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 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