Reimagining spaces, species and societies in the Himalayas

humaines, ainsi que la manière dont elles s'expriment dans la vie quotidienne. Dans le même temps, les contributions explorent comment les interventions à grande échelle initiées par l'État, les initiatives de développement et l'expansion des entreprises commerciales ont transformé, et continuent de transformer, les espaces et les espèces de montagne, générant de nouveaux contextes sociétaux dans lesquels ils acquièrent de nouvelles significations.

Himalayas refers to 'the anthropogenically impacted Himalayas since the early modern era', thus focusing on human-induced changes to the mountains (Smyer Yü and De Maaker 2021: 4). In this book, the chapters of which are written mostly by authors who are from the Himalayas, we explore the ways in which the region has been anthropogenically conditioned, as is evident -among others things -in how people engage with water and are confronted with the impact of (human-induced) climate change. This special issue extends the scope of this enquiry to explore how Himalayan spaces, species and societies are also transformed by state making and, by extension, by large-scale processes of development as well as increasing dependence on trade and markets.

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In this special issue, we do not restrict ourselves to how the Himalayas are conventionally perceived but include the adjacent mountain ranges of Southwest China, based on the geophysical, climatic and cultural continuities within this broader highland zone (Van Schendel 2002;Sheiderman 2010). Most of the international borders that currently segment these extended Himalayas were not defined until the late 19th century. Once conceived, they were merely a token presence 'on the ground' until well into the 20th century. In the aftermath of military conflicts such as the 1962 Sino-India war, and -from 1947 onwards -the high-altitude stand-off between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, many Himalayan borders were militarised and thus 'hardened' (Van Schendel and De Maaker 2014: 3). This transformed the areas in the vicinity of these borders into frontier zones (Bergmann 2016). In these zones, over the last couple of decades, states have systematically increased their presence. This includes extending infrastructures such as roads and airports, building hydroelectric dams to generate 'green' energy, establishing wildlife sanctuaries or biosphere reserves and, more generally, transforming the residents of these border zones into citizens of the respective countries. The international borders have resulted in the division of mountains, valleys, pastures, animals, people, deities and spirits across distinct national realms. What I call 'partitioning' of the Himalayas by the absorption of the respective parts into distinct states has weakened connections and restricted interactions between its residents across mountains, foothills and valleys.
Human and non-human relationships in changing spatial contexts 3 The papers included in this special issue follow two angles of enquiry, both of which have so far, in combination, barely been studied. On the one hand, the contributions scrutinise the changing framing and interpretation of human and non-human relationships, and the way these find expression in everyday life. On the other hand, the papers explore how large-scale interventions instigated by state making, development initiatives and the expansion of commercial ventures transform mountain spaces, creating new contexts that generate new meanings. These two angles of enquiry have received scholarly attention, but interconnections between the two continue to be neglected. It is this lacunae that this special issue wishes to fill.

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The four papers in this collection were initially presented at the graduate seminar 'Storying the sustainable intelligence of the earth in the new Himalayas: Symbiotic indigeneity and transboundary commons', which was held online late 2020 and organised by Dan Smyer Yü (Yunnan University) and Erik de Maaker (Leiden University). Referring to the growing impact of the political divisions that are being imposed on the Himalayas, 'symbiotic indigeneity' denotes indigenous modes of facing non-indigenous forces of change, and 'transboundary commons' the fragmentation and 'bordering' of what were traditionally shared common-pool resources. Supported by the Himalayan University Consortium (HUC) of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), seminar participants responded to a call for papers. 1 Participants were graduate students and early-career scholars and scientists in Himalayan social and environmental sciences. Most of the participants were affiliated to research centres located across the Himalayas, thus allowing the seminar to contribute to one of HUC's main aims, which is to strengthen and build academic capacity in the Himalayan region. Led by a group of multidisciplinary experts, 2 the seminar offered a series of interactive lectures, thematic discussions, peer presentations and group mentorship opportunities for research writing as part of an effort to advance new perspectives derived from environmental humanities in the Himalayan region. Apart from scholarly competence building, participants were introduced to partnership-and leadership-building approaches to prepare a new generation of scholar-leaders for a sustainable future for the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH).

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The four papers in this collection titled 'Storying multispecies relationships, commoning and the state in the Himalayas' address these issues through empirically strong case studies. Of the four papers in this collection, one concerns the western Himalayas (Tara Bate, 'Competing perceptions of landscape in the Limi valley: politics, ecology and pastoralism'), another focuses on the eastern Himalayas (Sangay Tamang, 'Environmentalism in the Darjeeling hills: an inquiry'), and the two others relate to Yunnan (Ma Zhen, 'Water as a relational being in Xishuangbanna: presence, scarcity and management' and Sun Rui, 'Yunnan flowers: storying cross-species love beyond metaphors'). As mentioned above, the inclusion of two papers that focus on Yunnan extends the geographical scope of enquiry from what is conventionally perceived as the Himalayas to include adjacent south-western China. 3 Multispecies perspectives and statist discourses 6 All four papers are grounded in a multispecies perspective. This creates room for world views in which humans, even though exceptional in their ability to shape and transform the world, are only one among many species present. It allows for a localised and situated perspective of how environments can be shared common spaces. Engaging with the innovative potential of new theory from the environmental humanities, the papers recount Himalayan community narratives proceeding from human-Earth relations in practical and affective terms. In the precolonial era, political structures in the Himalayas were mostly radial, focusing on the control of strategic places and the people and goods passing through these (Misra 2011). Political power could be wielded by controlling and taxing trade, therefore reducing the need to control territory. This gradually changed in the colonial era, when consolidated states emerged, fostered by mercantile elites for whom the valleys, hills and mountain slopes came to constitute resources that gained value in developing global market economies (Sheiderman 2010: 295). In the early colonial period, mountain forests became prized possessions because of the hardwood trees they contained (as in the hills of Darjeeling, Sangay Tamang, this issue). Much more recently, Himalayan rivers gained value as a source of hydroelectricity, fit to support the 'greening' of the increasingly energy-hungry economies of the region. Precious metals and minerals contained in the mountains created further incentives for states to gain territorial control. A major consequence of this territorial partition of the Himalayas has been that the people of the region became either Indian, Pakistani, Nepali or Chinese (among others), amounting to a denial of their pre-existing crossborder ethnic allegiances (Tara Bate, this issue). Similarly, the categories by which mountain residents were ranked changed as a consequence of statist discourses. Historically, residents of the Himalayas have been able to combine being place bound with being seasonal migrants. Every year, pastoralists would take their herds from lowaltitude winter grounds to higher-altitude summer pastures, making them permanent residents of different parts of the mountains. Yet in the colonial era, for example in the Indian Himalayas, a distinction emerged between indigenous and migratory communities, which often had serious consequences for forest rights because the authorities gave preference to the former over the latter (Sangay Tamang, this issue).

The reconfiguration of shared spaces and shared goods 8
The partition of the Himalayas across a range of modern states resulted in a denial of cross-border environmental knowledge and practices. Divided and dispersed, local indigenous voices have been drowned out and the interests of those concerned have been disregarded when it comes to nation states and international organisations implementing, for example, environmental conservation projects (Tara Bate, this issue). Examples of such a disregard for indigenous ecological knowledge are restrictions imposed on high-altitude pastoralism or a ban on practising shifting cultivation, both of which are historically proven to be environmentally nurturing practices (Ramakrishnan 2007). Fortunately, such alternative perspectives do increasingly resonate in the policy reports published by national and international think tanks (USAID 2017: 296, Pant et al 2018: 2).

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The Himalayas and, by extension, Southwest China have never been isolated. Historically, caravan routes allowing for the transportation of valuable goods for trade and of people have traversed the region. These 'silk routes' also allowed for the communication of (religious) ideas and practices, military campaigns and so on (Harris 2013: 92). The incorporation of the Himalayas into modern states has blocked many of these historic routes, which has been supported if not justified by lowlanders' perspectives on the mountains, which presented them as hostile and impenetrable and the people residing there as isolated and primitive. In identifying the epistemological challenges that have thus emerged, Sangay Tamang (this issue) foregrounds what he calls 'environmentalism of the hills', to exceed the divisions imposed by a rigid understanding of indigeneity that is dominant in approaches to the ecology of Darjeeling (India). This allows him to overcome the 'ethnic closure' that comes about when 'a given community and its respective knowledge are utilised as a dominant form of resistance against environmental destruction' (Tamang, this issue). Instead, he argues for the recognition of 'a co-existing and relational framework beyond exclusionary and ethnocentric forms of environmentalism', that can highlight how indigenous relationships with the forest have been restructured by colonial forestry. Arguing along the same lines, Tara Bate (this issue) phrases this environmentalism in more relational terms, coining what she calls 'ecological ethics of care'. This resonates with what John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker identify as a shared attribute of indigeneity when they write 'diverse forms of ecological responsibility, environmental ethics, and sustainable behavior are (…) broadly identifiable features of indigenous societies' (Grim et al 2014: 198). As for Ma Zhen, writing about the importance of water in Xishuangbanna (China), water is integral to the generative capacities of land; local appreciations of territory foreground relationalities which conventional dominant perspectives typically miss. Beyond the territorial, Sun Rui situates Yunnan flower growers' relationship to roses in a multispecies context. Such a multispecies context foregrounds the interconnectedness and inseparability of humans and other life forms, thus extending ethnography beyond the solely human realm ( 10 From a multispecies perspective, shared spaces or commons are integral to the environments they create. This sheds light on why the colonial-era approach to forests in Darjeeling constituted such an infringement of indigenous rights, because it regarded the Himalayas as primarily 'spaces free of humans' (Sangay Tamang, this issue). After all, this amounts to a denial of all the other entities that co-constitute the forest. Commons are, according to Tara Bate (this issue), less to be understood as resources that 'belong to all' than as 'shared and shaped by multiple sentient entities with both overlapping and conflicting interests'. Similarly, interventions by the provincial government in the management of water in Dai Autonomous Prefecture (Yunnan) denied Dai people the relationship to water they had previously cherished. Treating water as a type of commodity went against the Dai experience of water as a relational being that embodied both worldly and transcendental values. For Dai people, Ma Zhen (this issue) states, '(w)ater is the critical source of irrigation…and has been an important component of their Theravada Buddhist ritual practices since ancient times.' 11 The regional division of the Himalayas between various countries and the integration of its constituent parts in these states therefore not only have political and economic consequences but also an impact in terms of ontology. This facilitates the imposition of external notions of environment and ownership that necessarily challenge the localised and situated relationships that people maintain with the multiple species among which they reside. Tara Bate (this issue) notes how, due to the closing of the border between Nepal and China and the subsequent inability of Limey pastoralists to reach what used to be their summer pastures now located in China, the nature of the relationship between humans and their herds has changed. Where earlier people would consider their animals as kin, the changing nature of Limey pastoralism has introduced much more distance in these relationships. Addressing how the role of humans in the Himalayan environment is being contested, Sangay Tamang (this issue) notes that, whereas from a multispecies perspective 'local communities have always been integral to the landscape of Darjeeling…British colonialism excluded these communities.' 12 Market relationships imply commodification and anonymisation, changing the way people cherish goods and how they interpret and value their environment. For Dai people, water never used to be a passive object. Rather, it was a relational being, Ma Zhen (this issue) argues. The policies of the provincial government have resulted in the commodification of water, challenging its centrality in Dai religious traditions, which  (2019), she states that for small-scale growers in Yunnan, flowers as 'vegetative life forms are sentient, intelligent, communicative, agential and social beings instead of merely "species-as-décor"'. This mutuality involves not only flower growers but also other participants in the commodity chain of fresh-cut flowers, yet a similar relationship to flowers is not experienced by capital-intensive, large-scale flower growers.
Reimagining socio-spatial transformation 13 The two angles of enquiry that are shared among the papers included in this collection create new insights into how the changing framing and interpretation of human and non-human relationships is linked to state making, development initiatives and the expansion of commercial ventures. As spaces are reconfigured, relationships among species are redefined, transforming the societies of the Himalayas. The production of spaces is the outcome of localised processes, as much as it is due to their being subsumed into broader regional and global frameworks. This holds for the production of UNESCO world heritage (Tara Bate, this issue), the acquisition of water by an ever more present Chinese state (Ma Zhen, this issue) and the production of ethnic claims to territory (Sangay Tamang, this issue). It also holds for the flowers produced in Yunnan and for the extensive trajectories they follow for them to be sold to consumers throughout China (Sun Rui, this issue). In each and every one of these cases, unravelling the changing ways in which humans are included in their environment and co-constitute it can provide essential insights into the new significances that species and societies in the Himalayas acquire. 4