Multi‐sited Himalayan households and the misleading rural–urban dichotomy

Abstract

The dichotomous differentiation of people into rural and urban is necessary for the purpose of enumeration, but it is important to acknowledge that the outcome of censuses is shaped by the analytic categories that are applied. Squeezing a complex and fuzzy reality into narrow analytic categories gives a simplified picture of reality that hardly reflects actual events and processes on the micro level. Defining Himalayan rural households as multi‐sited economic units is more in touch with householders’ own perceptions and practices than dividing them into urban and rural units. Urbanisation rates derived from census data may be coherent with the assumption that households are units of domicile, but they do not reflect undercurrents of ongoing settlement processes in a valid manner. The term translocis encompasses all localities where households are active. It softens the stiff dichotomy of rural–urban by directing attention to the ways in which multiple sites and sectors are interwoven in the activities of the world's most basic economic unit – the household.