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Weathering relationships: the intra-action of people with climate in Himalayan India Heid Jerstad PhD Social Anthropology The University of Edinburgh 2016 1 2 Declaration I declare that, except where otherwise indicated, this thesis is entirely my own work, and that no part of it has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Heid Jerstad June 2016 3 Abstract Weather – cold, wet, hot and windy – pervades life, material and social. So present and obvious as to provide a challenge for research, material though ephemeral too, weather breaks boundaries and refuses categorisation. While night becomes day, the cold season warms up over weeks and annual patterns are changing on a scale of years, practices in the face of weather transitions are themselves shifting. Based on ten months of fieldwork in the small village of Gau in the Pahari Indian Himalayas this thesis interrogates the saliencies and permeations of weather in people’s lives. It investigates how people intra-act (Barad 2007) with the weather, though practices, infrastructures and relationships with others. My approach argues for the validity of weather as a means by which to learn about socio-material lives. Pahari villagers live and act within the weather that moves around them. They are subject to, but also modify, their thermal environment. Through housing, clothing and tools such as the fire and the fan they affect the impact of the weather as it meets their bodies, but also daily patterns of movement are coloured by weather considerations. This work views weather in relation to health practices (such as refraining from working during the rain so as not to fall ill), for care of others (such as domestic bovines), for house-building and hospitable relationship-building among neighbours, for negotiation of landslide- fraught access roads to elsewhere and for understandings of pollution in the air. This focus on weather is intended to connect dots for people working on climate change, both within and beyond anthropology, and to contribute to discussions in areas including human-animal relations, health and illness and housing. 4 Lay summary Climate change is a problem. It is a problem for people because climate is long-term weather and the weather matters to people. This thesis looks at some of the different areas in which weather matters for people’s lives, using what I learnt in a small village (Gau) in the Indian Himalayas. Cold winter rain mattered for the people in Gau because the risk of falling ill meant they might not be able to work. So this was about how they managed their households as a group of people working together and also looking after each other. But they didn’t just look after each other, they also looked after their buffalo, who they kept for milk and manure and also cared for by cooling down in the heat of the hot season. Housing was important for how people in Gau managed the heat, and also their relationships with their neighbours. Some people were building new cement houses, and these were considered less comfortable in the cold and the heat, in contrast to the older wooden houses. During the monsoon season rain would often cause landslides, blocking movement between the village and other places and affecting men’s travel for work and women’s travel to their natal villages. Pollution is a term that may be used locally or globally or even with regards to caste relationships in India, and was useful in connecting these topics back to the global question of climate change. 5 Acknowledgements The process of producing this thesis has been inspired and aided, prodded along and smoothened out by the contributions of too many people to name. I would, however, like to thank a few of them. Firstly I would like to thank the people who made the decision to grant the ESRC funding that made this research possible. Ed Simpson asked me what I would like to work on, as I had doubts about my initial project. I said ‘climate change, but I don’t know if I can do that in anthropology’ and he said ‘why not call it weather?’ I would like to thank my supervisors, Jamie Cross for challenging me and Laura Jeffery for providing a sense of stability, consistently thorough feedback and a willingness to listen to my version before suggesting where some bridging might be needed for it to make sense to others. Prem Malik from The Nordic Centre in India helped me (over several months) get the research visa which enabled this work. In many ways the biggest thanks goes to those in Gau who hosted me on trust. Those who worked with me, tolerated me, answered questions, fed me, taught me, got used to me and told me they would miss me. In particular, I would like to mention Karishma, who was my friend and guide, the elderly blind grandmother who supported me and Kali, who made time for me in her very difficult life. But really everyone who gave to me of what they knew. Two Indian anthropologists provided respite in Delhi and Dehradun – Anita Sharma who welcomed me so warmly and whose fieldwork anecdotes were always much worse than anything I was experiencing and Manjari Mehta who reminded me by her example that it is possible to be human and also do fieldwork. During writing up many people gave helpful feedback on my work. I would in particular like to mention: Louise Senior, Katka Ockova, Alessandro Rippa, Magnus Course, Jonathan Spencer, Paul Boyd and Sandarien Verstappen. A number of people made thoughtful contributions of their time and inspired me, including Claus Peter Zoller, Stephen Rayna, Koreen Reece, Jenny Love, Janet Carsten, Jane Dyson, 6 Rowland Keable and Alf Hornborg. Others have provided the support and social recognition without which I could not have made it through: Sandalia Genus, Juliette Oxford, Lauren Lee-Crane, Bren Markey, Jenny Lawy, Claire Stevenson, Ingvild Tokheim, Aglaja Kempinski, Elco Bakker, Jeppe Cavonius, Bruno Marchand, Ben Blow, Ellen Jerstad, Mari Jerstad and Lindsay Crago. Agathe Mora and Jon Schubert were there from the outset with delicious food, setting a professional standard. Luke Heslop was consistently encouraging. I would also like to thank Leila Sinclair-Bright for being a steady, sensitive presence. Thanks also to Jon Jerstad and Georgiana Keable for too much to mention, but who, for instance, never let me think there was anything I could not do. Work on other things enriched my PhD and helped me retain a sense of perspective. I would like to thank Michael Heneise and the team at the South Asianist, Louise Senior and the panel/special issue on energy, Dilshanie Perera and the ‘weathering time itself’ panel, Luke Cavenagh and others at the Scottish Government and my students on Social Anthropology 1A and 1B who kept me awake. Finally, I would like to thank the people who generously and carefully proofread the various chapters: Georgiana Keable, Bruno Bower, Claire Stevenson, Jonathan Alderman, Leila Sinclair-Bright, Louise Senior, Sandalia Genus and Stephen McConnachie. 7 Contents Declaration 3 Abstract 4 Lay summary 5 Acknowledgements 6 Glossary 11 List of figures 14 Introduction 17 Establishing climate change 19 The global and the local 22 Weather and place 24 Climatic determinism 26 Material weather 30 The politics of weather and climate change: a matter of morality 32 Thesis structure 34 Summary of chapters 37 Context and methods 41 A. The Pahari village of Gau in context 41 The region in which Gau is located 43 Paharis as villagers or tribals 45 Weather, housing and livelihood in Gau 48 Hill Hindus 52 Polygynandry and bridewealth – an unusual north Indian kinship system 57 Gau – village and fieldsite 59 B. Fieldwork methods and ethics 60 How this project came about 61 Fieldwork 61 Ethics and anonymity 64 My position as a climate change scholar 64 My gendered position, and the process of incorporation into Gau 66 Writing up, the return 70 8 Chapter 1: Cold winter rain and the risk of illness 73 The cold and my ill body 75 Poisoning in the village 78 Village wedding 81 The risk of illness and climate change 91 Chapter 2: Village work and the warmed body: fetching fodder outside 93 The cold is a problem 94 Why it is important to be healthy 96 Going for fodder 100 The household as the context for work 104 Work as a solution to the problem of the cold 109 Heating the body and climate change 110 Chapter 3: Somatic relations of substance: water buffalo in the heat 113 Three readings of the human-domestic animal relationship 116 The forest, the leopard and the care of the buffalo 119 The purpose of the buffalo, the milk of the buffalo 124 Kinship and the feeding of milk 127 The riskiness of heat on the buffalo body 133 Illness from the heat 136 The buffalo and the