Environment, Culture and Livelihoods in the Himalayas
May 11th, 2011, Kroon Hall
The idea behind this meeting will be to bring together faculty and students from Yale with key colleagues from elsewhere to focus in a coordinated fashion on a variety of aspects of Himalayan environment and society for research and development projects. There appears to be a growing interest among students to undertake sustained study in and of the Himalaya across humanities, social studies and some professional fields. While the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has a long history of research and training in the Himalayan region, this program also aims to encompass faculty and students in the arts and sciences.
A series of new faculty appointments in Anthropology and Religious Studies has augmented the ongoing work of the Council for South Asian Studies, creating new clusters of Himalayan expertise and interest. We hope to encourage interested faculty and graduate students across these schools and departments to coordinate their efforts and collaborate to work as part of a Himalayan research and development collective on the Yale campus. We expect this Yale collective to work in partnership with colleagues in other US and European institutions as well as institutions in the Himalayan countries. The ambition of this program is to integrate work done in various disciplines across several loosely connected projects that in their entirety will constitute this program. Such integration, we hope, will make the sum greater than its parts. We expect the activities to focus broadly on the theme of environment, livelihood, and culture in the Himalaya.