SEMINAR: Anthropology / Sociology Seminar Series

The Climate Change discourse generates a certain level of political consensus amongst the Indian and Chinese policy makers about an urgent need to preserve the high Himalaya, also recognised as the ‘water towers of Asia’, for the sake of South Asian security. Contrary to such dominant and elusive discourses about the relationship between environmental change and the likelihood of violent conflict, anthropological debates have instead revolved, for quite some time, around how complex social relations and processes participate in the dynamic process of environmental change. In this paper, besides arguing that Climate Change has influenced the way in which the Himalayan landscape is viewed and understood by the international policy makers as well as the climate science community, the analytical focus remains on an understanding of ‘adaptation’ that links household-level characteristics with larger political and policy contexts amongst the mobile pastoralists, living along the high Himalayan borders of India and China in the Ladakh region of the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Since 1962, government relief efforts and other social transfers that have become the institutionalized form of adaptation for the Changpa pastoralists have given way to a kind of reality where severe snowstorms also stabilise the food and income supply for some of the poorer Changpa households due to the governmental reactions they catalyse. Alongside investigating the underlying pre-conditions necessary for adaptation through the windows of mobility, household composition and wage herding as well as climate variability, including the occurrence of severe snowstorms, the paper also examines the security dimension of Climate Change in the high Himalaya and how it affects this shift in local coping strategies from internal to external by increasing the Changpa’s reliance upon the state. The paper seeks to contribute to the broader anthropological understanding of how historical and political mechanisms shape the human - environment relationships, especially in the context of international frontier regions in this modern era.