Phurwa Gurung

PHURWA GURUNG, then a graduate student at University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Reordering highland territories: State-building, indigeneity and multispecies worldmaking in the Himalaya,” supervised by Dr. Emily Yeh. Over the past three decades, the commodification of caterpillar fungus has entangled the lives of humans and nonhumans of remote Himalayan valleys into a transnational market economy primarily oriented towards neighboring China. In Dolpo, Nepal, the fungus has pulled various actors and precipitated large-scale transformations, including state-led resource extraction and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Concurrently, transnational conservation actors have constructed the charismatic snow leopard as the poster child of national and global conservation and development in the area, also a national park. This dissertation examines the political ecologies and nonhuman agency of these two highly valorized species at the interface of state-led biodiversity conservation and Indigenous environmental governance in Dolpo to illustrate the overlapping processes of state-making, Indigeneity, and multispecies worldmaking in the Himalayas. Over the course of a year-long ethnographic field research at multiple sites in Nepal, the grantee carried out several qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, participatory mapping, solicited journals, filming, documentation of oral literature, and an experimental land-based education program. The research contributes an Indigenous-centric posthumanist perspective to state formation through conservation projects, the concept of situated sovereignties and emergent formations of Indigeneity, the agency of nonhumans in state-building and Indigenous identity in the Himalayas.