Caring for Glaciers

"This refreshing, honest-to-life portrayal of ethnographic moments makes this an essential book for anyone interested in understanding contemporary issues in the Himalayas and changing human-cryosphere relationships. . . . Gagné demonstrates that the region becomes meaningful through the entanglements of land, animals, and humans. In Caring for Glaciers, readers learn that the ethics of care, which maintain these entanglements, are eroding. It is therefore a sobering gift."—Journal of Asian Studies

"[A]n evocative ethnography of how the Tibetan Buddhist Ladakhis on the borderlands of India's northwestern frontier have coped with the dramatic changes in the context of their lives since the 1947 partition of India. [A] profoundly compelling story of how globalization, conflict, and climate change have transformed people and, yes, glaciers."—Journal of Anthropological Research

"[A]n eloquent ethnographic exploration of how ethics and morality are cultivated through the everyday practices of living in the high desert of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas."—Anthropologica

"[A] unique integrative account of generational and climate resiliency in the Himalayas."—Anthropological Quarterly

"[A] rich and timely ethnography exploring the ethical dimen-sion of human entanglement with the nonhuman world...The great strength of Caring for Glaciers lies in the depth of its ethnographic description, drawing out the entanglement of political and environmental factors in modern Ladakh. It deserves to be read not only by regional specialists, but by anyone with an interest in human relations with the morethanhuman world."—Social Anthropology

"A timely and important foregrounding of the complex assemblage of human environmental relationships in the Himalayas."—Mona Bhan, coauthor of Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene

"Karine Gagné offers a perceptive and ethnographically rich monograph to the growing field of borderlands studies in high Asia and boosts our awareness of the Human-Nature bond on these margins."—Jean Michaud, coauthor of Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands