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| The Film
Himalayan Herders is an intimate portrait of a temple-village in the Yolmo valley of Central Nepal where Tibetan Buddhists consult shamans, married life begins by kidnapping the bride, and the nearest road is two days walk away. The community drama of marriage, death, and rituals is juxtaposed with the rich texture of daily life, both in the village and the surrounding mountains and forest where these pastoralists herd zomo, a cross between a cow and a yak which thrives in middle altitude pastures between 8000 and 14,000 feet. Culture change, in the form of a government primary school, incorporation into a national park, and circular migration for wage labor outside Nepal, is discussed by residents in interviews. A twenty-five year collaboration between an ethnographer and a documentary filmmaker, the film provides rich material for examining gender, culture change, religion, pastoralism, South Asia, and the cultural ecology and economics of mountain populations. It is 76 minutes long and available in video from Documentary Educational Resources. A 52 minute version is available for television and cable broadcast from me. (This edition is not for retail sale.) An annotated video copy of the all the footage shot to produce this movie can be found at the Human Studies Film Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. |
Click on the Water buff to download a movie. It is 3.5
megabytes and may take some time.
Making Himalayan Herders
Review in American Anthropologist.HTML
version or PDF version.
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| The Book
The book is a Case Study in Cultural Anthropology from Harcourt Brace (ISBN 0-15-50-5172-5). |
View an annotated and illustrated transcript of the film. This is a large single HTML file of a preliminary version. |