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

which people f rom Tamaphok maintained and developed their know1 edge of
people, places and events in the world outside. This latter function
had developed dramatically in the case of Basantapur bazaar with the
coming of the road from the Tarai, and had quite radically altered the
role of this particular bazaar in the lives of the inhabitants of
Tamaphok ,
I argue that an outward focus and desire to experience the world
outside was an integral part of Yakha culture, and helps to explain
certain aspects of the migration patterns described in the rest of the
chapter. The outside world must, therefore, be included in the study of
Yakha perceptions of their environment. Similarly, like the other
environments previously described, their perceptions of it were an
integral pert in the formation of a sense of identity.
Migration and outside worlds are problematic for the researcher
seeking a convenient, bounded complex of people and their environment to
study, and hence are often peripheralized in anthropological end human
ecological studies. If a large proportion of the population is
regularly on the move, as the Tamaphok Yakha were, then it follows that
they will be experiencing and perhaps exploiting not just one but a
whole range of different environments. Of course, one could confine
oneself to studying an artificially bounded population in a single,
external 1 y defined ' 1 ocal ' environment, but it would be hard to ignore,
and would distort the picture not to take into account, the ways in
which a population spreads out and relates to external 'unbounded'
environments.
Works which have looked specifically at migration in Nepal (e,g.
Rana and Thapa, 1974; M.N, Shrestha, 1979; Conway and Shrestha, 1981;