I am a first year PhD student in Anthropology at Rice University. Encounters during my research in the Karakoram region of Pakistan have led me to systematically question the relationship between glaciers and high mountain communities. Having witnessed cataclysmic floods in the region, the insidious shadow of militarism and interventionist conservation I want to understand the role of nonhuman-human linkages in navigating ecological harm. I want to listen and learn from the inhabitants of Hunza valley and the adjacent Shimshal valley in Karakoram.
These interactions have led to interconnected questions I wish to explore through my ongoing research: How do disruptions like the glacial flood transform the embodiment of shared experience between glaciers and local people? How does the transformation define their everyday lives and their paradoxical relationship to the state? I realized that a social system stemming from precarity and predicated on enmeshed glacier-human survival will allow me to develop a localized concern to shed light on the overarching notion of the practices surrounding environmental action.
Glaciers of the Karakoram live under the shadow of the militaristic Pakistani state, surgical scientific research projects, and unsustainable tourism. The people and glaciers refuse to be subsumed into the hegemonic project of Karakoram National Park which is a state imposition. I want to expand this model of political resistance by including the resistance of nonhuman-human corporeal bonds shared by glaciers and people by investigating the ways they elude aforementioned forces.
Glacier-human entanglements in modern environmental practice are understood in a binary where the glacier is inert material and the humans are active agents; the glacier, a mere resource that needs saving for human future. In such a conception glaciers are theorized as static materials that cannot alter the fabric of society. My project in Shimshal and Hunza paves the way to understand alternative models of nonhuman-human relationships in our contemporary moment of climate catastrophe.
I documented that the glacier-human relationship embodied in these valleys contains a sense of environmental stewardship emerging from situated forms of knowledge which could be seen as alternative glaciology. These entanglements have guided the formation of environmental frameworks and localized networks of support such as the Shimshal Nature Trust. Through my project, I want to explore the transformative potential of glacier-human entanglements in the Karakoram in producing an enmeshed self that is connected by material flows to its physical environment. I want to chart the currents through which such transformations thwart hegemonic forces like the extractive and militaristic state, and foreign interventionist conservation. Such transformation also provides a blueprint for surviving future climate catastrophes in glaciated regions. I want to put these stories from the Karakoram region in conversation with other regions like the Andes and Rockies. I am proposing this study because Karakoram has been left out of the conversation about the social dimensions of glaciers. A planetary comparative anthropological study will identify how stories that are local to glaciers can address the gaps within western knowledge about the environment and provide a framework for living on a planet in crisis.
Therefore, I believe that glaciers, which have been traditionally studied through “objective” and “scientific” approaches need to be understood alternatively to comprehend the differential human vulnerability of glacier communities and the more-than-human performativity of glacial ice in cultures.
