroe Lama, both the snakes and the apparition of the female, just like frogs and fish, were associated with klu. So they conducted the klu tor ritual to appease the klu and hopefully remedy the illnesses. Lodroe Lama claimed that the visions and illness among the soldiers disappeared ever since performing the ritual.

My purpose in this article is not to speculate about the scientific validity of nonhumans like the klu or the reliability of the Dolpopa narrators who tell these stories of nonhumans that animate their sacred geographies and who routinely participate in the human-nonhuman assemblages that emerge from them. If anything, such an urge to differentiate and dismiss the

Dolpopa subjects as “primitive” or antimodern, akin to “seeing like a conservationist”, runs the risk of purifying “culture” from “nature” (Yeh, 2009, p. 58), which according to Bruno Latour

(1993, p. 12), is but a paradoxical task that would only result in the proliferation of hybrids.

Instead, like the local story of the mtso glang pervasive on Lhasa’s Lhalu wetlands against the backdrop of competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles which Emily Yeh (2009) explores, nonhumans like klu and territorial deities (sa bdag and gzhi bdag) that I discuss here the destabilize nature/culture dualism. They also disrupt, even if momentarily, the taken-for-granted modernist premises of state-led conservation (literally militarized in this case) that projects the lake and nature as wilderness sans nonhumans and separate from humans. Likewise, they also confuse the orderly, colonial ways of “seeing like a conservationist” that dismiss and erase Dolpopas’ conceptions of nature and their governance practices as “superstitious” and defective.

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To counter these colonial ways of knowing, being, and governing nature, I have therefore provided a sketch of historical and emergent forms of indigenous environmental governance in

Dho Tarap and Phoksundo in Dolpo that account for the continuum of resource- and relationship-based practices (Carroll, 2014, 2015). These include the bstan skor ritual, agro- pastoral regulations that “seal” mountains and valleys, and legends of the Phoksundo lake and

Thasung Tsholing monastery. Taking a “political ontology” perspective, I did not treat these complex ontologies and environmental governance practices they inform as bounded, romantic, archaic or static wholes hermetically sealed-off from other, including the modern, ontologies but rather as constantly interacting, struggling, and co-existing with them as well as being shaped by broader processes including of nature conservation and resource extraction, among others. In particular, I showed that the Dolpopa ontologies in which nonhumans like klu and territorial deities inform governance practices are intensely material and highly political. Additionally, although the indigenous environmental governances I had sketched interact and mingle with state structures, they are both ontologically and historically distinct and are still practiced vis-à-vis the hegemonic governance system of conservation. Finally, following Yeh’s (2014) framework of

“reverse environmentalism”, I critiqued the imperatives of national and global conservation from the situated perspectives of the Dolpopas while at the same time making a case for an alternate notion of “conservation” that take Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices on their own terms.

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CONCLUSION

ོང་ོད་་ཡིས་དེད་ན།། ོང་ད་ད་མོ་མ་བ།། When the upper valley is flooding, The lower valley can’t afford to stare in leisure. —Dolpo saying

In the two articles above, I have provided a critical analysis of what happens when

Dolpopa ways of knowing, being and governing their land and territories interact, negotiate, and struggle with the expanding and intensifying state structures of conservation (and democracy). In so doing, I have argued in the first article that conservation materializes on the ground not only as an extractive regime of accumulation of resources but also an emergent structure of dispossession of Dolpopa governance practices. In the second article I extended this discussion to the ways in which conservation also works against Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices. At the same time, though, the second article demonstrated the robustness of Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices as they come into being and sustain themselves even as they interact, struggle, and mingle with the hegemonic regime of conservation. Together, the two articles discuss implications of the ontological, discursive and material tensions in play regarding conceptions of nature and environmental governance practices between external conservationists and Dolpopas in Dolpo. While the first article focused on resources to foreground critiques of conservation using a political ecology framework, the second article took political ontology approach to delve into alternate environmental governance practices and ontologies among the

Dolpopas that better account for their relational modes of knowing, being and governing, and that are conceived and carried out in their own terms.

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Through a brief social history of SPNP and its buffer zone, I have shown that although the imperatives of national and global conservation are implemented and justified through the rhetoric of participatory conservation in SPNP, they nevertheless serve to expand and intensify state authority in the Himalayan “margins of the state.” To begin with, this occurs through territorial enclosure of lands into the national park boundary, first through the establishment of the park itself and again through the creation of buffer zones and the rhetorics of participatory conservation linked to it. The discretionary authority of the park warden and the arbitrary manner in which he interprets and dictates conservation regulations to resident populations further complicates the rhetoric of participatory conservation. Moreover, the organization, structure and functioning of the local Buffer Zone UGs, who are held upwardly accountable and are severely constrained by the powers of the warden in their abilities to make decisions on matters concerning the governance and redistribution of revenues collected by the park, compounds the problems of (de)centralization that underlie participatory conservation.

The expansion and intensification of state authority through conservation, whether in its fortress forms or participatory guises, then have serious implications for control over and access to resources, as well as on Dolpopa ontologies and their governance practices. Focusing on and tracing the shifting and contested governance of yartsagunbu between the residents of Dho

Tarap, Maoist insurgents, and the national park, I have suggested that participatory conservation has materialized as an emergent structure of dispossession for the Dolpopas in terms of both resources and relationships. In terms of terms of resources, the incorporation of Dho Tarap and

Phoksundo into the national park territories and the promises of participatory conservation linked to this enclosure have allowed the park to claim control over the management of yartsagunbu.

Despite the resistance and contestation by residents of Dho Tarap and Phoksundo, the park has

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thus increasingly asserted its exclusive authority, even if through violence, to extract large revenues from yartsagunbu collectors. Moreover, the revenues that the park collects every year from Dho Tarap and Phoksundo from yartsagunbu and tourists, of which 30-50% is supposed to be redistributed back to the communities, barely materialize on the ground and hardly benefit the residents of either village. In order to monopolize the collection of revenues from yartsagunbu, the park has also suppressed existing management of yartsagunbu, particularly in Dho Tarap. In terms of relationships, conservation privileges and imposes certain modern conception of nature and governance structures erasing Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices that take into account the agency of nonhumans and maintenance of relationships with them.

In light of these events, Dolpopas have recently been optimistic about the ongoing processes of democratic state restructuring that seek to decentralize and devolve powers to the local level, including the collection of certain revenues from natural resources. However, I have demonstrated that the authority of the national park, which still controls the management of yartsagunbu, and the imperatives of conservation, which are still implemented through strict regulations and enforced by a militarized structure, have eclipsed any and all discussions of

“democracy” and local autonomy regarding the management of resources in areas where the jurisdictions of national parks overlap with those of local governments. In addition, my preliminary findings of the democratic state restructuring process, which is beyond the scope of this research, show that if anything it has only entrenched existing hierarchies by empowering certain people through increased access to state resources while the plight of the ordinary people remain unchanged. In this regard, I suggest that conservation and democracy run parallel forms of governance in overlapping territories both in turn marginalizing and dispossessing the

Dolpopas of their resources and indigenous governance practices, as well as their ontologies.

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Critiques are extremely important. However, when it comes to decolonizing existing structures of conservation and colonial ways of knowing, they can only go so far. That’s why I have reversed my attention towards an analysis of ontologies and place-based indigenous environmental governance in Dho Tarap and Phoksundo that account for resources but also exceed them to constitute a continuum of both resource- and relationship-based practices. To this end, I have provided a sketch of various practices in Dho Tarap and Phoksundo including a ritual to bring rain and harvest, agro-pastoral regulations that “seal” mountains and valleys, and finally, legends and origin myths that animate the sacred geographies of Dolpo. These indigenous ontologies and governance practices, I argued, disrupt the colonial regime of conservation and conception of wild nature that is separate from humans and sans nonhumans like klu and territorial deities. I depart from tendencies in post-humanist and material geographies to privilege certain secular technoscientific nonhumans as legitimate matters of inquiry by venturing into an analysis of spiritual and sacred nonhumans. In particular, the klu, lha, sa bdag, and bgzhi bdag which are often embodied by snakes, juniper trees, specific families or clans, blue sheep and snow leopards, among others, challenge human exceptionalism by not only blurring the distinctions between human-nonhuman or nature/culture but also by showing them instead to be arising in interdependence. A particular conception of nature emerges from these human- nonhuman assemblages in which nature is conceived as an equilibrium of the “vessel” (physical world) and “beings” (human and nonhuman sentient beings) (Yeh, 2014, 2017).

Ontologies are inseparable from the politics through which they are enacted. Through an analysis of rituals, agro-pastoral regulations, legends and founding myths, I have shown that above relationships with nonhumans are in turn interwoven with resource-based practices of the

Dolpopas. In a way, the relationship between humans and nonhumans like nagas and territorial

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deities enact what Glenn Coulthard (2010) calls a “place-based ethics of reciprocity” in which for example nonhumans, particularly klu, bring rain, harvest, health and life in return for properly performing rituals to propitiate them. Likewise, historical and emergent forms of agro-pastoral regulations, such as skya khrims and sngo khrims, that have long been issued and implemented in the region account for agency of nonhumans and the maintenance of relationships with them. In addition to these, I have also argued that attentions to the various legends and origin myths of the people and places that animate the sacred geographies of Dolpo can be read simultaneously as a situated critique of ‘Western’ conservation and as an unfolding of “reverse conservation” that articulates environmental concerns in their own terms and are grounded in their own ontologies.

Finally, given the hegemonic discourse of conservation and general tendencies of many engagements with indigenous people to romanticize their knowledges and ontologies, I want to be clear about the politics of this thesis and its potential interpretations. First, my analysis of the

Dolpopa ontologies and governance practices is not intended as a call to supplement existing structures of conservation with indigenous knowledges. Although attempts to integrate indigenous knowledges into wildlife management or environmental protection might create temporary illusions of agreement, they do not take radical difference seriously partly because they tend to privilege the evaluation of the former from the ideals and to the standards of the latter (Nadasdy, 2011; Yeh, 2014). Rather, following Emily Yeh (2014)’s framework of “reverse environmentalism”, I make a case for the need to acknowledge and advance historical and emergent forms of indigenous environmental governance in Dolpo that are ground in their own ontologies and are carried out in their own terms.

Second, I discuss Dolpo ontologies and their governance practices not as romantic, archaic, ahistorical and apolitical body of “knowable wholes” hermetically sealed off from other

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ontologies. Rather, I treat them as both historical and emergent, and therefore, very much a

“living tradition”. I have shown the ways in which they come into being and sustain themselves even as they interact and struggle with, for example, the modern ontology of nature/culture entailed in “seeing like a conservationist.” In other words, I have demonstrated how indigenous environmental governances in Dolpo have historically been shaped by broader political economies of and beyond the Nepal state. Relatedly, my analysis of the rituals like bstan skor and the religious-political institutions of monasteries reveal that they are at their core material and highly political, rather than solely religious or symbolic. Ultimately, I am not concerned with the scientific validity of the nonhuman entities like klu and bgzhi bdag or the reliability and doctrinal correctness of Dolpopa narrators who offer diverse interpretations of these human- nonhuman assemblages from their own situated positions, for such urges would only reinforce colonial ways of knowing. After all, it is said that the real test of knowledge is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

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APPENDICES

Appendix 1. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval letter

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Appendix 2. Verbal consent form in Tibetan

ཆོག་མཆན་ཡི་གེ

རི་ི་རི་་བགོས་། གདོད་ལ་ལ་མིའི་ཁོར་ག་དབང་འཛན་ཏེ་བ་གས་ཁོར་ང་དང་བལ་ལ་དམངས་གཙའི་ལམ་གས་ལ་ བངས་པའི་དོགས་དོད། ཉམས་ཞིབ་པ་དོལ་པོ་པ་ར་བ་དོན་བ།

ེད་མ་པ་མདོ་་རབ་བམ་ིང་་འམ་ག་མ་མདོ་ཡི་ལ་མི་ཡིན་པའམ་ཡང་ན་དར་་དན་འ་འ་མཁན། དེ་མིན་ ལ་གང་ངམ་དོལ་པོར་དར་་དན་འ་ངས་འཛན་ཐོག་འེལ་བའི་ལ་གང་ང་ོབས་ཚགས་པའི་ལས་ེད་ཡིན་པའི་་ མཚན་ིས་ངའི་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིར་མཉམ་གས་ས་ཏེ་མན་ེན་གནང་རོགས་ཞེས་་ཡི་ཡིན། ེད་ི་ས་ཚད་དང་རོགས་རམ་ལ་ གས་ེ་ཆེ་་ཡི་ཡོད། མཉམ་གས་མ་ས་གོང་ངས་ེད་མས་ལ་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་ོར་གཤམ་ི་ཚག་འགའི་ོ་ནས་་གི་ཡིན། o ངས་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་བ་ོངས་དང་དམིགས་ལ། གས་ེན་བཅས་གོ་བ་ོད་ི་ཡིན། o ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིར་གས་མིན་ནི་མི་ེར་ི་འདོད་མོས་ར་ཡིན། o ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིའི་ས་བས་གང་ང་་མཉམ་གས་ེད་མིར་འདོད་མོས་ར་ིར་འད་ས་ཆོག་པའི་རང་དབང་ཡོད། o དང་ཐོག་མཉམ་གས་ས་ང་ེས་མར་བསམ་ོར་འར་བ་བཏང་ཆོག། o ེད་ི་ཐག་གཅོད་ས་པ་གང་ལ་མ་པ་གང་ང་གི་ོ་ནས་དར་འཛན་མི་ེད། o ཐག་གཅོད་མ་ས་གོང་དང་ཡང་ན་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་ས་བས་གང་ང་་ེད་ིས་ི་བ་གང་ང་ིས་ཆོག། གལ་ིད་ེད་ལ་ི་བ་དང་སེམས་ར། དཀའ་ག་ཡང་ན་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ལས་བེད་པའི་མི་ེར་ི་གནོད་ོན་ཡོད་ན། ང་ལ་ མ་པ་གང་ང་གི་ོ་ནས་འེལ་བ་གནང་རོགས། ངའི་ཁ་པར་ཨང་ངས་ ༩༨༡ ༨༠༣ ༨༤༥༧ ༼བལ་ལ་༽ +༡ ༣༡༣ ༤༡༣ ༢༣༠༣ ༼ཨ་རི་༽ ཡང་ན་ [email protected] ལ་ཡིག་ཟམ་གཏོང་ར་འཛམ་དོགས་མེད་པ་གནང་རོགས། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིར་གང་ངོས་ནས་ཞིབ་བཤེར་དང་བར་ཞིབ་དང་ངོས་ལེན་བཅས་ས་ཡོད་ཙང་། གལ་ིད་ཉམས་ཞིབ་ཚགས་ མིར་འེལ་བ་ེད་མ་བ་པའམ་ེད་ི་ི་བ་དང་སེམས་ར་། དཀའ་ག་སོགས་ལ་འདོད་ོ་ཚམ་པའི་ལན་མ་ད་པའམ། ཡང་ན་ ཉམས་ཞིབ་ཚགས་མི་མ་ཡིན་པའི་གང་ཟག་ར་བར་ི་བ་ཡོད་པ་དང་། ཉམས་ཞིབ་ི་ེང་གཞིར་འར་བའི་ེད་ི་ཐོབ་ཐང་ཐད་ི་བ་ ཡོད་པ་དང་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིར་འེལ་བའི་གནས་ལ་གཞན་ལ་ས་ལོན་སོགས་ེད་འདོད་ཚ་ེད་མ་པས་ཁ་པར་ཨང་ངས ༣༠༣ ༧༣༥ ༣༧༠༢ ཡང་ན་ [email protected] ལ་འེལ་བ་གནང་ཆོག། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་ོར། བལ་ལ་ལ་གང་དང་ས་གནས་དོལ་པོའི་ི་ཚགས་བར་ི་རང་ང་ཐོན་ེད་དང་ེད་ག་་དར་་དན་འའི་ཐོན་ ངས་ཐད་ི་དབང་འཛན་ི་འེལ་ལམ་ཤེས་ོགས་ཡོང་ཆེད་ངས་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ེད་བཞིན་ཡོད། ེད་ི་མེན་གསལ་ར་རང་ང་

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ཐོན་ེད་དབང་འཛན་ལ་སོགས་པའི་ལ་ཁབ་ི་དབང་ཆ་ཡོངས་ོགས་་ེ་གང་དང་ས་གནས་ིད་གང་ལ་ཆ་བགོས་གཏོང་ཆེད་ བལ་ལ་ལ་གང་འདི་ད་་གང་གི་ལམ་གས་ི་ོམ་གཞི་ར་བཟོའི་ལས་རིམ་ནང་གནས་ཡོད་། ངས་ཞིབ་འག་ེད་འདོད་ཡོད་ པ་ནི། འདི་་འི་མང་གཙའི་ལམ་གས་ི་ལ་ཁབ་ི་ོམ་གཞི་ར་བཟོའི་ལས་རིམ་དེ། བལ་ལ་ལ་ཁབ་དང་ལ་ིའི་ཁོར་ང་གི་ ལས་འཆར་དང་ཇི་ར་གཅིག་ལན་གཅིག་མཛལ་ི་འེལ་བ་ཡང་གི་ཡོད་པ་དེ་ཡིན། དེ་ལས་གལ་ཆེ་བ་ཞིག་ནི་། ལས་རིམ་དེ་ཡི་ཐོག་ེད་ལ་ ཚར་བ་ཅི་ཞིག་ཡོད་པ་དང། ས་གནས་མི་དམངས་ཚས་རང་ང་ཐོན་ེན་ི་བེད་ོད་ེད་ངས་དང་དབང་འཛན་ེད་པའི་ཐོག་གི་གོ་བ་ ལེན་ངས་སོགས་ལ་ེད་ི་བསམ་འཆར་བ་ལེན་ེད་འདོད་ཡོད།ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་དམིགས་ལ་ནི་ས་གནས་ི་རང་ང་ཐོན་ེད་། དམིགས་གསལ་་དར་་དན་འའི་བེད་ོད་དང་དབང་འཛན་ེད་པའི་ོར་དོ་ང་ས་ནས་དབང་ར་ི་ིད་གང་གི་རིམ་པ་ ་མར་ིད་ས་བཟོ་བར་རམ་འདེགས་ེད་ིར་ཡིན། ཚད་བགམ་ས་པ་ར་ན་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིར་ལོ་གཅིག་ཙམ་འགོར་ིད། མི་༥༥ཙམ་ཐད་ཀར་ཞིབ་འག་འདིར་གས་པའི་རེ་བ་ བཅིངས་ཡོད་། ངས་ི་་་བ་ནས་བད་པ་ེ་་བ་གམ་རིང་དོལ་པོའི་ས་གནས་ལ་་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིའི་ལས་དོན་བབ་འཆར་ཡོད་ པ་དང་། དེ་ནས་་བ་ེས་མ་དག་ལ་ཞིབ་ིས་ཉམས་ཞིབ་ཡིག་ཐོག་་བཀོད་འི་ལས་་་ཡིན་། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདིའི་བ་འས་གང་ བེབས་པ་དེ་ཡི་ངོ་བས་གཅིག་ངས་ེད་མ་ལ་འལ་་དང་ས་གནས་དོལ་པོའི་མི་མང་དང། ལ་ཁབ་གང་། ག་མ་མདོ་དང་འ་ གནས་། ཀ་ཐ་མན་་་ཡོད་པའི་ཁོར་ག་ང་ོབས་ལས་ེད་མས་ལ་ལོགས་་ཉམས་ཞིབ་དེ་ཡི་ོར་གགས་མཐོང་བན་པར་ཞིག་ ང་གཟིགས་འལ་་་ཡིན་། བད་རིམ། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་ཞིབ་འག་ེད་ངས་ལ་བད་རིམ་ཁ་ཤས་ཞིག་ཡོད། དང་པོ། ངས་ེད་མས་ལ་ཨིན་ད་འམ་ནེ་ཱ་ལི་ ད་ཐོག་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་བ་ོངས་དང་དགོས་མཁོ། ཡོང་ངེས་པའི་གས་ེན་བཅས་འེལ་བོད་ེད་་ཡིན། ངས་ེད་མས་ མཉམ་གས་ེད་འདོད་ཡོད་མེད་ངག་ཐོག་ནས་ང་མཆོག་མཆན་་་ཡིན། གལ་ིད་ེད་མས་མཉམ་གས་ེད་འདོད་མེད་ཚ་ེད་ ི་ཐག་གཅོད་ལ་བི་བར་ས་ཏེ་ངའི་ལས་གཞི་ལ་མཚམས་འཇོག་་་ཡིན། ེད་ི་ཐག་གཅོད་ི་མག་འས་ལ་བས་མི་ལེགས་པ་ གང་ཡང་མི་ཡོང་། ཡང་གལ་ིད་ེད་རང་མཉམ་གས་ེད་ར་མོས་མན་ང་ཚ་ངས་བཅར་ི་་ཡ་དང་རིགས་གཙ་བོ་ེང་་འི་ ལས་འཆར་་་ཡིན། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་བད་རིམ་གང་ང་གི་བས་་ེད་ིས་ི་བ་འི་ཆོག་ཅིང་། གལ་ཏེ་ེད་ི་བསམ་ོ་འར་ བ་ཐེབས་ན།ས་བས་གང་ང་ཞིག་ཡིན་ཡང་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ལས་ིར་འད་ས་ཆོག། བཅར་འིའི་ས་ན་ནི་་ཚད་གཅིག་ཙམ་ཡིན། བཅར་འིའི་ནང་དོན་ཇི་མ་ཇི་བཞིན་་ར་འག་ེད་འཆར་ཡོད་ཅིང་ ེས་་ཡིག་ཐོག་ལ་ཕབ་ིས་ཡིན། མི་ེར་ི་གནས་ལ་དང་ཉམས་ཞིབ་ི་ཟིན་ཐོ་མས་གནས་ལ་དེ་དག་ར་ཞིབ་ེད་མཁན་ཚ་ཡི་ བེད་ོད་དང་ིར་ོན་ེད་པར་ཚད་བཀག་བཟོ་ར་འབད་ོན་ེད་ི་ཡིན། ེད་ི་གནས་ལ་ལ་་ཞིབ་དང་འ་བས་ེད་མཁན་ ཚགས་པའི་འས་ནི་ IRB དང་དེའི་མས་ཚབ་ཚགས་པ་མས་ཡིན། ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་བས་ངོ་གས་ཆོད་པའི་གནས་ལ་བ་མི་ ཡོང་། ཡིན་ཡང་གནས་ལ་ཡོང་ོགས་གསང་བར་གནས་ངེས་པར་ངས་ཁས་ལེན་ེད་མི་བ། ེད་རང་རིགས་གཙ་བོ་ེང་ནང་མཉམ་གས་ེད་པའི་ཚ་ཡང་གནས་ལ་མས་གསང་པར་གནས་ངེས་པར་ངས་འགན་ ལེན་ེད་མི་བ། འོན་ང་གལ་ིད་ེད་ཉམས་ཞིབ་འདི་ཡི་ནང་མཉམ་གས་ེད་མཁན་གཞན་དང་ན་་རིགས་གཙ་བོ་ེང་ལམ་ གས་ནང་མཉམ་གས་ེད་པར་བདེ་པོ་མེད་ན་ེད་ིས་ིར་འད་ས་ཆོག་གོ།། གལ་ིད་ེད་ལ་ད་་ི་བ་ཡོད་ན་གངས་རོགས་གནང་།

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Appendix 3. Semi-structured interview aide-mémoire

primary (research) questions themes/concepts secondary research questions

1 Conservation and rule How are the existing policies Historical 1. What are the historical circumstances and on conservation and natural circumstances context of protected areas in Nepal in resource management and context; general, and SPNP in particular? articulated and enforced in the planning, policies 2. What are the existing conservation policies management of yartsagunbu in and discourses; and discourses relevant to yartsagunbu? Shey Phoksumdo National enforcement 3. How are the conservation policies Park (SPNP) and its buffer practices articulated and enforced, both historically zones? and in current sociopolitical context, in SPNP and its buffer zones?

2 Local politics and resource use practices

How do Dolpo residents assert local responses to 1. How do locals perceive state and national claims, negotiate deals, contest state, NP or BZ; park and/or buffer zone presence? access, and exercise control local resource 2. How do locals assert their claims and over yartsagunbu management use practices control over yartsagunbu within the in the context of the ongoing (past and ongoing democratic state restructuring state restructuring process in present); process? Nepal? assertions and 3. What are the resource use practices, both claim-makings historical and today?

3 State formation

How are state institutions State 1. What is the historical relationship between (federal, provincial, and local) restructuring; the state and the Dolpo communities? and national park officials NRM and 2. What are the ways in which the state exert responding to assertions and decentralization; control and govern yartsagunbu in SNPN resource use practices of local state formation and its buffer zones? communities in and around 3. How is the role and structure of the state SPNP? changing at ‘local’ scale within the current context of democratic state restructuring and decentralization process regarding natural resource management?

Notes

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Appendix 4. Research permit from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC), Babarmahal, Kathmandu, Nepal

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Appendix 5. Research permit from Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP), Suligad, Dolpa,

Nepal

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