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Posted
on 06-Jun-02 08:56 AM
Sliding Down Hill: Some reflections on thirty years of
change in a Himalayan village
-by Alan Macfarlane
I first came to Nepal in December 1968 with my wife
Gill and stayed for fifteen months. We spent a year
working in the Gurung village of Thak, about five
hours walk north of Pokhara. I returned with my second
wife, Sarah Harrison, in 1986 and we have visited
Nepal and Thak for periods of between three weeks and
three months in almost every year since.
The first fieldwork led to a Ph.D. in anthropology
which was subsequently published as Resources and
Population: A Study of the Gurungs of Central Nepal
(Cambridge,1976).
The planned re-publication of this book by
Ratna Pustak Bhandar of Kathmandu makes it appropriate
to reflect on some of the changes which have occurred
in one village in the more than thirty years since I
first visited it.
This brief account, based on
arguably the most intensive longitudinal study of a
single Himalayan community ever made, can only sketch
in a few of the changes. We hope to publish a more
detailed ethnography, possibly based not only on the
extensive genealogical and survey accounts but also
the many films and photographs which we have taken, at
a later point.
In one sense, at least on the surface, there has been
little change in the village since my first fieldwork.
The basic agricultural and craft techniques described
in Resources and Population are still used. The amount
of labour input for various tasks is roughly the same
and the village lands shown in the maps to the book
have not changed greatly.
The main village and the
nearby hamlets are not greatly changed in their
physical form, though a number of houses have tin
roofs and there is now a diesel mill and two
television sets (powered by car batteries) in the
village. The track up the valley is somewhat improved
and it is possible to get a car to the bottom of the
steep climb up to the village, saving a three hour
walk.
The water pipe is larger and a number of houses
have taken small pipes off it. Yet there is still no
electricity, no telephone, no motorable road, and no
health post.
The children no longer have to climb down
to a school forty minutes below the village, as there
is a village school with five classes in it. There is
a government office and a large water tank with
watchman's house (unoccupied). The two 'shops' have a
much wider range of goods, including beer and coke,
than in 1968 when they basically only had tea.
The major prediction of Resources was that with a
population growth rate of over one per cent per year,
and a doubling time of thirty years or so, there would
be ecological disaster in this and other villages like
it. The already over-stretched forest and land
resources would collapse and the Malthusian checks of
famine and disease, if not war, would probably return.
One part of this prediction has been fulfilled. The
population of the hundred sample households in the
original survey has indeed at least doubled in that
period and so there are now over two hundred
households stemming from the original hundred.
Yet when one visits Thak itself, the village is, if
anything, slightly smaller in the number of occupied
houses than it was in 1969. The paradox is explained
by something which it was not possible to predict in
1969: namely that there would be very extensive and
permanent out-migration.
The pattern described in Resources was of temporary
labour migration, with many men leaving for army
service in the British and Indian armies. These
soldiers returned with their pay and pensions and the
profits from army service were invested in the
village.
From the middle of the 1970s, as army
recruitment dried up and towns such as Kathmandu and
Pokhara grew, the pattern changed. Waves of young men
started to go to wherever work was available. They
went first to India and later to East and south-east
Asia, the Middle East, and a few to Europe and
America. When they and the remaining army service men
retired they no longer came back to the village but
settled in the town, in particular in nearby Pokhara.
So there is now not only the core village in the
hills, but a 'dispersed' village of equal size,
particularly concentrated on the road that leads from
Thak into Pokhara. Currently, young people from the
village are in Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, the Arab
states, Europe, and elsewhere. If they are lucky
enough to make any money, they will invest their
savings in buying land and building houses in towns
and cities, not in the village.
The beneficial effect of this out-migration has been
to prevent ecological collapse. If anything, the
forest above Thak is in better condition than it was
in 1969. The tree cover is growing back closer to the
village.
This is the result of a slight decline in the
need for firewood and also because of another large
change, which I shall describe: the dramatic decrease
in the number of larger animals. So, although there
has been erosion and loss of some land through
landslides, the catastrophe which I predicted in
relation to the forest has not occurred.
The negative effect on the wealth and development
prospects of the village is, however, equally great.
These steep and rocky hills cannot sustain people at a
reasonable level of affluence from settled
agriculture.
In the earlier study I showed that over a
third of the total income in the village came from
army pay and pensions and civilian work abroad, and
this constituted almost all the cash that was
available to villagers. This has declined to a thin
trickle from the few labourers abroad who save a
little and send it home.
Furthermore, those with most
initiative and experience of new ways, who used to
return, no longer do so. Only the young children, the
old and the poor are left in the village. Consequently
there is little leadership and little experience of
the wider world, and few political contacts available
to the village.
The results can be seen in the material culture. The
clothes are often ragged, the number of brass pots and
cauldrons is much reduced, the gold ornaments of the
women that were so apparent in 1969 have almost all
been sold off. One receives the strong impression that
people are actually poorer now than they were then,
despite the massive growth of wealth in parts of Asia,
Europe and America.
Thus the village is not facing imminent famine or
disease, but it may well be facing malnutrition. One
of the major changes in the thirty years has been in
diet. Although new foodstuffs are more easily
available for those with cash, for example iodine
salt, oil and sugar, the basic foodstuff, rice, is
becoming too expensive for many villagers. Currently
only two of the hundred households in my original
sample area are self-sufficient in rice, a
considerable drop from the situation thirty years ago.
Most have to eat millet and maize for much of the
year. In 1969, most of the medium families had enough
meat and milk to consume one or both at least twice a
week. Now even the wealthier families only eat meat
once or twice a month and milk is a luxury for
everyone.
Since the mid 1990s we have noticed for the first time
that a number of the villagers, and particularly the
women, were abnormally thin: their bodies appeared to
be wasting away, with no reserves of fat.
The amazing
way in which villagers metabolize food so that a huge
expenditure of energy is possible on the basis of a
very small calorific input has long puzzled biological
anthropologists. But the limits seem to have been
reached and the people may be starting to starve.
The shortage of meat and milk is one aspect of the
most dramatic change in the village: the decline in
domestic animals. The number of livestock in the
sample area of Thak has more than halved in the period
between 1969 and 1999.
The traction power available
for the fields through the use of oxen has declined,
and the milk, oil, meat and manure provided by stalled
and herded buffaloes and cows has declined. The
Gurungs were still pastoralists to a certain extent in
1969, as they had been for thousands of years. By 2000
those remaining in the villages were settled arable
farmers living on a meagre carbohydrate diet.
The growing poverty is also the result of a third
major change, the decline in land productivity. Land,
which produced, say, 100 kg. of rice or maize in a
good year will now produce on average only a little
over half that amount. The decline in the amount of
manure, far from compensated for by fertilizer (which
most people cannot afford), is but one reason for
this.
Thirty years of constant use and the leaching
effect of monsoon rains have lowered productivity
hugely. Meanwhile, cheap grains from the Terai and
India have skewed the costs of grain in the village.
The total result of both local and national changes
can be seen in the rapidly falling value of land in
the village over the thirty years. While land prices
have rocketed in Pokhara, they have hardly risen in
the village.
Again, the decrease in income is shown in
the decline in returns on labour. The wage for
ploughing in the fields in 1969 was 10 rupees for a
day's work. The cost of a chicken was 8 rupees. Now
the wages are about 50 rupees and the cost of a
chicken is 400 rupees or more. In 1969, forty days of
work would earn enough to buy a buffalo. Now one would
have to work for more than two hundred days to do the
same.
Only one villager has enough rice to sell some, so all
of the clothing, education, medicine and extra food
have to be paid for from the trickle of gifts and
foreign earnings.
There is a serious shortfall. One
result of this is massive indebtedness. I was unable
to make a systematic study of indebtedness during my
first fieldwork, but subsequently we have been able to
make extensive enquiries. The results are staggering.
Almost every family is heavily indebted, often for
very large sums of more than a thousand pounds
sterling equivalent (over a låkh in Nepalese money).
Much of the borrowing is for special occasions,
weddings, funerals, and illness but the main reason is
to pay 'agents' to facilitate work abroad.
To go to
South Korea or Hong Kong or Japan (in all of which
most work illegally, so without the simplest of
safeguards) families often borrow up to ten thousand
pounds sterling (10 låkhs), on which they pay interest
of up to seventy percent per year.
For the Gulf
States the sums are roughly seventy to eighty thousand
rupees. Frequently the money is lost through theft or
police corruption in the country where the migrants
are working. In conclusion, then, while the ecological
situation is stable, the economic position of the
village has declined greatly and real poverty is
emerging.
The social and cultural situation has also changed.
When I first visited Thak it was a rich cultural
community. There were young people's associations (the
rodi), much co-operative labour, singing and dancing
in the evening, communal picnics and so on. Almost all
of this has gone.
So too has most of the ancient
shamanic tradition of the local 'poju' priest, who can
now be seen at work only on special occasions in the
village, such as the memorial service or pae. In what
is relatively a twinkling of an eye, after several
thousand years of maintaining a cultural tradition,
the old ways have largely been wiped out.
Ironically,
it is more resolutely maintained in the towns, where
numerous Gurungs associations are flourishing which
emphasize the older ways, particularly in the
impressive Gurung Centre (Tamu Pye Lhu Sang) in
Pokhara which is building a museum and ritual centre.
Thus the village has very few of the 'benefits' of
civilization-some plastic, inoculation campaigns, a
diesel mill-but carries many of the costs: alienation,
individualization, dependency, and corruption.
These
are features of town life as well. Yet these
undermining effects are mitigated by a number of
features of Gurung society, one of which is worth
stressing. This is the way in which the Gurungs,
mainly in the towns, but also villages, are
energetically building up a non-political 'civil
society'.
This gives them some control over their
lives and will increasingly strengthen them in
relation to factional politics and the power of the
State. The Gurungs have for long been noted for their
co-operative labour organizations and other ways of
working together.
In Pokhara the Gurungs of Thak, for
example, have set up a 'Thak support committee', there
are also lineage-based social groups which meet and
have picnics or celebrate other occasions and provide
mutual support, there are local groups of women (as in
the village) who raise money for good works, and there
are at least two main, over-arching, Gurung societies.
All this activity, which crosscuts lineage and
locality, although building on that as well, gives
purpose and strength to their lives. They support each
other in their migrations as they have always done,
and the demoralizing atomization caused by moving into
the towns is mitigated.
There are thus grounds for both optimism and
pessimism. At the end of Resources I was extremely
pessimistic, predicting mass hardship and little
'development' of any kind. Now the situation is more
complex. There are many successful Gurungs in the
towns and a number of the young are well educated and
idealistic.
It is in the villages such as Thak that
amidst the tremendous beauty and social warmth one
finds increasingly impoverished people. Many of the
inhabitants are now elderly or children, and the
proportion of poorer Blacksmiths and Tailors has
increased; all of them are struggling to make a living
from almost impossible mountain slopes.
Their backbreaking labour is day by day leading them
into greater debt and food shortage. Whether
electricity,
which is now about five years away in the most
optimistic estimate, motorable roads, telephones and
bio-industries will alter this trend it is impossible
to say. I would like to be optimistic, but the
situation in the village leads me to be as pessimistic
as I was in 1969, but for different reasons.
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