The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.

This book explores how ethnic groups living in the Himalayan regions understand nature and culture. The first part addresses the opposition between nature and culture in Asia’s major religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Shamanism. The second part brings together specialists of different representative groups living in the heterogeneous Himalayan region. They examine how these indigenous groups perceive their world. This includes understanding their mythic past, in particular, the place of animals and spirits in the world of humans as they see it and the role of ritual in the everyday lives of these people. The book takes into account how these various perceptions of the Himalayan peoples are shaped by a globalized world. The volume thus provides new ways of viewing the relationship between humans and their environment.

In conventional views, pastoralism was classified as a stage of civilization that needed to be abolished and transcended in order to reach a higher level of development. In this context, global approaches to modernize a rural society have been ubiquitous phenomena independent of ideological contexts. The 20th century experienced a variety of concepts to settle mobile groups and to transfer their lifestyles to modern perceptions. Permanent settlements are the vivid expression of an ideology-driven approach. Modernization theory captured all walks of life and tried to optimize breeding techniques, pasture utilization, transport and processing concepts. New insights into other aspects of pastoralism such as its role as an adaptive strategy to use marginal resources in remote locations with difficult access could only be understood as a critique of capitalist and communist concepts of modernization. In recent years a renaissance of modernization theory-led development activities can be observed. Higher inputs from external funding, fencing of pastures and settlement of pastoralists in new townships are the vivid expression of 'modern' pastoralism in urban contexts. The new modernization programme incorporates resettlement and transformation of lifestyles as to be justified by environmental pressure in order to reduce degradation in the age of climate change.

This book teases out the reasons for, and the socio-economic impacts of, different types of migration on contemporary rural households and individuals. The author creatively depicts the dynamic microcosm of one village in the North Indian Kumaun Himalayas, near the border with Chinese Tibet, giving voice to the life stories of a range of migrants. Through this ethnography, migration is revealed as a fundamental part of the multifaceted 21st-century changes which the village is experiencing. From elderly women, to unemployed men, young farm women and local children, the book demonstrates how village life is continually constituted socially and economically by overlapping migration patterns – including outmigration, return migration, in-migration and even non-migration. Extending the argument, the author demonstrates that the village microcosm is linked to many other villages which are microcosms in their own right as well as in relation to the main village across a spatial hierarchy. The theoretical implications of the study are teased out to inform our understanding of rural-urban migration trends and impacts more generally, and as such the book will be of interest to researchers of the South Asian region but also of internal migration in the global context.

This volume takes a long-term view of the various processes of ethnic and national development that have been displayed, both before and after 1990. It brings together twelve carefully chosen ethnographic and historical chapters covering all of the

This work combines a study of contemporary issues in tourism development with a close examination of approaches to tourism research. Looking beyond the much-studied mass tourism industries, leading international academics who are members of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, explore new issues raised by emerging tourist destinations such as Ghana, Samoa, Vietnam and India's Bhyundar Valley. A fascinating work, Contemporary Issues in Tourism Development discusses a wide range of topics such as: * reasons for development * tourism development as a strategy for urban revitalization * tourism’s links to heritage conservation and regional development * sustainability and the adverse impacts of development * cultural considerations and community participation * the importance of context for individual tourism projects.