Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes

Throughout the Nepal Himalaya socioeconomic changes are transforming the lives of remote agro-pastroal peoples, bringing them into new relationships with once-distant elites. Himalayan Households is a comprehensive study of the cultural ecology, demography, and domestic organization of one village undergoing these changes, the Tamang community of Timling. Faced for the first time with an inability to procure most subsistence needs from their local environment, these Tamang have joined the flow of people from rural Nepal who compete for wage labor to supplement their household economies. These changes are profoundly altering internal village relationships, which are organized by both marriage and an ethic of reciprocity, while simultaneously drawing Timling’s people into a labor pool where they are disadvantaged because of exposure to unfamiliar experiences. Tom Fricke explores the demographic roots of these changes in the social organization of Tamang economy and the implications for this population struggling with finite resources.