ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors, it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place. Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality, and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change, reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region, including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.
