Introduction

Although recent scholarship has yielded a rich literature on the impact that human activity has had on the Himalayan environment and the uses which human beings have made of it, there has been relatively little attention paid to how human beings who live and work in that part of the world understand or conceptualize it, and the implications of their cognized models of the environment for policy-making in development work.1 The authors of the collection of essays presented in this book seek to expand our knowledge of the relation between human beings and their environment by focusing on the cognized environment, and in so doing to direct attention to areas that are often ignored in the study of the Himalaya. Among Himalayan states, Nepal in particular has been consumed by the ideology of development, and scientific views (including out-dated ones) that pay little or no attention to cultural concerns in their analysis of human-environment relations have dominated policy-making by bureaucrats and development workers. For their part, anthropologists and cultural geographers working in the Himalaya have either focused their attention on issues such as ethnicity, kinship, the caste structure, shamanism, religion and the like (cf. Fisher 1985) when they were concerned about “culture,” or on the way that Himalayan societies made use of natural resources and the impact of their activities on nature when they took human-environment relations as the object of their study.