What’s in a tsam? On boundaries, networks and researcher bias in the Tibetan-speaking Himalayas- Dr Theo Hughes-Morgan (Cambridge)

In early 21st century scholarship (anthropological, historical, political) there is sometimes a tendency to portray networks as vibrant and positive, and - in contrast - to portray boundaries as conservative, stultifying, dead. Even when scholars have clarified the social potential of boundaries, as points of transition, this has often been done by transforming the boundary into a node in a network - in other words, by demonstrating that boundaries had positive connective potential, all along. In such cases, the fundamental evaluative stance is often left more or less intact: that connecting is good, and disconnecting is bad. This paper proposes that, in at least one Tibetan speaking area of the Nepalese Himalayas, this is an unhelpful analytic stance, and one that obscures a lived reality in which detachment is as important as integration, in social life. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork working with the Nyinba of northwest Nepal, the paper argues for a re-evaluation of the figure of the boundary, based on an appreciation of the figure of the Tibetan tsam. In so doing, it points to the importance of friction, and homelands, and places of protection, even within the heartlands of the trade networks of the Himalayas - an insight with potential significance across the silk roads, across Inner Asia, and beyond.