my humla reading list, and a couple extrapolations based thereon...

i'll be getting a post-trip update on my research and my experiences up over the weekend/early next week, but i thought i'd throw in a couple of additions to the bibliography for those of you who are into those things (you know who you are...all two of you).

far and away the two most important books i've read for this project are Barry Bishop's Karnali Under Stress: Livelihood Strategies and Seasonal Rhythms in a Changing Nepal Himalaya,  and Jagannath Adhikari's Food Crisis in Karnali: A Historical and Politico-economic Perspective. 

Bishop was a geographer who spent 1969/1970 doing GOD's work (ethnographically speaking), collecting some incredibly detailed data on the land and people of the karnali region. specifically, he looks at people's livelihood strategies, or how they make their living, and the way that had changed over time up to 1970. basically he did what i was/am intending to do (more on this later) in an inevitably more superficial way. it's daunting as hell looking at what he did (seriously, i lack words for the quality of the appendices), but it's also GREAT because it basically gives me baseline data for a pre-civil war, pre-major aid intervention period. one of the things that's unbelievably striking is how little has changed, at least superficially. with the addition of massive deforestation and cell phones, pictures bishop took 40 years ago look almost exactly like the ones i took two weeks ago.  i'll try to scan a page in and do a side-by-side example.

Adhikari does a much broader sweep of an update through 2006 (the conclusion of the civil conflict, and basically where i sort of pick my research up), including a chapter on the effects of government and foreign aid. unfortunately, he doesn't go to humla, where i'm working, but at least i don't feel geographically redundant. his thesis is that "much of the problems in Karnali relates to the hegemonic and exploitative relationship imposed by Kathmandu (the power center) over Karnali (a peripheral region treated as colony) since its unification in Nepal", and i'd say that's pretty accurate. it's not the whole story, and especially in combination with the Bishop, you can see how much is attributed to other factors as well....

aw hell, i was going to wait to put up a more complete research update, but i'll start with this one set of thoughts and how it's sort of refined my thinking...

basically, i finished the Bishop while i was in humla, it struck me (literally, at the top of a mountain), that you could conceptualize pretty much all of the observable, substantive livelihood changes that have happened there since 1970 as a function of one of these variables:

1) population growth
2) climate change and environmental degredation (not unrelated to 1)
3) externally driven political/economic developments (most importantly: the closure/restrictions on the northern border with tibet, and the penetration of roads, and access to india, from the south and west)
4) political upheaval, most recently, the maoist conflict
5) direct aid intervention by the government and NGOs (with most of it being from NGOs)

please don't be TOO harsh with this, those of you more knowledgeable than i (although kind, critical feedback more than welcome). since it's just sort of a rough rubric to consolidate my thoughts and refine my future research. ideally, now, what i'm doing is trying to understand the changes that have been wrought by factor 5, bearing in mind that it's probably impossible to fully isolate these causes from each other, as they're all part of a complicated system. going forward, i'm trying to understand those changes both, to some degree, etic-ly (that is, through the collection of "hard data" on livelihood adaptations from the field and secondary sources), and, in my mind more importantly, emic-ly (that is, locally situated understandings of those changes as informed by participants' narratives), and to try and start to get at the way those changes have affected people's understandings of themselves and their relationships to larger institutions, specifically, the government and (vs) non-governmental organizations.

well. if you're still reading, you'll probably find the following list interesting. it's what i'm sort of continuing to pick my way through as background reading. these are the books anyway, and pretty much just the tip of the iceberg of the canon. at some point maybe i'll do a list of the articles as well, although it's a LOT of sort of dry, methodological stuff....

Ferguson, James The Anti-politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
Fisher, Julie Nongovernments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World
Scott, James Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

i've also started reading a LOT of development blogs, thanks to my google reader, so i think i'm going to start trying to link to some of those and comment on the debates, insofar as i can follow them.