Strange Intersections: Humans, Technology and Insects in a Himalayan Valley

By IMTFI Fellow Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

I study the complex material, technological, and financial practices surrounding the yartsa market as a case study of human-nature-technology relations in Manang, Nepal. "Yartsa gunbu" is an inter-species medicinal fungus. In my work it acts as a touchstone for understanding the transitional nature of life in the high Himalaya, illuminating the interdependence of technology, economy and place. In this ethnographic essay drawn from my fieldwork, I recount the experience of one day of the harvesting season.

Manang, Nepal

We crossed the 15,000ft pass without problems, the rain comes and goes, and the valley stretches out for hours. We don’t know how far it is to Naar and our companion is slow. I decide to move ahead, with thoughts of getting a horse in the village to come back for Poonam if it gets too late. I enjoy the rhythm of walking alone and it’s an easy trail through meadows dusted with wildflowers. Softly humming, and watching clouds move across the peak opposite, it takes me a several moments to realize that the village has materialized on an unexpected ridge directly in front of me.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Naar is one of the two major villages in the most remote region of upper Manang called, eponymously, Naar-Phu. It’s a special-permit zone with restricted access for tourists ($90 fee, trekking guide required, 7 day maximum stay) and limited proprietary rights for non-residents. Some forty families stay there now and, refreshingly, it bustles with a domestic energy missing in the easier access and more tourist-oriented villages elsewhere in the region. The fields suspended below the village in a wide basin are brilliant green with ripening barley. Two young men and an older woman with bright eyes herd a bunch of goats towards me and they stop to say hello. I ask for “Tiger,” the contact given by a friend in the last town, and the woman breaks off from her companions to show me the way. We dodge the remaining goats, stop to chat with a horse-rider, pass several houses and then she directs me up a ladder carved from a tree trunk. I climb onto a neighboring family’s porch, over their roof, and then back down via the roof of Tiger’s house to his open porch. Before I can explain the situation about my friends coming slowly Tiger’s wife insists I put down my pack, come inside, relax and have some tea. She is nursing an infant as she talks and prepares the wood stove. Tiger comes in, yes, he’s heard we’re coming, and will go out to find my friends in case they don’t reach the village before dark.

The hospitality continues during the four days we stay in Tiger’s sister’s lodge. The kitchen functions as an informal meeting point for villagers throughout the day and evening. Drolma, Tiger’s niece, has been out of school for only two years, but already manages the place, and all those who visit, with capable authority. She prepares bread, tea, liquor, snacks and full meals for the eclectic guests. Teenage friends of her brother back from school in Kathmandu for the monsoon holidays spend the evening watching Justin Bieber videos downloaded to their smartphones; elderly grandparents who while away the day exchanging stories; several young men waiting around for the yartsa picking season to open; and many of her own contemporaries who drop by to chat in between chores at their own homes. It takes me a full day of hanging out to realize that she is actually running a business with all this socializing. The payments are infrequent and informal, but Drolma keeps a running tab for everyone involved.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Tirtha is a regular visitor. He looks like someone from South India, a round face with an open smile. He recognizes us from when we walked through the district town of Chame, almost a week ago. He came a more direct route up the valley and is waiting for the picking season to begin. He’s come early the last several years to be amongst the first to buy from the local harvest, which has a reputation for being of very high quality and corresponding intensity. In 2012 several people were murdered in a conflict over access to territory. Tirtha is clearly an outsider here, but he has many friends and seems to be well liked and trusted by the villagers. Nevertheless, he and several other young men involved with yartsa dealing in Naar-Phu, insist that the picking season is a dangerous time and they are careful never to walk the trails alone or do anything unexpected that might arouse suspicion. When he’s not out buying yartsa, Tirtha runs a guesthouse in Chame and also works at the Honda motorcycle dealership in Pokhara (he received a complementary motorcycle last year for having the highest sales). He bought between 8-9kilos of yartsa from Naar-Phu last year - that is roughly half a million dollar’s worth of cash and/or worms he carries around in a backpack. He tries to buy and sell early because the prices are usually higher at the beginning of the season, then they drop. Three years ago he lost some 32 lakh NRs (approximately US$32,000) but shrugged it off with a smile, “Usually I do OK.” He deals with buyers in Kathmandu that he already knows, negotiates the deal over the phone with pictures and descriptions of provenance and quality, and takes his supply down once the deal is verbally confirmed.

The full-on picking season when everyone migrates to the upper pastures is delayed by a few days because of a funerary ceremony. They say it’s been a bad year, with ten deaths already by the fifth month. With ceremonies generally carried out every week for seven weeks, and the entire village participating, I wonder when they have time for much else. Today we all spend time in one of the three village temples, and there are at least fifty people there at any given time saying prayers. The family is responsible for feeding all of us.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

We make donations. In between prayer recitations a young lay-lama reads out a teaching on death from his smart phone. I meet an ex-monk who was responsible for arranging logistics for the escape of the Karmapa from Tibet back in 2000, propitiously during my first visit to Manang. I remember a helicopter flying overhead and an old woman bowing, “there is the Karmapa.” I had visited him at his monastery outside Lhasa two months earlier and thought I didn’t understand correctly; two days later I heard an announcement come through on BBC shortwave. This was the most high-level escape from Tibet since the mass exodus accompanying the Dalai Lama in 1959; the man I was speaking to had arranged the helicopter. He had the bloodshot eyes and dazed look of an alcoholic, the rugged body and sinewy arms of a pastoralist; they said he had been in prison, had a price on his head, gone into hiding and had “problems” since the escape.

We’re waiting in the same kitchen for an announcement from the village committee - will the exodus to the upper meadows take place tomorrow, or later in the week?

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Finally, well past 8pm, there is a call out of the darkness, “Attention, attention…” The voice carries over the suddenly quiet village without the help of any amplification. Tiger cocks his head to listen better - they announce the opening of a lower, more accessible, picking area for two days, and then the primary upper meadows three days hence. There was some consternation over me accompanying the villagers on the big trek, so Tiger is happy to take me picking to the more accessible grounds instead. We leave relatively late at 7am (the village starts moving around dawn, at 5am), but quickly scramble past other pickers on the lower slopes to join three of his cousins in the upper reaches of the range across from the village. Short alpine grass clings to the ravines between rocky ridgelines. The slope is crisscrossed with goat and yak grazing paths and scattered with wildflowers. Our group of five men wander up and down the steep slope, four of them looking intently at the ground, myself trying hard to frame photographs with the harsh backlight and struggling to keep-up without tripping. Only occasionally is there an exclamation, “alloooh-ah!” and we all scramble over to check the discovery. The forager uses his hand-axe for a quick swipe at the soil, and pulls the worm with its fruiting grass out of the extracted lump. The worms are certainly bigger then those I was seeing near Manang, but every other one is limp, mushy - as if the fungus has not fully occupied the caterpillar larvae. The cousins do not seem surprised or overly discouraged by the poor finds, they already know not to expect much from this season. There had been hardly any snow over the winter, and the many deaths in village were foreboding of a hard year to come.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Despite the poor yartsa showing, the group seems to enjoy the outing. We spend plenty of time snacking on wild herbs and shared food, chatting with other groups on the hill, and simply sitting, breathing, and staring across the valley. Even the few pieces each member has found counts for several thousands of rupees more than they would otherwise have. Despite two decades of extremely profitable harvests, the yartsa is still viewed as a boon, a symptom of luck and good fortune, rather than a factor of subsistence or necessity.

Read Kabir Mansingh Heimsath's Final Report here

Off the Charts: Session Two of the 2016 Conference

In the panel on "Ecologies in Crisis: Transferring, Converting and Marketing Value in Unstable Times" with discussant Rosa Akbari of the International Rescue Committee stories of crisis and resilience turned out to encompass a wide variety of political and natural disasters.  As Akbari noted, when it comes to understanding creative responses to precarity in developing economies from the position of the developed world, "we have a lot more to learn from them."  The first presentation on "Managing, negotiating, and converting 'currency' in daily life in a multicurrency environment of Zimbabwe" by Innocent Tonderai Mahiya of Women's University in Africa and Simbarashe Gukurume of the University of Cape Town grappled with the effects of a "serious economic crisis," where "the worst inflation in the world for a country not at war" had created a country of "poor billionaires," where daily 50 thousand withdrawal limits cripples those earning salaries of 50 billion units in local currency.

The research team provided an overview of money providers.  EcoCash, the most widely used mobile money service in the country, launched in 2011.  It was subsequently joined by NetOne, which introduced the government-controlled OneWallet in 2013.  With Telecash, which is now the second-largest provider in the country, there are three giant telecommunication companies joined by other stakeholders and players in a growth environment in which the largest companies have over six million subscribers.  Thus this national mobile money environment could be compared in scale to the territories of the M-PESA model, which the research team attributed to the rapid introduction of mobile money services, which rapidly expanded in urban and rural areas.  Additionally mobile networks are seen as reliable by informants with an increased number of players in mobile money sectors.  Access is added by ubiquitous advertising including omnibuses and commercials on government radio and television.

The team's field site in Chivi was one of first areas to adopt foreign currency because of immigration flows creating a sending population to the community.  With so many from Chivi migrating to South Africa, there were formal and informal channels for currency alternatives long before the government adopted the multi-currency system, particularly with the circulation of the rand.  The team's  methodology was primarily qualitative, based on ethnographic participant observation with  interviews with clients and agents of mobile money services and informal conversations with villagers.  In addition to the rand, the US dollar was a common currency, but there was also the presence of the Chinese yuan.  Researchers were interested in the process which is negotiated during the exchange and features that include high social solidarity and the deployment of social capital.  Sometimes this involved the subverting of regulatory restrictions, as when elderly clients would sometimes send grandchildren to negotiate on their behalf or attempt transactions without documents by deploying social understanding mechanisms.  They also considered types of mobile money agents and the politics of space, because some operate in makeshift booths, while others are run out of shops.

"Financial Security: Laborers’ Transfer of Value from Karachi’s Marketplaces to Tribal War Zones in Pakistan" by Noman Baig of Habib University Pakhtun offered the perspectives of many participants living in contested territories under threat of drone strikes.  The three major perspectives were those of impoverished laborers, state officials, and actors with a corporate point of view  This research explored "the value transfer system of ethnic Pakhtun migrants working on daily wages in Karachi’s marketplaces." Baig chose to tackle the following research questions: "How do laborers transfer value from the city of Karachi to villages and tribal areas of Pakistan?" "How does state counter-terrorist surveillance impact laborers’ traditional value transfer system?" and "How are emerging financial technologies such as branchless banking shaping customary ways of handling money in Karachi’s marketplace?" Baig aspired to the ideals of the "good anthropologist" by attending to "their interactions with financial instruments such as branchless banking" and borrowing and credit practices "within their kinship, religious, and ethnic networks." His methodology emphasized a "deep hanging out with the laboring class" that was enhanced with semi-structured interviews.  He drew on many sources of information for his study to understand the experiences of his core group of laborers and migrants, including retail agents, Easypaisa staff, State Bank of Pakistan representatives, employees of the Habib Metropolitan Bank, currency dealers, and money lenders.

In negotiating alternatives, the Pakistan Post offered money orders, which were extremely slow but carried low fees.  Commercial banks charge significant transfer fee and might take days.  There were a number of appealing reasons to rely on truck and bus drivers who simply carry cash to far flung villages. Finally a local shopkeeper/moneylender could serve as an intermediary: if a laborer chooses to deliver cash in Karachi, the equivalent amount of food ration can be delivered to the laborer’s house in a village.   In other words, in this scenario,  it  was not physical currency but value that gets transferred. Choices were often dictated by generational differences and issues of trust and kinship
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Easypaisa is emerging financial instrument with 250,000 retail agencies and 22 franchises in Karachi. It only takes two days to get a franchise, although it used to take 15 days.  The major requirement is to have to have a physical roof, so agents are not just sitting on a sidewalk.

Such mobile financial services facilitate dramatic changes around existing community bonds, which could also create disruptions in an already disrupted environment. The use of digital financial instruments might seem to offer relative autonomy, Baig argued, but that autonomy could also risk greater precocity.  A person becomes "more vulnerable to economic crisis" but is "also released from embedded networks of kinship."  These changes also encompass changing gender dynamics and disrupt existing systems of home delivery through kinship.

This disintermediation might be appealing when "laborers hesitate to visit banks" that are too "fancy and glittery."  In place of banks, retail agents offer banking services to the underprivileged, but laborers’ income gets incorporated into financial logics far beyond Karachi. "So they become included but they stay excluded." In other words, "financial inclusion and physical exclusion happens simultaneously," because "financial categorization reproduces social hierarchies" in the "network paradox of capitalism" that "allows you in but excludes you also."  Baig insists that such people aren't really "unbanked" but they are banked "in their own ways."

He cautioned that regulation of Hawala by the state plays a significant role as existing networks are "demonized" and the "alternate of corporate technologies" is lauded.  He explained that Western Union "became popular after 9/11," because the informal system was seen as illegal, but "profit comes to Wall Street."  In his view of the "financial ecology" he is interested in "how a laborer in bazaar in Karachi is connected" to the U.S. sector. He also expressed his concerns that "the discourse of financial inclusion gives a negative valuation to everyday forms of money management" particularly "under the rubric of security and counter-terrorism."

According to the presenter, "Strange Intersections: Humans, Technology and Disaster in a Himalayan Valley (Nepal)" by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath of Lewis & Clark College could just as easily be retitled "strange disjunctions."  The commodity Heimsath focused upon in his IMTFI research is an unusual one: the caterpillar fungus yarta.  He explained how his interest in "the experience of space and place" shaped a relatively "new project on South side of the Himalayas."  Although he hasn't "done focused fieldwork yet," the research questions began to emerge in late June 2013 from a conversation in back of vehicle going to Manang.  He described interacting with a "spotlessly dressed" man "just as monsoons were beginning." When he glanced down at the man's baggage, the man explained that he was going up to a remote region to sell caterpillar fungus, because he was told prices were higher in a remote valley than up in metropole.  Heimsath puzzled over the "weird commodity chain" of "taking something out and bringing it back again."

He described how Manang was culturally Tibetan but part of Nepal with a history of trade and smuggling.  Because of a large exodus to Katmandu, the region had "huge ostentatious houses based on money they made with international trade," as well as financial streams from trekking tourism and yartsa.  He characterized the area as "cosmopolitan for decades," because Yartsa was already comparable to the price of gold and"almost anyone can pick it." He described himself as working "in the footsteps of Anna Tsing whose 2009 article on mushroom foragers was formative for his work. He also credited the ideas of Tim Ingold on space and place as helpful for not conceptualizing them as an "empty passive category" containing place.  He noted his own "preference in thinking about pathways and movements," so that space was"always coming into being through pathways, movements.

This product of "summer grass" and "winter worms" grows in human influenced landscapes and yak pathways. Foragers never sell directly to the international market, because there are several levels of middlemen. "Exporters aren't even on map," because there are smugglers as well as buyers and exporters.  Yarta is used primarily as gift item among elites like Tsing's mushroom mappings.  In considering the overlap with tourist networks, he asked if it an intersection or lanes on the highway.  He aspires to do a "similar mapping for road the itself," because in Nepal half of all roads have been built in last decade in response to a "teleological development paradigm" in which "we build the road, and everything else will be fine."  As he exclaimed, "these networks existed before the road got there, and the money was there before the road, so why do we need the road?"  )He pointed out that hydropower was also as paradigmatic development project.)  His planned research would look at how the earthquake has effected all of this.

In the question and answer session, participants developed the theme of "following the money" and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in a group largely skeptical of the development paradigm.

Liz Losh's Guest Blog: Failed States, Shitting Grounds, and Ethnic Slurs

In the first panel on"Money Cultures: Identity, Wealth & Poverty" at the IMFTI annual conference researchers told stories about urban informal economies that might be at variance with the official narratives of international development, conventional charity, and even newer microfinance schemes.

The first presentation “Beyond the Failed State: Capital Mobilization, Investment and Entrepreneurship among Somali Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya" by Kenneth Omeje, who has presented at IMTFI before, and John Mwangi countered conventional tales of woe from the region about child soldiers and humanitarian catastrophes in which refugees from failed states never appear as economic actors and only take the stage as "poverty-stricken parasites" like those shown in this Google search for "Somali refugees" above. Instead Omeje argued that one could look beyond the one million "highly deprived" people in refugee camps suffering from the impacts of climate change as well as political instability to include the financial activities of 150,000-200,000 people in the densely populated suburb of Eastleigh, which is also known as “little Somalia” or "little Mogadishu" in the region, where shopping malls like the one pictured along side the Google search result screen present a very different picture of the Somali immigrant experience in Kenya. Omeje admitted that it was often difficult to study the underground economy, because it may involve piracy, trafficking in small arms or drugs, or other obviously illegal activity, but he also thought that the area was characterized by much more than its criminal element. (See this NPR story for more about these neighborhoods in which refugees and Kenyans of Somali origins co-exist.)

Omeje asserted that the role of community values, kinship ties, and Islamic dictates to use money to help others was often overlooked and that studying economic competition from businesses rooted in Indian diasporic communities and the ethnic Kikiyu population might also provide a worthwhile perspective on these transnational citizens and their economic behavior. The study of Omeje and Mwangi was based on interviews with 136 people, about half of whom were refugees. Others consulted included Kenyan police officers and members of rival Indian business communities. Because interviews often were conducted during business hours or broached sensitive topics, the data from the community was necessarily incomplete, but the researchers argued that there was definitely enough information to counter the prevailing stereotype of the economics of the failed state. As he concluded his presentation, Omeje showed photographs of a local branch of Chase Bank on the main street of Easteligh, fresh fruit hawking, a shot of First Community Bank, and a business plaza. The spectacle of dilapidated roads juxtaposed with modern shopping malls owned by refugee populations showed how the failures of infrastructure often coexisted with the successes of entrepreneurship.

(See this video of the Madina mall for more.)



Although efforts to "give the poor a stake in India's booming economy" have focused on giving Indian peasants title to the lands that they work, Syed Aiman Raza's study of landless tenant tobacco farmers attempting to capitalize on higher world prices emphasized the immediate context of decision-making in which the future may be less bright. In his study of 56 households, "Harvesting Death: Do Tobacco Growers Need Financial Inclusion? An Analysis into the Monetary Problems and Prospects Enshrouding Farmers Harvesting Tobacco in Basti District, Uttar Pradesh, India," Raza's claimed that his case study of Sikandarpur village shows that fertilizer input of DAP (diammonium phosphate), urea, or manure might not seem a worthwhile investment to farmers worried that landlords might evict them at any time. Although the area's Muslim farmers might have appreciated the 11% per annum loans offered by Purvanchal Gramin Bank, the cap on loans at 25,000 rupees might spur most farmers to also make agreements with money lenders, despite interest ranging from 5% to 10% per month if profits dependent upon the quality, color, and weight of their tobacco crop would benefit from the financial risk. Raza's data showed how pests and price volatility could wipe out even the most economically savvy farmer and how romanticizing financial inclusion might ignore the challenges of competition in global financial markets.

Sepideh Bajracharya's work on Nepali informal economies presented some of the most dramatic research of the day, as she attempted to explain the function of Dhukuti activities, which translates as "Treasury" or "Cash-Box," but may describe much less traditional economic activities of newly affluent Nepalis that model lottery schemes, rotation schemes, or bidding schemes that are characterized as "lucky-draw," "number system," or "releasing and eating" respectively. Her study, "Untouchable Wealth: The Moral Exchange of New Wealth among Women in an Urban Nepali Untouchable-Caste Community," chooses to present a somewhat different narrative about the sweeper caste Emukhel in the Kathmandu Valley who lived before the 1980s in houses of straw and mud once situated on a public defecating ground. These one-time untouchables no longer live in a "shitting ground." Instead their houses are of brick and cement with paned glass, closets, sofa sets, and gas stoves in communities with paved roads and attractive parks.

Bajracharya noted that although changes that generated this new wealth may be based on participation in the state and may be development-based, since city municipalities began hiring people as state-sanctioned sweepers, it is Dhukuti, or informal credit associations, often independently run by women in their forties and fifties, which inhabitants credit for allowing them to build and furnished their houses. She pointed out that there were significant differences between an "Economy of Need," which is an aid and development-based economy, and an "Economy of Pleasure" that is determined by access to and desire for consumer goods and services. She observed that the "pleasure element" of thrill, risk, uncertainty, risk, and flight marked the "late neoliberal moral economy" that she was describing in which social capital and income disparity may have served as critical ingredients.

Bajracharya detailed the activities of four dhukutis that she studied, which were based on rotation and number systems. Her informants were participants in both formal and informal economies who made little distinction between different kinds of credit and saving cooperatives. She argued that such people were most comfortable when their money is circulating, since there was a "certainty associated with a lack of trust. By not trusting any one in particular and focusing on "where you put your biscuit money," dhukuti participants might see enormous sums change hands. Bajracharya described wealth transfers occurring in "ten minutes" in a restaurant with "kebabs and dumplings." In this high-stakes environment, if you needed more money for the month, you would have to bid more. She observed that participants often adopted the same vocabulary as gambling, and that dhukuti might even be associated with dramatic murder cases, police raids, and numbers on the back side of an accounting book. Her future research would pursue the practices "historical dimension" and incorporate a "comparative perspective." (See this study for more about the practice.

The final panelist, Svetlana Tyukhteneva, regaled the audience with her tale of economic and ethnic difference in "Tell Me How You Earn and Spend Money - And I Will Tell You Who You Are," which followed the IMTFI tradition of presenting at least one paper about how livestock function as currency in households, as Tyukhteneva explained the value of camels and yaks, particularly at weddings and funerals, accompanied by a slideshow that began with an image of a man carrying a sheep.

The research idea is that the daily cash practices can serve as a symbol, marking the boundary between rich and poor, but also ethnic and cultural markers between living in the neighborhood of the two peoples. Their ways of making money, their methods of conservation, storage and use, the Altaians and the Kazakhs are different.

She explained the ethnographic value of certain stereotypes in the region, such as "Kazakhs bargain"; "they bargain at length." Furthermore, "if one neighbor buys a Mercedes, the other neighbor will do everything to get the same car." In contrast, "the Altai live poorer than the Kazakhs, but they sleep better." Such generalizations could be documented in more complex ways that foster economic understanding, and she provided copies of detailed accounting records of animals given in support of funeral feast as an example. Some of this cultural difference might be explained by religious preferences, beliefs and practices, since the Altai people were Shamanists and Buddhists for whom monetary passivity might be linked to their idea of fate. But her presentation that began with livestock reminded audience members of the built environment in which her subjects lived by showing graffiti on the wall of a marked that could be translated as "The Money is finished, Love - never."

Respondent UCSD colleague David Pedersen noted how these papers "set in the present tense" and were devoted to "identifying certain kinds of conjunctures" in which "when something happened, something else tended to happen," which could be visualized in "images and maps." He also observed how the papers did not work with the neat divisions of "public sector" and "private sector" that might be more familiar to Western audiences oriented around formal economies.