Politics of Scale in a High Mountain Border Region: Being Mobile Among the Bhotiyas of the Kumaon Himalaya, India

Abstract

Pastoral mobility in mountain environments always implicates indigenous forms of agency vis-à-vis the surrounding states with which people are interlinked, for instance through trade relations, contested border demarcations or natural resource regulations. In this paper, we analyse such interactions in terms of an ongoing 'politics of scale', that is to say a politics of the spatial dimensions structuring social life. Our case study focuses on the Bhotiyas, former trans-Himalayan traders who practise a sort of combined mountain agriculture in the high valleys of the Kumaon Himalaya, bordering China. The interdisciplinary approach foregrounds several registers of mobility, from agro-pastoral to ritual techniques and from property rights to ethnic identities.