High Frontiers: Dolpo and the Changing World of Himalayan Pastoralists

For a study such as this, it is necessary to place Dolpo within a larger literature on pastoralism. Two theoretical approaches have had considerable influence in academic interpretations of pastoralism: one derives from social structural analyses, the other argues from the logic of ecological relations.¹ This account draws from both approaches to contextualize the herding practices and rangeland management strategies I observed in Dolpo. Common themes in pastoral literature—the communal rules and institutions that manage resources such as pastures, water, and fuel, as well as the social arrangements that organize labor and property regimes—are part of the story I tell of Dolpo amidst change.

Pastoralists is a broad label for mobile people who herd livestock in rangelands that have low carrying capacities and high seasonal variation in precipitation and temperature (cf. Salzman and Galaty 1990). Pastoralists rely upon natural rangelands rather than cultivated fodder to provide for animals, and move livestock according to the growth of rangeland vegetation. Transhumance pastoral systems are employed in mountains and other areas too cold for year-round inhabitation or grazing. In these systems, livestock are maintained by following defined migratory routes from communal centers to reliable seasonal pastures (cf. Tapper 1979). Transhumance occurs not only between altitudes but also across latitudes, as in the movement of Siberian herders and their reindeer between the sub-Arctic taiga and the Arctic tundra (cf. Montaigne 1998).

In Dolpo, transhumance is characterized by migrations between permanent villages and pastures at higher altitudes—a pattern more localized than the wide-ranging nomadism of Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1975; Jones 1996; Fernandez-Gimenez 1997). Dolpo’s pastoral movements are also occasioned by the onset of critical periods in the annual production cycle, such as agriculture and trade. It has been suggested that the German concept almwirtschaft is a more appropriate term to describe Dolpo’s agro-pastoral system. This term describes farming in high altitudes, which has gone on since Celtic times in high mountain areas of Austria and Tyrol. In this system, high-altitude almen (in the European case, the Alps) are used for livestock-keeping during limited periods of peak production; these pasture resources are usually located within several days of farming settlements. The Dolpo-pa themselves call their mode of living samadrok, which translates roughly as farming nomads.

The term range management was coined by Western scientists to describe the science and art of manipulating livestock and maximizing returns from rangeland ecosystems (cf. Heitschmidt and Stuth 1991). But what twentieth-century progressives called range management derived from a much older craft, that of pastoralism. As systems of knowledge meet in this shrinking world, they may act as a lens and a mirror unto each other. Thus, in this chapter, the “scientific” principles of range management can be seen in the methods that Dolpo pastoralists use to evaluate pasture conditions; conversely, local ecological logic may be compared to the rationales of Western (and Western-trained) land managers.

Land management strategies, especially in rangelands, must work within ecological constraints rather than attempt to overcome and circumvent them. Ecological variables account considerably for the internal diversity seen in livelihood practices among pastoralists, especially in the marginal and dynamic environments where they tend to live.

Rangelands in the trans-Himalaya are characterized by low and highly variable production over an extensive area. Dolpo pastoralists try to affect the magnitude and efficiency of energy flows by manipulating stocking rates, breeding patterns, the kinds and classes of livestock, grazing season, as well as grazing intensity. They focus especially upon herding and being mobile as tools to achieve a balance between animal demands and forage supply. Such mobile pastoral strategies increase harvest efficiency by constantly changing the distribution and numbers of livestock grazing rangelands.

Range degradation—effectively irreversible changes in both soils and vegetation—is a permanent decline in land’s capacity to yield livestock products (cf. Little 1996). A significant trend in the academic literature of pastoralism has focused on assessing the state of rangelands across the world, especially in Africa. Studies show that descriptions of range degradation are specific to local land uses (cf. Sneath and Humphrey 1996). Dolpo’s herders value the productivity, nutritional value, and palatability of plants rather than species diversity as such, and their definition of rangeland degradation derives from this mindset. They monitor range conditions closely and observe an increase in unpalatable grass species, or the drying up of a spring, with the same concern as any range manager. However, they may give a supernatural cause—incurring the wrath of a local place deity, for example—to explain these turns of events.

The seasonal dynamism of the pastoral livelihood, and the inherent instability of a commodities-based economy, condition a fluid social organization (cf. Irons and Dyson-Hudson 1972; Spooner 1973; Khazanov 1984; Clarke 1998). The flexible domestic organization of Dolpo households supports its pastoral economic pattern. For one, the large, extended households of Dolpo facilitate the multiple economic involvements that are needed to persevere in the marginal trans-Himalayan environment (cf. Levine 1987).

Generations inherit trade relationships, and young men learn the trails of the trans-Himalaya from their fathers and grow up trekking in caravans across an achingly beautiful and physically punishing landscape. In the meantime, at home, a young woman learns the chores and demands of maintaining a house, its fields, and how to husband animals. She raises her younger brothers and sisters and helps her mother. Household production in Dolpo is divided along gender and age lines. Children play, collect fuel, and generally grow up quickly, if they survive. In Dolpo, it is not uncommon to hear that a woman has seven surviving children of thirteen born. The older generations of Dolpo function integrally in the household’s production and reproduction and are often called upon to raise their grandchildren, especially nowadays as economic migrations take more young folk away from this region.

Pastoralists resort to mobility to deal with the risks attendant to environmental fluctuations. Dolpo’s pastoralists have adapted to temporal and spatial variability in forage resources by synchronizing their seasonal trade trips with livestock movements. As a pastoral strategy, mobility not only addresses fluctuations in biomass production but is also a form of social organization and identity (cf. Agrawal 1998). Mobility militates against too much hierarchy—community checks and balances are endemic to the collective organization used for caravans and seasonal movements.

Like states, academics have tried to categorize, pin down, and otherwise define pastoralists. Effort has been focused upon the nature of property relations (e.g., private livestock, corporate pastures) and the relations of production (e.g., labor arrangements, access to resources, social sanctions).² The crux of economic analyses has been to determine the extent to which pastoralists are “economic men”—that is, how much is pastoral production oriented to human nourishment and subsistence and how much is it oriented toward producing wealth and assets that can be traded.

That the pastoral livelihood can be seen as purposefully striving, expansionary, and aiming toward larger herds and families has been problematic for Marxist academic interpreters. Because of the volatility of livestock as a form of wealth, and the need for constant decision-making in caring for animals, a successful career as a pastoralist involves greater personal stakes than one in horticultural communities. I. M. Lewis has thus characterized pastoral nomads as “the thickest-skinned capitalists on earth, people who regularly risk their lives in speculation” (Lewis 1975:437). Dolpo’s pastoral economy is a hybrid one based on subsistence as well as investment in risk and expansion but is primarily driven by needs other than the capitalistic appropriation of labor and class relations (cf. Hart and Sperling 1987; Salzman and Galaty 1990; Aris 1992; Donnan and Wilson 1994). The distinction between a precapitalist, subsistence economy and a capitalist one becomes overly simplistic when attempting to understand a pastoral system like Dolpo’s.

Within pastoral systems, livestock play the role of money, media of exchange, and stores of value. It is therefore not obvious at first that there is a contradiction between pastoralists’ aim to satisfy biological and social needs as well as to accumulate wealth: biological and social needs are culturally constituted and do not prescribe any inherent limit to the use of wealth (cf. Bourgeot 1981). Livestock wealth, in turn, can be converted into values that are culturally defined. Livestock represent a hard currency and a media of exchange that is highly liquid (cf. Paine 1971; Ingold 1980; Salzman and Galaty 1990). Moreover, livestock hold an advantage over land: unlike land they can reproduce and multiply, but there is a continuous risk for total or partial loss (cf. Dahl 1979). What is critical is whether livestock conversion rests with individuals or collectivities, and whether these conversions are oriented toward welfare and security, political alliance, religious credit, or direct consumption.

Pastoralism rides on reliably maintaining herd sizes. The Dolpo-pa make use of their inhospitable environment by employing techniques familiar to Western-trained range managers: rest/rotation and deferred grazing, monitoring of plant and animal performance, and stocking-rate adjustments (cf. Brower 1991). Dolpo’s herders adjust grazing periods and intensity seasonally according to the life stage of vegetation and soil conditions.

In Dolpo, the value and condition of a given pasture depends, in large part, upon its season of use. High and dense grass is good, Dolpo herders will tell you, but animals also need browse, water, and shelter. A good winter pasture needs a windbreak, while suitable spring pastures are found on the southern slopes, where snow melts quickest and grass grows early. Desirable summer pastures have reliable water and dense grasses, which boost lactation and the growth of thick fleece. To these pastoralists, then, landscape diversity is critical (cf. Williams 1996; Fernandez-Gimenez 1997).

Dolpo’s herders mitigate the effects of concentrated grazing by moving frequently. They inspect their animals often to assess weight gain or loss, and take stock of dairy production, as indicators to plan movements to new pastures. Dolpo villagers augur climate and grassland growth first among other ecological indicators to judge how many animals will be productive—and profitable—in a given year. A householder explained: “If there is little rain in the fourth month, the grasses will be poor, so we sell our animals early. If the fourth month rains are good, we ride to Tibet and trade for more animals.”³

Pastoralists in Dolpo take advantage of the inherent differences in biology and grazing behavior among their livestock to fully utilize range resources. Animal nutrition and grazing behavior are largely determined by biology—an animal’s digestive capacities as well as its relative size and nutritional needs.⁴ In addition to the divergent nutritional needs and diet preferences of livestock, there are differences in their physical dispersal, which impacts forage demand and grazing intensity. In a mixed herd, livestock naturally stratify by altitude when they graze (cf. Brower 1996).

Diversification of livestock holdings permits a fuller use of the environment and facilitates energy transfers from rangelands. Dolpo herders capitalize on the differences within their herd (in terms of grazing behavior and physiological tolerance to altitude) to disperse animals and distribute grazing pressure. Complementary grazing by a mixture of livestock species better utilizes the total grazing resource (cf. Choughenour 1982; Mace and Houston 1989; Mace 1993; Miller 1999b). Different livestock species also succumb to different diseases. Owning several species makes owners less vulnerable to loss due to epidemic. Diversification also helps even out irregularities in the food supply, for livestock species vary in the times they come into milk, depending upon the length of pregnancy (cf. Ingold 1980).

Dolpo’s range managers use a variety of techniques to evaluate changing pasture conditions. Reconnaissance of the trails, water availability, and grass growth precedes any decision to move the herds. During the late summer season, herding strategy shifts to increase the length of daily grazing time, allowing animals to select the best diet possible. Grazing on seeded grass builds up the condition of the body so that livestock can withstand the long winter. Supplemental feeding during Dolpo’s long winter provides livestock animals with critical nutrients and calories when no natural supplies are available, blighted as they sometimes are by blizzards. During the winter female cattle are fed a daily supplement: a stew of sorts made of native grass and legume species mixed with weeds, salt, barley hay and flour, kitchen midden, and spent grains from the family’s still. Sheep, goats, and horses are also given hay, while crop stubble supplements winter’s meager forage. The annual journeys to trade for Tibetan salt are undertaken also for the sake of livestock: the Dolpo-pa feed their animals salt as a dietary supplement up to three times a month during the summer (the peak dairy production period).

Dolpo’s economic systems are not merely functional ecological responses to natural conditions. Social and political arrangements play instrumental roles in organizing and controlling pastoral production. Historically, a village assembly directed by a headman whose office is hereditary governed communities in Dolpo.⁵ These headmen were (and are) responsible for the administration of justice within each valley. In Nangkhong Valley, for example, three families rotated the headman position every five years. The headman mediated conflicts, negotiated settlements, and set fines for resource-use infractions.

The village assembly was convened by the headman to deal with community affairs such as setting the dates of agricultural activities (e.g., plowing and harvesting), travel to and from seasonal pastures, and annual trading expeditions. The position of tax collector (tralpön) was filled on a rotational basis by members of the assembly. The secretary-treasurer (trungyik) came from the spare ranks of the literate: one man usually held this job for long periods. This secretary was responsible for village correspondence, revenue records, and keeping property rights.

Historically, women have not had a position in these political structures, though their lives were certainly affected by decisions of the village assembly, which heard divorces, settled terms of separation, and sat in judgment on thefts and other misdemeanors. Aspects of these gender relations are changing, in certain respects, through the impacts of education and development projects (described in chapter 7).

An important accouterment of Tibetan culture, and therefore Dolpo’s agro-pastoral system, is auspiciousness. The dates of weddings, important rites of passage, and the beginnings of journeys all commence on days judged favorable, based on interpretations of the Tibetan lunar calendar (lotho). There are no weather reports to forecast storms, no market digests to show trends in wool prices. Dolpo has no radio announcements to predict trail conditions—whether passes are blocked or streams in spate. Yet the need for such information in planning seasonal movements and trade ventures is acute. A Dolpo trader may call upon a lama to perform a divination and name an auspicious day in anticipation of leaving. Divination helps an individual feel that his decision-making is being shared, assuring him in action, for, “in his world view he has been in touch with the supernatural” (Ekvall 1968:83).

Still, lay practicalities often drive the rhythm and timing of seasonal movements. Sometimes it is impossible to travel on auspicious days. However, there are means to avoid incurring heavenly wrath or bad luck as a consequence of departing on an inauspicious day. A caravanner can “catch the stars” (kardzin), and thereby trick time, by sending articles of his clothing and a few possessions along with someone who is leaving on the day appointed by the gods. It is even possible to “catch the stars” on important, community-observed days like the first day of planting. An absent landholder may have a family member plant just a handful of barley on the auspicious first day of planting and only later, in fact, sow his fields.

More than half of Dolpo’s precipitation falls during summer, so there is little moisture stress on plants during the growing season (cf. Richard 1993). Capitalizing on this synchrony, Dolpo herders practice a management strategy that applies intense grazing pressure to pastures during the rainy season, delaying the maturity of perennial grasses and supporting high livestock densities without deteriorating range quality (cf. Choughenour 1982; Perrier 1988; Miller and Jackson 1994). Animals spend the long days grazing leisurely and are milked twice daily. During Dolpo’s brief summer season, animals can gain weight and produce surplus milk.

Two apparently contradictory themes permeate the pastoral literature about labor:

One tells of the arduousness of the herdsman’s existence, conveying an impression of unremitting toil and frequent physical hardship. The other remarks on the leisurely pace…. [A pastoralist] has only to look on as his animals seek out their food and multiply of their own accord. (Ingold 1980:180)

All that time pastoralists in Dolpo supposedly spend “watching” animals is invested in the establishment and maintenance of taming bonds, especially important when considering the independent-natured yak (cf. Ingold 1980). Dolpo shepherds control the amount that animals can graze by corralling them nightly. Penning animals reduces the length of the herding day and allows households to balance livestock needs with labor availability.

How labor-intensive a pastoral operation is depends on the types of animals husbanded as well as on the topography and the kinds of vegetation (cf. Helland 1980). Pastoral systems in the Himalayas require considerable labor input and relatively restricted populations (cf. Crook 1994). In Dolpo, livestock labor demands many tasks: controlling grazing, protecting the herd, assisting births, rearing calves, milking cows, processing dairy products, harvesting wool, spinning thread, and constantly collecting fuel.⁶ Shepherds direct the flow of feeding, moving animals so that an area is evenly grazed. Most importantly, shepherds prevent the flock from scattering, since stray animals are easy prey for predators like wolves and snow leopards (cf. Goldstein and Beall 1990).

In livestock activities, extended families manage their herds in coordinated work units. Tasks like milking and keeping the hearth are divided within households. But the households that share a common pasture area will pool labor for collective chores like herding and gathering up fuel. Members of family groups take turns herding each other’s livestock, and neighbors will often jointly hire shepherds to augment their labor force. Herders are paid one sheep for every month they work, plus food, and sometimes a set of clothing.

Multitasking in agriculture, trade, and domestic production complicates pastoral life in Dolpo. A clear delineation of responsibilities and economic pursuits is seen among men and women, and livestock herds are divided accordingly. In harsh Dolpo, no hand is idle. Gender roles serve more to divvy up labor rather than unduly burden just one sex—the land is too demanding and survival too contingent on shared industry. Trade is men’s work, while women anchor agricultural and dairy production. Men also contribute to the processing of pastoral products, by participating in labor such as churning, carding, and spinning. Women are the bedrock of domestic production, while men are born to a life of travel—they move between entrep&ocirc × in Tibet, Nepal’s middle hills, and Kathmandu to trade in commodities and livestock, accumulate capital, and secure manufactured goods for the household.

While dairy production is organized around households in Dolpo, larger social units regulate access to natural resources like rangelands and water, and resolve differences within and between communities (cf. Irons 1979). Conflicts can arise in pastoral communities like Dolpo’s because households are operating private enterprises that draw upon public resources such as pastures and water sources, which are collectively controlled (cf. Salzman and Galaty 1990). Pastoralists’ seasonal mobility means greater fluctuation of members, compared with that of peasant communities, and therefore, more complex forms of community labor and arrangements for common resources (cf. Khazanov 1984).

In his landmark essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin (1968) combined images of the old English commons with the economic language of marginal utility to argue that there are irreconcilable contradictions between the individual and the group in commons systems. He argued that communal ownership of grazing lands leads to resource degradation: individuals will inevitably act on their own behalf and maximize the number of their animals on the commons. Others will echo this behavior where formalized boundaries and tenure are absent, and thus communal lands are more likely to be degraded; as a corollary, privatization would reverse these trends.

Social theorists have labored to deconstruct the oversimplifications inherent in this interpretive model of natural resource use (cf. Williams 1996). Yet the tragedy of the commons is still a dominant framework used by social scientists to portray environmental and resource issues; Hardin’s work remains canonical in the discourses of anthropology, sociology, and environmental studies, a point of departure even for those contesting it. As such, I have framed and question commons systems from this angle, too: the resource management institutions of Dolpo offer a test case for Hardin’s hypothesis and the scholarly criticisms used to explode it.

A few assumptions undergird the tragedy of the commons thesis, namely that the commons are open-access and resource users are selfish and not constrained by normative behavior. In fact, the term commons is itself ambiguous as access to communal land is typically regulated by social institutions (cf. Cheung 1970; Artz 1985). “Commons systems” and the social structures that manage land access and resource-use practices have been characterized broadly as balancing individual and collective interests. Academics focusing on commons systems have written about how communities allocate community labor, set management responsibilities, and designate resource-use privileges. Assumptions about the community-oriented nature of these systems have subsequently been challenged as romantic and simplified (cf. Godwin and Shepard 1979; Saberwal 1996; Agrawal 1998). Aware of this ongoing dispute, I describe land-use practices that I observed in Dolpo and the ways I interpreted these social systems as a result of my research.

Who controls, owns, manages, and disposes of land is an enduring question in the organization of economic production. Families, neighbors, villages, regions, and states must address themselves to large-scale, diverse landscapes and invent property regimes that balance human needs and resource capacities. Property arrangements can reveal personal bias and communal egalitarianism, wise use and shortsighted thriftlessness. How the constituent resources of Dolpo are distributed, owned, and managed reflects important systemic principles of this resource management system—in a land defined by scarcity.

Social systems, beliefs, and customs—sometimes called “resource management institutions”—govern the collectively owned resources (pastures, fuel, and irrigation water) that are the means of life in Dolpo (cf. Rai and Thapa 1993). Individuals agree with their neighbors upon a set of enforceable rules and regulations that control households’ access to and use of community resources. These resource management institutions act less as laws than as codes that provide incentives for self-regulation and establish guidelines for settling disputes. A negotiator—usually the headman of the village—sets fines, binds parties to agreements, and supervises payments (cf. Ekvall 1968). Penalties are in the form of indemnification rather than punishments, corporeal or otherwise. Enforcement of resource-use infractions comes not in the form of judgments, condemnations, or verdicts but in negotiated agreements consensually mediated by a respected community figure.

In managing land, power lies in limiting the access of outsiders to particular resources during specific seasons. Characteristically, permanent residence qualifies individuals for membership in the “user group” that has access to certain resources. Village-based land management systems like Dolpo’s depend upon community members acting as an organic unit that exercises control over resources. How would an outsider experience being excluded from the use of resources? For one, locals would refuse to provide food and withhold the hospitality that is so typical of Dolpo villagers. Instead, outsiders might choose to join bonded partnerships with the Dolpo-pa and thereby gained seasonal access to their resources.

Trans-Himalayan rangelands constitute a mosaic landscape—low in productivity, extensive in area, and spatially diverse—that lends itself to communal rather than private ownership and management. One ecological rationale for communal control of pastures in Dolpo is that the returns from private ownership of these rangelands would be slight in relation to the costs associated with effecting exclusive rights over such an extensive and rugged area. Open-access regimes in low-productivity rangelands (like those seen in Dolpo) are more efficient than those that confer exclusive property rights (cf. Cheung 1970; Godwin and Shepard 1979; Agrawal 1998). Social rules may be made in direct correlation to their facility in implementation and the expected returns (versus labor and time required to enforce these rules). Resources needed by everyone in the village, but whose productivity is diffuse rather than concentrated, tend to be common property (cf. Prakash 1998).

Resource-use rights have been used in the pastoral literature as a way to describe the community-specific concepts and systems that regulate the access of the individual community member to immobile economic resources—notably fodder and water.⁷ Historically, communal rangelands have been divided along the boundaries of Dolpo’s four valleys. Within the valleys, a household’s membership in the village determined its access to the local grazing grounds (cf. Bishop 1990). The rights of access to collective resources have been described in the pastoral literature in terms of kinship—for example, by matching territorial to lineage segmentations. Use rights to community pastures were granted to households that had a permanent vested interest in the village, as evidenced by property ownership, payment of local taxes, marriage, and so on. In Dolpo, well-defined rights of access regulate the use of communal pastures, and sanctions enforce these social norms when grazing rules are violated. In Dolpo, a household’s customary claims to pasture resources are kept in village documents such as tax records, census rolls, etc.

In a recent survey, Dolpo villagers identified more than sixty forests and over one hundred units of grazing land.⁸ This social structure is made visible by spatial order. Village and valley boundaries are delineated by universally known and recognizable physical landmarks: high ridges and river confluences, as well as physical markers such as cairns piled high with white rocks, marking off pasture areas.⁹ Abodes of place deities—often visible as outstanding features in the landscape—double as pasture and village boundary markers, too.¹⁰ Still, local understandings of these resource-use rights are multiple, as grazing privileges are extended to traders passing through, and to fictive kin—for example, during their stay in a Dolpo household, netsang partners are granted the right to graze their animals on community pastures.

Livestock animals—especially the wide-ranging yak—frequently stray over these communal boundaries. These infractions are tolerated, to a point, but forbearance can rankle and tempers may flare. Conflict is averted in Dolpo through a system of sanctions, whereby livestock owners pay fines that are meted out by village headmen. In Nangkhong Valley, for example, headmen impose a fine of five rupees for each day that an animal from a neighboring valley grazes on its commons.¹¹

Pastoralists in Dolpo recognize that range forage is heterogeneous in both quality and quantity. Pastures may vary widely in forage quality and access to water, depending upon where one encamps on the range. Given the disparities in pastures’ quality, and the relative advantage of certain camp locations, villagers in Panzang Valley use a system called lhe gyen to distribute this communal resource. Lhe gyen is the casting of lots for livestock corrals, a commons system that divvies out access to pastures by the throw of dice. Goldstein (1975:97) describes a similar system in Humla District: “The pasture areas in Limi are communally owned and each year lots are picked to determine which families use which pasture areas.” Likewise, Fürer-Haimendorf (1975:177) reports: “The use of pastures is well regulated, and such devices as the throwing of dice or drawing of lots have been developed in order to guarantee a fair distribution of resources.”

At the beginning of the summer season, all the households gather at the monastery to take part in lhe gyen, under the watchful eye of the village lama. Each summer pasture area is divided into a series of lots, which have local names and qualities associated with them (though there are no written records of these rankings). The names and locations of community pastures, as well as their qualities and seasons of use, are universally known and kept orally in the vernacular of local herders, especially women—the primary managers of village rangelands.

During lhe gyen, heads of households roll a pair of dice (made of barley flour) three times, with the highest roll deciding the winner of a contest. The villager with the best rolls earns the right to establish his family’s camp on the village’s best pasture lot. Ties are settled by a roll-off until everyone has been allotted a place to pen their animals and carry out dairy production. The lots that rank best are typically within a stone’s throw of running water; highly valued pastures also have nearby fuel sources like shrubs, making collection easy for the all-important dairy production cycle, which places heavy demands on fuel.

The pasture lottery does not allocate plots depending on the size of a household’s herds or the types of animals they keep. This ensures that wealthier households have no inherent advantage during the casting of lots. Lhe gyen is performed four times over the course of the summer, and the whole village shifts pastures and tent locations with each lottery. As the season progresses and grasses are exhausted, there is a steady movement away from easy water sources as the herds are moved to more distant pastures. The stakes of lhe gyen figure grow even higher over the summer since herding labor increases and one’s tent location makes more and more of a difference. Turnover multiplies every household’s chances of a favorable allotment during the summer. Not all the valleys of Dolpo throw dice to distribute pasture lots—each has a distinct matrix of range resources and, therefore, traditions of commons allocation.

The disposition of irrigation water in Dolpo also illustrates how scarce communal resources are distributed to buttress community life and ensure equity. Irrigation water is a communally owned, managed, and distributed resource, as villages usually draw water from a single source, whether spring, river, or reservoir. Water is a limiting factor for agricultural production in Dolpo, and most precipitation falls during the monsoon (June through September). After crops are planted in April-May, irrigation water provides critical early season moisture to ensure the germination and establishment of crops. The universal need for this scarce resource demands an impartial system of distribution—in Dolpo’s case, chu gyen, the lottery of water.

The natural terrain of Nangkhong Valley works against human habitation. Agricultural terraces hang off sheer slopes, houses edge out over eroded gullies, and trails are scoured away each summer by flash floods. Cultivation in Nangkhong relies on a series of constructed reservoirs that lie above villages and are connected to fields by a network of trenches and gates that divert water or allow it to pass. On a spring day that is deemed auspicious by the Tibetan almanac, representatives from every household gather, sit in a circle, and place a stone that symbolizes their house before them (cf. Valli and Summers 1994). The higher powers are invoked and chu gyen begins. Two large dice made of barley flour are rolled to determine the order in which precious irrigation water is to be distributed to fields. A village lama presides over the tense ceremony, and a scribe records the results.

Not every valley in Dolpo faces water deficits nor shares the need for an irrigation lottery. In the upper Panzang Valley, chu gyen takes place only in the village of Nilung, whose distance and location relative to the river makes water scarce. Dice are also cast in Shimen, a large village built on alluvial carapaces in the western reaches of the Panzang River. Water must be diverted high above the village, so every household in this village is dependent on a single channel. The water lottery also occurs in other villages of Dolpo during severe droughts.

Dolpo has virtually no trees, bereft by altitude, climate, and historical land use of these most useful plants. When anthropologist David Snellgrove visited Dolpo in the 1960s, he wrote, “Shimen is the most pleasant of Dolpo’s villages just because of its many trees” (1989[1961]:98). The few trees that grow—poplars (Populus spp.) and willows (Salix spp.)—are planted, irrigated, and guarded from livestock by stone enclosures. There are no forests in Dolpo proper: from Nangkhong, Panzang, and Tsharka Valleys, the nearest timber trees are a four days’ walk. Building a new house or community structure like a monastery is a daunting task in this treeless land. Intense negotiations precedes the purchase of wood from lower-altitude communities. If these discussions proceed fruitfully, a householder will then have to employ a gang of laborers for several months simply to acquire and transport wood, which is cut from forests on the south slopes of the Himalayas. These laborers will then hike along Dolpo’s precipitous trails carrying logs and planks up to three meters long.

The dearth of trees in Dolpo also means that villagers must turn to shrubs and dried dung for fuel. As an energy source, dung is highly scattered and labor-intensive to collect. Households with more laborers have an inherent advantage in amassing fuel, which is communally owned and needed by every household in the community. How, then, do villagers in Dolpo share this resource? Through rame, the sharing of fire.¹²

Forbidding as Dolpo’s winter is, it cannot be an idle time—survival requires a constant supply of fuel. Once a month in Panzang Valley, fifty or so boys and girls gather for rame, a community rite that helps distribute fuel resources. Each household sends only one member to collect fuel in groups for three days at a time. Households from the village rotate the responsibility of providing these laborers with food. Since dung cannot be collected during the summer, when it rains too much to dry patties, rame operates only between the eighth and twelfth Tibetan months.

Rame is based on a resource-sharing logic conditioned by strict natural limitations and universal need. With a member from each household in the village collecting fuel, distribution of this scarce resource is rationalized and even. Shared values and community homogeneity enable the close cooperation displayed in this commons system. Thus, the larger and spatially separated villages of Nangkhong Valley do not practice rame. While traditions like rame help ensure the fair distribution of community resources, they also shield the Dolpo-pa from the perils of this environment: working together is safer in this land of extremes.

To illustrate: one day, as I was visiting the winter herding tents in the upper Panzang Valley, a young girl was brought to our tent by her friend, who had been collecting fuel with her. The girl, no more than eight, was suffering from severe hypothermia, shivering, no feeling in her hands and feet. She had carried her basket of collected dung all day and become chilled, exhausted. By the fire and the warmth of my down jacket, the girl recovered—slowly—but lived only because her friends and coworkers had brought her to shelter, fire, and food in time.

Resource-use infractions in Dolpo (such as encroachments by animals onto agricultural fields) trigger community mediation and indemnity in the form of fines. These social rules reinforce individuals’ ownership of cultivated fields. But private ownership carries its risks, too—individuals assume all the inherent risk of Dolpo’s harsh climate, which pelts fields selectively with hail and freezes crops even late into the summer.

Village rules regulate user rights and access to communally controlled resources in Dolpo: violators are held accountable through indemnification and the pain of social censure. Social rules and mechanisms like rame, le gyen, and chu gyen accomplish a skillful compromise in distributing universally needed, environmentally diffuse, and scarce resources like water and fuel. These commons systems establish boundaries on behavior, delineate management responsibilities, and are integral with religious rituals, social hierarchies, and deeply held indigenous beliefs in supernatural agency.

The local systems of resource use and access in Dolpo that I have described are today encapsulated within larger sociopolitical systems (the emergence of which I discuss in later chapters). We will see how and why Dolpo’s agro-pastoral system transformed and persisted in response to closing borders, the extension of transport infrastructure, and changing resource-use regimes during the second half of the twentieth century.