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

Getting to Cagnipa: Field Notes from the Bicol Region, Philippines

By Federico Jose T. Lagdameo (working with Bernadette Gavino Gumba)

Google Maps declared that the barangay we were headed to was just 14 minutes away from where we hit the shore. As I announced this to the team we all had a good laugh. There was definitely no traffic in this area, but to say that we would get to Barangay Cagnipa in 14 minutes was to presume we were going there by helicopter! We weren’t. We were going there on foot.

Cagnipa is one of the more remote barangays of Garchitorena, a poor fourth class municipality of the province of Camarines Sur in the Philippines. The barangay or village is among the poorest in the district. Cagnipa is located in an island where there are no means of public transportation by land. People walked. They climbed up and down the hills and then they walked some more.

Like many other villages in Garchitorena’s islands, Cagnipa relies on what the sea provides. People fish when they can, and when they cannot due to the easterly winds, they turn to agriculture. Or they leave the village and seek work elsewhere as carpenters, construction workers, house helpers, bakers, store helpers, or whatever employment their limited education and skill-set can fetch them.

Our guide to Cagnipa offered us two choices: we could either climb and cross the steeper side of two eastern hills that separated Cagnipa from Burabod, the barangay on which we docked; or we could trudge along a roundabout path that would take us through the seaside mangroves of the island (a muddy forest at that time of the year), and then up the promontory of a hill west of Cagnipa. We chose the latter, deciding that the sights were better on this route.

The route we took was also the one that most of Cagnipa’s children took when they went to school at Burabod. The one-hour trek tested our endurance. We learned that that many of the school children had to quit school because it was so tough to make it everyday. They then become like their parents: poorly educated, shackled to poverty and at the mercy of the sea’s caprice.

We were asked by our guide why were we headed to Cagnipa. We answered that we were part of a research team surveying the town of Garchitorena for interviewing its fishing households about their usage of mobile money transfer and storage, or what was locally called “SMART Padala.” We said we were trying to find out how many made use of the technology, what problems they encountered while using it, and what was their general assessment of it. Our guide nodded at this, saying that his cousin at Cagnipa was actually one of the only two mobile money transfer providers there and that the villagers found the service convenient in sending and receiving money.

Indeed, not only in Cagnipa but in all the barangays we had surveyed, the consensus has been that “SMART Padala” was a more efficient and cost-effective way of sending and receiving money from loved ones and kin. People found its process to have been convenient and fast, and relatively inexpensive. When sending money, the senders inform the service provider of the SMART Padala number of the service provider from whom the recipient would claim the money. In addition, they inform the service provider of the amount they wish to send as well as the name and mobile number of the recipient. They hand the amount they are sending—together with the transaction fee—to the service provider who then secures the transaction. Once successful, the service provider then sends an SMS message to those who had sent the money, informing them of the confirmation and reference numbers. The receiver also receives an SMS with a reference and confirmation number. Once these are affirmed, the recipients are handed the amount sent after the small transaction fee has been deducted.

The process, however, was not without its problems. Since mobile money transfers make use of mobile network connections, their reliability and success is contingent on these connections remaining stable, uninterrupted and available. This requirement is made painfully acute during periods of calamities such as typhoons when power and network lines are down and people in the islands need to receive cash support from family members, friends, and relatives. The  remote location of the barangays make it difficult for their residents to secure constant network connection for their phones. This problem gets accentuated due to the insufficient number of mobile phone sites or stations that broadcast the network signal or connection.

Having arrived at Cagnipa after more than an hour’s trek from Burabod, we immediately proceeded to undertake the survey-interviews of 20 fishing households, even as the thought of the return trip weighed heavily on our heads. We split the barangay to four areas, dividing them up between each of us so as to cover more ground efficiently.

Most of the men were out in the fields. Those we were able to talk to informed us that some were harvesting coconuts while others were planting crops. Others were preoccupied with bets-free cockfighting. Still some were in Naga City and Manila, working as construction laborers. It emerged that as the easterly winds prevented the fishermen from going out to sea, the meager income opportunities in the village and in the town had to be supplemented with work elsewhere. We learnt through the interviews that those who left in search of work sent money back to their families whenever they could. And those they had left behind found the process of receiving money from husbands and children abroad much easier and faster with the mobile money transfer technology. As one respondent put it, “It’s as if they were here, handing to us the money for food and our children’s education.”

In retrospect, our research yielded five major findings regarding the usage of mobile money transfer and storage technology by Garchitorena fishing households: 1) The higher the educational level of fishing household heads, the greater the amount of money they had sent; 2) The higher the household income, the greater the amount of money sent to these households; 3) The higher the educational level of fishing household heads, the greater the amount of money received by these households; 4) The bigger the size of the fishing household, the greater the amount of money received by the household; and 5) The higher the household expense, the greater the amount of money received by the household.

It was interesting to note that while higher levels of educational qualifications appeared to have a positive influence on the usage of this technology, lower educational levels of household heads did not seem to limit the its use. This could imply that lower level of education was not a contributing factor to fishing household heads’ use of mobile money transfer services.

By the end of the day, we completed our interviews and plodded back to Burabod to our boat and a rendezvous with the other survey team members. Cagnipa continued to linger in our thoughts. In this very remote area, where many lives are dire and destitute, life flowed on. Separated by the vast expanse of sea and land, families at Cagnipa find themselves comforted by the thought that during the time of financial need they could easily send a relative or a loved one an SMS message seeking for help. And this help could arrive just minutes away.

See the final report, "Storing and Transferring Money in Cash-Strapped Fishing Municipality in the Bicol Region"