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

questions at an early stage moving on to more fruitful 'mainstream'
anthropological fields such as kinship, ritual or religion as their
careers develop. Clifford Geertz is a case in point. His book
'Agricultural Involution: the Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia'
(1963) is in many ways a seminal work in ecological anthropology, but
one which seems now almost to embarrass the author. In an article
concerning the book and its critics written twenty years later, he
reminds us of the social milieu which led to the ecological discourse in
which the work was framed and asks for it to be seen as a prolegomenon
to the rest of his work on culture and society in Indonesia rather than
as a significant work in its own right (Geertz 1984),
However, in the Nepalese case at least, this passage of interest
appears if anything to be reversed. Thus we have authors such as
Messerschmidt wr i t ing about ' The Gurungs of Nepal : Conf 1 ict and Change
in a Village Society' (1976a) and then moving into subjects such as
'Ecological Change and Adaptation among the Gurungs of the Nepal
Himalaya' (1976b). One reason for this is that with the western
ideology of concern for the environment and its easy application to the
Nepalese case, there is an unusual demand for anthropological expertise
in the numerous development projects with an ecological focus in
N~~~ 1.23. Messerschmid t , for example, had moved into forestry by the
time of my fieldwork and was based at Tribhuvan University's Institute
of Forestry. Ramble, whose thesis (1984) was on Tibetan Bonpo
householder priests in Western Nepal presented a paper at the Oxford
' Himalayan Society and Environment' seminar (Hi lary Term 1991) on ' Park
Management in Eastern Nepal ' , based on research undertaken whi le on the
staff of the Woodlands Institute in Kathmandu,