What is the relationship between body, land, and place in a world of unknown future risk? The Himalayas are a region where people forge strong ties of belonging to place. However, disasters such as the 2015 earthquakes epicentred in central Nepal, coupled with increasingly common environmental catastrophes, have forced people to consider relocation due to risk, including that generated by post-disaster reconstruction. At the same time, education- and labor-driven outmigration, coupled with an aging rural population, raises intimate issues of concern related to place, in which homes must be retrofitted, or left entirely as aging bodies are no longer able to navigate traditional architectures and care for themselves on their own. This event brings together two distinguished scholars of Himalayan studies—Sienna Craig, anthropology professor at Dartmouth College, and Sara Shneiderman, associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to explore movement, mobility, and connection to place in the Himalayas across multiple scales–from the aging body to the displaced community.
This panel discussion is part of the Liu Institute's lecture series Global Affairs from the Top of the World: Himalayan Asia Today, which is cosponsored by the Liu Institute's South Asia Group. Brunch will be served.
Craig and Shneiderman will participate in the workshop that follows the panel discussion and the link to that event can be found HERE.
Sienna Craig is the Orvil Dryfoos Professor of Public Affairs in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She has been conducting ethnographic and public-health oriented research with Himalayan and Tibetan communities between Nepal and North America for more than twenty-five years. A writer whose work spans multiple genres, she is the author, most recently, of The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020).
Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, where she co-leads the Himalaya Program and Disaster Resilience Research Network. She has been conducting ethnographic and policy-engaged research in the Himalaya and South Asia for over 25 years, and is the author of Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), along with many journal articles, most recently focusing on Nepal’s post-earthquake reconstruction.
Moderator Aidan Seale-Feldman, an assistant professor of anthropology at Notre Dame and a Liu Institute faculty fellow, is a medical anthropologist interested in affliction and its treatments. Grounded in ethnographic explorations of disaster, mental health, and mass hysteria, her research asks how to approach forms of affliction that are not bound within the individual but instead move across bodies, environments, and generations.
Originally published at asia.nd.edu.