Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas by Karine Gagné (review)

Karine Gagné's Caring for Glaciers is an 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. Emphasising the ongoing cultivation of ethical selfhood against the backdrop of two dramatic threads of change in Ladakh – post-colonial state formation and climate change – Gagné argues that the seemingly mundane activities of farming, herding and living on the fraught border between India and China are the foundations for a Ladakhi sense of ethical self. Based on arduous fieldwork conducted through the freezing winter in the high Himalayas, Gagné explores how people in Ladakh make sense of the vast biophysical, cultural, economic and political changes that they have experienced in the past few decades and argues that multiple and simultaneous forces of change have transformed the moral order of Ladakhi life. She traces these changes over time by foregrounding the voices of the elderly population in Ladakh whose agrarian and pastoralist way of life has been transformed by the increasing militarisation of Ladakh by the post-colonial nation-state of India as a mountain fortress against China. In the span of one or two generations, Ladakhis are discursively and materially transformed from passive and submissive colonial subjects of the British empire to "sentinel citizens" (72), ideal citizen-subjects for guarding the nation-state in the newly created border zone between India and China, in the harsh terrain of Ladakh.

The geopolitical transformation of Ladakh into a militarised border zone accompanies an economic transformation of everyday life from an agrarian and pastoralist economy to one where younger generations migrate to other parts of India, seeking different kinds of education and employment, which means they have less time for and interest in taking care of the family's herds and fields. This seasonal migration is made possible by the increase in connectivity between Ladakh and the rest of India because of state-led infrastructure development and is driven by the younger generations' understandably growing economic aspirations and the increasingly difficult subsistence conditions in Ladakh's high-desert villages. But this increase in connectivity for younger generations also leads Ladakh's elderly population to experience long, lonely and difficult winters and results in the rapid transformation of Ladakh's intergenerational family structures. Many of Gagné's elderly interlocutors report feeling isolated, burdensome and trivial in the new way of life. In parallel, a stark consequence of the changing way of life is the lack of knowledge that the younger generations of Ladakhis have about the mountain landscape, as well as a lack of familiarity with Ladakh's glaciers, which have hitherto been integral to routine Ladakhi life.

Glaciers, for Gagné's elderly interlocutors, are not simply a beautiful backdrop to their lives, nor are they seen solely as natural reservoirs of water, integral to the lives and economic well-being of their downstream brethren in the plains of India. They are sites of sociality and places marking happy memories of one's youth. Glaciers are intimately known through years of herding in the high mountains. They are protected by the proximity to and interaction with their humans, who know them well and care for them by cultivating a sense of moral selfhood in relation to them. Climbing a glacier requires enskilment in the mountains, which involves social relations and requires both physical and mental strength. One of the most memorable sections of the book (and there are many) is the author's attempt at climbing Shali Kangri, a glacier at high altitude, accessible only through a long and difficult hike. When the author returns to her host's home after having failed to complete the ascent, she shows an assorted intergenerational crowd of residents the photographs she took on her journey. Gagné realises that except for the older people in the group, few know the glacier with any familiarity, and most do not know the place names or narratives...