Shaila Seshia Galvin, recently appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute, tells us about “Ecology of the Himalaya”, a paper published last January in Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology.

How did you come to write this paper?

Actually, I was asked by Oxford Bibliographies to prepare an article on the ecology of the Himalaya, which made me both excited and daunted. This is a vast area of enormous ecological, cultural, social and political diversity, spanning five countries, stretching over 2,500 kilometres, connecting (but also dividing) South, Central, East and Southeast Asia. I have carried out my own research in one small corner of the Himalaya, in western Uttarakhand in India, and so the preparation of this bibliography allowed me to think about the Himalaya on a much larger scale, and in terms of how it may be understood as a transnational region.

What is its originality?

In curating this bibliography, I approached ecological questions that confront the Himalaya – both contemporary and historical – from an anthropological standpoint. That is to say, I look at the ways in which people have lived in, understood, shaped, and been shaped by Himalayan environments. The bibliography aims to reflect some of the diversity of the region; it cites works by colonial plant hunters as well as contemporary ecologists, and includes scholarship produced by researchers based within as well as outside the region.

What will the reader learn from your bibliography?

Although not a research article, I hope that this bibliography helps bring to light the important ways in which the Himalaya has generated thinking and debate about human-environment relations that extend beyond the region itself – for example in terms of population, social erosion, biodiversity and, most recently, energy and climate change. These issues have global currency, but it is important to recognise the means by which they are historically and regionally grounded as well as the circumstances in which they emerge.

Is the ecology of the Himalaya your main expertise?

I am broadly interested in the intersections of agricultural and environmental change in the Himalaya, and how these are entangled with political and economic processes that span local to global scales. For example, my most recent research has examined the development of commercial organic agriculture in Uttarakhand, and its connection to processes of political restructuring and economic reform in India.

Seshia Galvin, Shaila, “Ecology of the Himalaya”, Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology, January 2016.