Kenneth M. Bauer, High Frontiers: Himalayan Pastoralists in a Changing World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 320 pp. One of the reasons we human beings so fascinated by pictures from the moon or Mars is that we want to see if the landscapes of those places look anything like those on earth-another version of the are we alone? question. And for the same reason we fascinated by photographs of remote and desolate places like Tibet or Nepal, because we think maybe that's how things look on the moon or Mars. We even sometimes describe them as being lunar in character, which makes them seem more inhospitable and hostile than they really are. The many coffee-table picture books by photographers, journalists, and others testimony to this romanticization of places that are, from the point of view of people who don't live there and write the books, off the beaten path, although to the inhabitants themselves life may seem quite quotidian. At the other extreme from this genre of travel and journalistic pictorial accounts those written by textual scholars, who go to these places to discover, and bring back, the wisdom of the east views-i.e., translations of religious texts that often only remotely connected with the lives of ordinary people who live there. Or they may take the form of teachings of learned priests whose knowledge of scriptural tradition far transcends that of lay people. For the most part these different groups of authors-the journalistic and the esoteric-with different interests and competencies. At what I like to think of as a more epistemologically open and empirically grounded level the studies of anthropologists and practitioners of such anthropologically-inclined disciplines as geography. Kenneth Bauer nicely exemplifies the latter species. In this book, he attempts to give us a sweeping view of how pastoralists living in one of these remote areas-the region of northwest Nepal called Dolpo-not only live their daily and seasonal lives, but more specifically how they have adapted in the last forty or so years to changes in their economic, political, and cultural circumstances. Therefore, anthropologists interested in minute details of Buddhist belief and practice, fine-grained analysis of kinship and family structure, or the ever-enticing loadstone of polyandry will be disappointed. What they will find is a broad-spectrum examination of the unsettling effects of encroaching Han Chinese to the north, high-caste Nepalese presences to the south, and the wide-ranging changes-ecological, cultural, symbolic, religious-they have left in their wash. The ruling classes of both those countries regard people like those who live in Dolpo as uncultured and unrefined barbarians, somewhere off in the peripheral mists. That these ruling classes probably also regard each other in equally contemptuous ways is of no help to the people of Dolpo. While Bauer's affection for Dolpo and its people comes through loud and clear, his stress is on local creativity and tenacity rather than nostalgia for some mythical good old days of a by-gone era. Bauer's main emphasis is on how the triangulated system of agriculture, animal husbandry, and trade, separately and in connection with each other, play major roles in the lives of Dolpo people. He is, in anthropo-geographical terms, a possibilist: that is, the environment makes some characteristics of social and cultural life possible, but it doesn't determine them. He does this by showing how various configurations of these three components can and do change as internal and external pressures move them in different directions. He grounds Dolpo life in the exigencies of everyday existence, but, like many other anthropologists during the last century, he is unable to reconcile some ethnographic practices with geographic conditions-e.g., the great importance attached to keeping horses with the lack of using mare's milk (unlike Central Asian pastoralists). …
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