15th IALS Conference, Leh, Ladakh, 19–22 August 2011

Conference Statement (download)

The conference theme, ‘Responding to Climate, Biodiversity and Resource Changes in Ladakh and elsewhere in the Western Himalaya’ is intended to attract papers that will address the relationship between biodiversity and its ecological, social, historical, and political contexts. We also welcome papers on other Ladakh-related themes, as well as papers on the central theme but relating to other Himalayan regions.

The interdisciplinary nature of the theme is intended to shed light from many different perspectives on pressing questions of environmental and human sustainability in the face of dramatic economic and political transformations. We welcome presentations that explore issues of biodiversity and conservation by embedding their scientific analyses within political, economic, historical, or cultural processes. Our theme encourages analyses that deconstruct the false distinction between nature and culture, biology and society, or politics and science, in order to provoke a deeper understanding of how these themes and their divergent discourses are related within Ladakh. As such, it challenges the distinctions between disciplines that create artificial divisions, thus obscuring the fundamentally dialogic relationship between nature and culture, or environment and politics, in this part of South Asia. Because of the complex and multi-faceted nature of the processes and challenges associated with this theme, the conference will be organised according to a series of sub-themes:

● Development and its relationship with biodiversity, natural resource use and conservation;
● Climatology and hydrology;
● Medicine, health, and ethno-botany;
● Migration and socio-economic change;
● Indigenous responses to change;
● Cultural change and heritage conservation;
● Cultural, religious, and political responses to these changes.

In the global imagination – from scholarly discourses to travel writings – Ladakh has exemplified the myth of ‘pristine nature’. This construction has fuelled a considerable travel industry while recasting its various subcultures or communities as tourist attractions. Among other topics, the conference will examine how this industry, development in general, and other drivers of change—e.g. enhanced natural resource use, the warming climate—affect the biological and socio-cultural diversity of Ladakh. It will explore how discourses of biodiversity or conservation may have served to create and/or reinforce perceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘purity’ that further disenfranchise populations either by relegating them to the margins of science, or by reinventing them as ‘primitive’ and ‘primordial’. This conference will explore the complex field of the ‘biosocial’ in Ladakh by asking how global discourses shape, or help produce, perceptions of nature, culture, biodiversity, and sustainability among the Ladakhi people. How, and in what ways, have discourses of biodiversity and conservation reconfigured social relationships in Ladakh in recent history? How do multiple actors within the household, village, district, or any of the governmental and non-governmental bodies perceive the intersections between people and their environment and with what ecological, political and social consequences? How do such perspectives differ across boundaries of class, caste, religion, gender and ethnicity?