Thinking through Nature in Highland Nepal

This paper is an account of populist ways of thinking through images of nature in highland Nepal. By highland Nepal I am referring more particularly to the northern central Himalaya of Nepal, and the peoples of Sindhu Palchok and Dolakha districts. ¹ The focus is not directly with people’s perception of nature or the environment as a thing in itself, but with indigenous images and models of the natural environment as used in an understanding of other people, life and society. Though the Himalaya contains a great deal of patterned variation in social and cultural, as well as biological, features, such spatial and temporal variation is not a feature of this paper. On the contrary, it is the uniform experience of hierarchical linkages to the state, and their common cultural expression in Nepalese, the lingua franca, that form the key feature to the social context.