Alex Yu

Ethnographically attending to the local medical professionals’ ongoing engagement in mountain medicine, my research project focuses on the making and remaking of human-mountain relations in Nepal. Under this theme question, I ask (1) what roles do Nepali medical and mountaineering professionals play in developing mountain medicine?  (2) how and in what ways does mountain medicine draw on, or against, previous medical and mountaineering practices in Nepal? Mountain medicine is a new biomedical domain that emerged in the 1980s. Derived from medical concerns and practices in the mountaineering community, this medicine redirects our attention to certain ways in which bodies have been perceived and enacted in mountaineering. In Nepali studies, the Nepali encounters and interactions with Western medicine and mountaineering since the twentieth century have long been important issues. Previous works, however, focused on either one and none on both; meanwhile, most of the works only looked at the time before the 2000s. By looking into the Mountain Medicine Society of Nepal (MMSN) established in 2006 and their ongoing efforts, my project hopes to provide a new entry point to think of the entanglement between various forms of knowledge and practices regarding environment, medicine, and bodies high in the mountain.