Doctoral candidate Phurwa Gurung was awarded a National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration grant to work together with local Dolpopa scholars to document endangered oral literature in Dolpo, northwest Nepal.

National Geographic funds a global community of Explorers who investigate, test hypotheses, innovate, stretch their creativity, and push the boundaries of traditional thinking in ways that fundamentally change our world. They support and cultivate a portfolio of diverse, Explorer-led programs within their five focus areas to drive impact and fulfill their mission of illuminating and protecting our world. They leverage their global expertise, platforms, and unparalleled convening power to inspire educators, youth, and future Explorers and help more people learn about, care for, and protect our world. Their innovative business model allows them to invest every philanthropic dollar—100% of donations—directly to their Explorers and programs. 

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Phurwa Gurung was awarded a Wenner Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for his dissertation project, “Reordering highland territories: State-building, indigeneity and multispecies worldmaking in the Himalaya.”  It will support his ongoing field research in Dolpo, Nepal, which uses caterpillar fungus (yartsa gunbu) as a lens onto state building processes, indigenous territoriality, the political ecology of conservation, and non-human agency.” 

He got the announcement of the award at the end of September.

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A high-altitude seasonal encampment for caterpillar fungus harvest in Dolpo, Nepal.

Phurwa D Gurung, PhD Candidate in Geography, received the competitive Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF) funded by the Mellon Foundation. Phurwa was selected from a total of 870 applicants from graduate students at 112 universities. This year's 60 awardees represent thirty-one universities and fourteen disciplines. The SSRC IDRF fellowship will fund a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, for his dissertation research tentatively titled Reordering Highland Territories: State-building, indigeneity, and multispecies worldmaking. His dissertation takes caterpillar fungus as a lens to examine the ways in which state-led biodiversity conservation and resource extraction overlap and clash with Indigenous environmental governance in the Himalayas. 

Caterpillar fungus aka yartsa gunbu ("summer grass, winter worm"). Both photos by Phurwa.

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Phurwa Gurung has been awarded the highly competitive for 2022, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Phurwa was selected from a total of 870 applicants from graduate students at 112 universities. This year's 60 awardees represent thirty-one universities and fourteen disciplines. Phurwa will submit two progress reports during the fellowship year, and participate in a fellow workshop upon the completion of his on-site research.

The IDRF fellowship must be held for a single continuous period of six to twelve months between July 2022 and December 2023, and must be started by January 2023. The IDRF fellowship will provide support for housing and living costs, round trip travel to the research site, local transportation, affiliation fees, related research expenses, and travelers' health insurance if it is not already covered through the university. The average fellowship award will be $23,000; final award amounts will be determined by the IDRF program based on a budget Phurwa creates, his research needs as presented in his proposal, and on any additional funding he may have received. 

IDRF has announced that the 2022 cohort will be the final cohort of the program. While there will not be any future competitions, all fellows will continue to receive the support of the Social Science Research Council and the IDRF program throughout the course of the fellowship.

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Abstract

National and international development narratives frame Nepal’s Karnali region as synonymous with remoteness and food insecurity. These narratives often position food insecurity as a direct outcome of geographical remoteness associated with the lack of motorable road. Road building is thus presented as the solution to food insecurity. I challenge this orthodox narrative using the concept of “infrastructural orthodoxies”. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on infrastructures and critical human geography scholarship on vulnerability, I argue that rather than resolving food insecurity, road increases vulnerability. This occurs in at least two ways: 1) through the proletarianization of wage workers and petty contractors in the road building market, and 2) through increasing dependence on cash and distant markets for the production and reproduction of local social lives. However, I neither suggest road building as inherently negative nor limit my discussion to the normative evaluation of the success or failure of road. Instead, I ask: what is it that these road projects are actually doing? This question helps turn our attention to the multivalent effects of road and illustrate why the orthodoxy is problematic. I thus present two unintended effects of road that exceed and are obscured by the orthodoxy: 1) road as key sites of electoral politics, and 2) road as vectors of new economic and labor geographies in the Himalayan borderlands. This paper contributes to the knowledge on the relationship between road and food (in)security, and to the interdisciplinary literature that view infrastructures as contingent and always in the process of becoming.

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The  honors the life, career, and service of Dor Bahadur Bista, Nepal’s first anthropologist and former Honorary President of the ANHS predecessor organization, the Nepal Studies Association (NSA). The purpose of the prize is to recognize outstanding scholarship by students whose research focuses on the areas of Himalayas. Submissions from all academic disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and arts will be accepted.

The winner of 2020 Dor Bahadur Bista Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper is Phurwa Dhondup Gurung. Phurwa is a PhD Student in the Department of Geography at the University of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. The title of his paper is: "Dispossessing while Decentralizing: Participatory Conservation as an Emergent Structure of Dispossession in the Himalayas". 

Abstract:

Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total land area of Nepal and over a third of its entire Himalayan region. Despite the rhetoric of participatory conservation often used to justify fortress conservation, National Parks in Nepal remain firmly under the control of the central state and are governed by strict conservation policies implemented through a heavily militarized structures. Using a political ecology approach, this paper examines how and to what extent centralized conservation policies and the institutions of participatory conservation affect local socioecological lives in Dolpo, Nepal. I first provide a brief sketch of Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) followed by an analysis of its role in monopolizing the governance of yartsa gunbu in Dho Tarap valley, Dolpo. Drawing from three-months of ethnographic field research at multiple field sites in the summer of 2019, as well as from my own engagements with Dolpo communities for over a decade, I argue that participatory conservation materializes on the ground as an emergent structure of dispossession— not only in terms of the extraction of resources like yartsa gunbu but also because of its role in displacing community-led resource governance. This paper contributes to the literature on conservation as government, the politics of decentralization in resource management, as well as the growing literature on the management of yartsa gunbu in the Himalayas.

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Highlights

• Road increases vulnerability to food insecurity in multiple ways in the Himalaya.

• As much as it connects, road is also a source of distantiation and disconnection.

• Infrastructural orthodoxies proliferate at multiple scales and are problematic.

• Infrastructural orthodoxies obscure the unintended effects of infrastructures.

• We need more counter-stories of the messy and uneven effects of infrastructures.

Abstract

National and international development narratives frame Nepal’s Karnali region as synonymous with remoteness and food insecurity. These narratives often position food insecurity as a direct outcome of geographical remoteness associated with the lack of motorable road. Road building is thus presented as the solution to food insecurity. I challenge this orthodox narrative using the concept of “infrastructural orthodoxies”. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on infrastructures and critical human geography scholarship on vulnerability, I argue that rather than resolving food insecurity, road increases vulnerability. This occurs in at least two ways: 1) through the proletarianization of wage workers and petty contractors in the road building market, and 2) through increasing dependence on cash and distant markets for the production and reproduction of local social lives. However, I neither suggest road building as inherently negative nor limit my discussion to the normative evaluation of the success or failure of road. Instead, I ask: what is it that these road projects are actually doing? This question helps turn our attention to the multivalent effects of road and illustrate why the orthodoxy is problematic. I thus present two unintended effects of road that exceed and are obscured by the orthodoxy: 1) road as key sites of electoral politics, and 2) road as vectors of new economic and labor geographies in the Himalayan borderlands. This paper contributes to the knowledge on the relationship between road and food (in)security, and to the interdisciplinary literature that view infrastructures as contingent and always in the process of becoming.

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