Sacred, Alive, Dangerous, and Endangered: Humans, Non-humans, and Landscape in the Himalayas

The landscape we inhabit is haunted by its own past. In its present form, in fact, it is just the actual, and temporary, reconfiguration and re-positioning of its constitutive elements. Reconfiguration is the direct outcome of those transformative processes defined, in human terms, as calamities and disasters. In the Himalayas, according to indigenous ontological views, these recursive processes of reconfiguration allegedly happened at the hands of cosmic forces, gods and goddesses, sages and wizards of old, and are often thought of as reaction to human misbehavior. The category of human misbehavior may include active and mechanical processes of pollution and desecration, or more subtle dynamics of ethical and moral corruption. More often than not, among the indigenous collectivities of the Himalayas, these two dimensions appear to be strictly intertwined. The process is not over: minor adjustments continuously take place here and there, as automatic reactions set in motion by individual and collective, human and non-human, patterns of interaction.