Oxford Handbook of the Himalayas

The Himalayas are not just mountains. They are also not just places for mountaineering, exploring, or extracting commodities. The Himalayan region is dynamic. Spanning eight contemporary nation states - from Afghanistan to Myanmar, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, and Pakistan - the region is home to great diversity of people, languages, political formations, and ecosystems. It is also a region that is frequently imagined through siloed disciplinary perspectives, for its beautiful mountain vistas and geography, or its anthropological complexity. These perspectives developed during European colonial expansion in the region which has had long lasting repercussions for the making of borders and nation states as well as academic disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the Himalayas provides an overview of the many ways that the Himalayas as a region are conceptualized and studied from the perspective of academics across multiple fields, including anthropology, history, geography, and religious studies, and from the people of the Himalayas. It engages with crucial themes for understanding this region in both local and global contexts, including through the lenses of relationships between Himalayan communities and their environments, political formations, international relations, race, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, economics, and infrastructures. This Handbook refuses the limitations of colonially-imposed boundaries, and instead emphasizes the themes of diversity, change, and connectedness to understand how the study of the Himalayas has developed, and how it continues to develop in conversation with the communities of the region. The Handbook is divided into five sections that provide an overview of the history of global engagements with the Himalayas. The first section provides an overview of the region. The second looks at colonial engagements and statemaking. The third examines how Himalayan worldviews have been represented in scholarship, and how these representations are interpreted with and engaged by local communities. The fourth critically examines local identities. The fifth examines contemporary issues that have developed from these earlier engagements and the growth of Himalayan diasporic communities around the world.

Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Asian Studies at Occidental College. She is the author of The Social Life of Tibetan Biography: Textuality, Community, and Authority in the Lineage of Tokden Shakya Shri (2014).