THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

This probably reflected not only an unconscious reliance on the 'magical
power of words' (i. e. ' if we say something will happen of ten enough,
then it will happen') but also that, with the timescale often involved
in making arrangements for the 'Third World', an over-tentative approach
in the planning phases c8n lead to even greater delays than necessary in
the unusual event of everything going more or less according to plan.
The Sri Lanka project was still only in the planning phases and, with
the considerable political unrest in the country at that time, there was
ultimately no greater guarantee that I would be able to go there than to
go to Nepal.
I finally decided that, despite my enthusiasm to do work of
practical utility for somebody else, I faced perhaps my last chance in
life to do research I had planned in a place I had planned to do it.
There were always shorter-term tourist visas and, if the worst came to
the worst, I could simply give up the whole idea of collaborative
research and sequester myself in a Nepalese village somewhere to
undertake some more conventional, if disjointed, periods of
anthropological fieldwork. Ironically, my intentions of doing applied
research seemed to be being thwarted at every turn, I did, however,
persist with the more specific propos~l Sean Conlin wanted me to prepare
for W S Atkins.
In this proposal ('Social Research in the Koshi Hills') and its
transformations, I tried to be as specific as I could about the subjects
I was planning to study and how I was going to study them. My expressed
interests included the attitudes to deforestation and reforestation
amongst local groups in the project area, differences in knowledge and
use of forest resources by different ethnic groups, and the possible