ZANSKAR, INDIA

Karine Gagné will mobilize her expertise on the insertion of the state in the rural highlands and border areas and its affective dimensions. She will investigate how for Zanskarpas, a minority population (and a scheduled tribe, as per the social classification system of the government of India) of Zanskar, a politically and geographically marginalized region of the Indian Himalayas, the upcoming Zanskar highway is presented by the national government as a source of aspiration. This implies consideration for how citizens are participating in the building of the road, and how they plan to use their expertise of the local environment to create alternative livelihoods at the margins of this large scale project in ways that may contradict the expectations of the Indian state.

Selected Publications

Gagné, K. & J. Lundup (2024). Snow Leopards, Checkpoints, and Roads: Negotiating Selective Legibility in Hemis National Park, India. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2024.2327390

Gagne, K. (2022). «Si seulement la guerre avait été un peu plus longue» : Géopolitique, routes, et infrastructure de la citoyenneté dans l’Himalaya indien. Anthropologie et Sociétés, 46 (1), 109–132.

Gagné, K. (2020). The Materiality of Ethics: Perspectives from a Himalayan Anthropocene on Water and Reciprocity. WIREs Water (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews). (Advance online view: doi: 10.1002/wat2.1444)

Gagné, K. (2019). Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Gagné, K. (2019). Waiting for the Flood: Technocratic Time and Impending Disaster in the Himalayas. Disasters. 43(4), 840-866.

Gagné, K. (2017). Building a Mountain Fortress for India: Sympathy, Imagination and the Reconfiguration of Ladakh into a Border Area. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 40(2), 222-238.

Gagné, K. (2016). Cultivating Ice Over Time: On the Idea of Timeless Knowledge and Places in the Himalayas. Anthropologica 58(2), 193-210