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

These conclusions must have been to the despair of the funding
organisation and many social and environmental scientists, but they
reflect current thinking about the evironmenta! situation in the
Himalaya today. In similar vein Ives calls the 'Theory of Himalayan
Environmental Degradation' a latter-day myth which "must be challenged
at all levels" (1986:69), an argument developed in Ives and Messer!i
(1989). It seems there is a crisis not in the Himalaya so much as
amongst the region's researchers, a paradigm shift from certainty to
uncertainty of major proportions.
To support their argument that no-one real!y knows the full
situation, Thompson et a1 point out how expert estimates they collected
of such relevant variables as 'per capita fuelwood consumption' and
'sustainable yield from forest production' vary by a factor of 67 and
150 respectively, They argue that ' in coming to grips with
uncertainty', different methodological approaches might be appropriate,
They see a need to shift the ' locus of expertise' away from those whom
they call "centrist grand designers", able to work only with simple
problems, to "fringy tinkerers", better able to handle dynamic systems
(1986:150), and who would be able to incorporate greater portions of
what they call the 'natural : cultural template' into their analyses,
Enter the social anthropologist.
There are interesting parallels between the tenor of Thompson et a1
and the so-called 'post-modernist' trend in contemporary social
anthropology. To quote Marcus and Fischer:
The authority of "grand theoryM styles seems suspended for the
moment in favor of a close consideration of such issues as
contextuality, the meaning of social life to those who enact
it, and the explanations of exceptions and indeterminants