James Fisher’s classical monograph of a village in lower Dolpo begins – after an introduction and some background on the land and its people – with a long chapter on farming in the Himalayas. Only then does the author turn to the two chapters on tans-Himalayan trade that give the book its title. Tarangpur, as he calls the village, produces a surplus of grain which is traded for salt form Tibet. Fisher dedicates one to the salt circuit and one to the trade of other commodities.
The fact that trade is less present in the book than its title suggests, may be a consequence of the standard ethnographic approach of late 1960s. Choosing a village and staying put may be less suited to capture the highly mobile lives of traders. But the focus on trade and connectivity may also be less developed because Fisher did his research at a time when the Tibet trade had just lost much of its former glory. The book is a rewrite of Fisher’s PhD dissertation. He began his research in 1969, not even a decade after the demarcation of the border and the (at least temporary) collapse of the Tibet trade. In this sense, the monograph provides a highly readable account of a society trying to adjust to the closure that affected the the entire Himalayas.
This book, based on field research conducted in a village deep in the mountains of northwest Nep-al, is a revised, expanded, and generally overhauled version of an earlier formulation that was presented as a Ph.D. dissertation to the University of Chicago in 1972. {Fisher 1986@236}
The context of its inception…