Alex Yu

My project ethnographically attends to professional engagement in mountain medicine in Nepal and explores the human-mountain relations these Nepali medical students and professionals have created through their commitment to mountain medicine. Conducted between March 2025 and May 2026, the research focused on two major organizations promoting mountain medicine in Nepal: the Mountain Medicine Society of Nepal (MMSN) and the Himalayan Rescue Association (HRA). This project consists of two different sets of fieldwork: (a) Kathmandu, where I focus on the medical students and professionals’ participation in related events, and (b) Manang, where I am able to carry out a close participant observation at a high-altitude medical post. As a result, I have a three-month fieldwork in Manang, along with interviews with 18 medical students (including the intern doctors), 8 doctors, and 4 other people. After this year-long fieldwork, I come to see how “place,” rather than my previous thinking around “body” or “medicine,” becomes an overarching framework for my project. As mountain medicine in Nepal is a complicated network in which myriad actors have been involved in different ways, competing imaginations and concepts of “locality” and “placeness” become the main forces that unite all these actors.