A Social Life of Water: Water, Ownership and Society in a Himalayan Village

In the far northwest of Nepal there is a village called Tangshet. It is one of the four principal villages of the Nyinba, a largely endogamous, Tibetan-speaking group of merchants, pastoralists and agriculturalists whose name derives from their choice to live on the ‘nyin-’ – the ‘sunny side of the slope’. Tangshet is in Humla district, in Nepal’s Karnali State; the latter so called because it is dominated by the river of that name, which flows south from Mount Kailash in Tibet, through Nepal, to the Ganges in India. Although within Nepal, therefore, Tangshet is situated within what has been called the ‘Kailash Mandala’, the Tibetan sacred landscape centred on that mountain; as a result, it sits at the overlap of Tibetan, Nepalese and global social spheres. A study of Tangshet therefore offers insights not only into the social life of Tangshet itself, but also into the social life of each of those societies, in different ways. The thesis describes aspects of Tangshet’s social life ranging from place-making and theories of substance to property regimes and social identity. In a part of Nepal whose economy and demography are undergoing dramatic changes, Tangshet is significant for the fact that its springs and streams provide the water not only for traditional mills and water for domestic use, but also for the district’s largest hydroelectric power station. Although there is no irrigation within the village, the management of springs and streams, and the deities associated with them, is a significant aspect of village social life. Sometimes, too, the management of water within the village also serves to connect it to places much further afield, as with the drinking water infrastructure recently installed in the village with funding from the Finnish government and the EU. In this context, in which water plays such a complex social role, this thesis sets out to answer the deceptively simple question: ‘Who owns the water, in Tangshet?’ It proceeds via an analysis of the question, asking in turn: ‘What is meant by “Tangshet”?’; ‘What is meant by “water”?’; ‘What is meant by “ownership”?’ and ‘What is meant by “who”?’ It offers, by way of answers to these questions, the reflections that Tangshet is defined by its tsam, or boundary; that water in Tangshet is a kham – an element, or aspect of social activity; that the ‘ownership’ of water in Tangshet is best conceptualised as a form of laka, or work; and that the question of ‘who’ owns the water involves a tension between pre-existing categories of person, and new roles created precisely to do the laka involved. The thesis then brings these insights together to help to describe the difficulties that the villagers face in managing their new drinking water infrastructure. In so doing, it demonstrates how different aspects of social life combine, in Tangshet, to form a social life of water.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Hughes-Morgan, Thomas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Diemberger, Hildegard

• water
• ownership
• Himalayas
• Tibet
• Nepal
• Anthropology

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/032b425f-7988-41dc-9382-8fe9a3211379/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.114481

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/377766