In 1861, military officer Henry Godwin-Austen went on an expedition to the Mustagh Pass in the Himalayan-Karakoram region to do mapping for the Survey of India. His account evokes the emotional anguish experienced by the travelling party when they confronted the challenges of working at high altitudes and in bitter cold temperatures. It also suggests that glaciers had a significant impact on the party's emotions. When he describes crossing the challenging terrain of the Mustagh Glacier, which became unstable as the day progressed and the temperatures rose, Godwin-Austen depicts the crevasses as ‘ugly things to look into’, with their massive, long icicles that look ‘like rows of great teeth ready to devour one’. Adding to the apprehension was the sound of the glacier, which was ‘making most disagreeable noises – crunching, splitting, and groaning to an awful extent’ (Godwin-Austen 1864: 35–36).
Decades later, Italian geologist Giotto Dainelli attempted to survey the Siachen Glacier, located in the same region. On seeing the glacier in its entirety after cresting a rocky moraine, Dainelli is impressed by the size of the ice mass, which is ‘monstrous, not to be compared to any other glacier in size, but dreary, almost threatening in the grey light’ (1933: 118). Dainelli recalls a fitful night on the glacier when he ‘really “felt” how alive the glacier was’, his senses accosted by an endless, noisy concerto of large ice chunks smashing into a lake and the ‘tolling sound of flints in some crevasse’. Dainelli heard ‘a deep mysterious crash’ coming from under his bed, when a new chasm was created in the ice mass. The following morning, while the party was breaking camp, Dainelli stopped to listen attentively to the rumbling of the glacier, which he describes in rather poetic terms as ‘the thousand voices by which the multiform life of the glacier shows itself’ (1933: 142–143).
The production of scientific knowledge about the Himalayas has its roots in the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, when explorers like Godwin-Austen and Dainelli travelled the mountains of the Himalayas to better understand their flora, fauna, terrain and glaciers. Explorers’ reports highlight the centrality of the human body in how the mountains came to be known. Arguably, the human body itself was an instrument of knowledge (see Kapil 2002). The physical experience of engaging with the mountains was not dismissed as anecdotal. Allusions to bodily ailments, from frostbite to acute mountain sickness, are common (Fleetwood 2019). What is significant for the present discussion is that these accounts also evoke a sensory engagement with glaciers. This includes references to the sound of glaciers (Longstaff 1910: 636; Thomson 1852: 441–442; Workman and Workman 1909: 53, 81; Younghusband 1904: 212) and visual descriptions, sometimes couched in highly affective language (Galwan 1923: 102; Vigne 1842: 290; Workman and Workman 1909: 64–66; Younghusband 1890: 159). Accounts of glaciers convey the impression of being immersed in a living landscape, one that comes to be known through the connection of bodies, human and non-human. Here, bodies of ice, through their materiality, act on humans by appealing to their senses and eliciting a response.
The materiality of ice also had implications for the knowledge produced and its limitations. This is nicely captured by this evocative reflection by British explorer Godfrey Vigne, in reference to the glacier of the Brahaldo valley, which leads to the Mustagh Pass:
Ahmed Shah informed me, that he had once sent some people to follow up the glacier, and that they had returned, after a few days’ absence, saying that it appeared interminable. I should be tempted to infer, from the quantity of water which it sends forth, that a lake or reservoir must exist at its upper extremity. (1842: 286)
The very materiality of the glacier – its immensity having overcome the team sent by the then ruler of Baltistan – is such that the ice mass could only become known through the process of deduction. Prior to technological advances, knowledge about glaciers was circumscribed by the human body and its physical limitations. This differs markedly from the contemporary production of scientific knowledge about glaciers. Remote sensing technologies mean that this knowledge is no longer predicated primarily on an in situ engagement. These modern technologies are generally favoured over field research, which, because of the Himalayas’ challenging terrain, is laborious and time-consuming, requires significant logistical support and presents considerable challenges, including physical ones (Bolch et al 2019; Inman 2010; Sangewar 2012). Scholars have raised concerns about the outlook thus produced. For instance, Mark Carey and his colleagues take on a feminist perspective on glaciology and forcefully argue that much of climate science is predicated on a ‘masculinist reflexivity generating supposed objectivity through distance from and disinterest in the subject’, something reflective of ‘broader trends in Western sciences that have sought to place science at a god-like vantage from nowhere, ignoring both situated knowledges and the geography of science’ (2016: 778).
Technologies that allow remote visualisation also rework imaginaries about Earth, places, and their environments (Jasanoff 2004; Yusoff 2005). In the Himalayas, visualising technologies are central to knowledge about ice and ideas about climate change. Contemporary scientific accounts about ice depart from those of European explorers in that they are concerned with making sense of climate change. Knowing, in climate change research, is strongly predicated on technologies and models and the capacity to articulate a future through the accumulation of data. This inevitably entails the silencing of forms of representation (Yusoff 2009: 10–11). Understanding climate change through the scientific study of ice also entails a shift in scale. For instance, much of the research on glaciers is framed as a contribution to knowledge about something happening on the global scene, global climate change.
The ontological and epistemological work of the science of the Himalayan cryosphere is thus largely based on the construction, from a distance, of ice as an epistemic formation, a process reminiscent of what Lisa Messeri (2016) refers to as ‘planetary imagination’: scientists use images and data to extrapolate and make generalisations to make sense of an area or region. Through this process, the local becomes inconsequential. Speaking of climate politics and the spatialities of climate change knowledges, Martin Mahony and Mike Hulme note that ‘the field often disappears from view as the global climate system dominates scientific and political discourses’ (2016: 399). In fact, the scale of the local does not reconcile well with how science exudes its authority. Noting the marginalisation of the local in the study of ice in the Antarctic, Jessica O'Reilly explains, ‘scientists tend to be disciplined into this idea: to be local is to be subjective or anecdotal’ (2016: 29).
In this article, I propose a radical shift in scale to provide an account about ice in the Himalayas. In contrast to narratives about climate change that are anchored in a technocratic imagination, I foreground the scale of the body, human and non-human, in accounts of encounters with ice that, like those of Godwin-Austen, Dainelli and their peers, mobilise the senses and emphasise the capacity of ice to affect.1 Taking a cue from scholars who recognise the role of stories – or small and situated contingencies, as opposed to grand narratives – to make sense of the Anthropocene (Tsing et al 2017: G5), I propose ‘icy tales’, or patchy experiences of encounters with ice. In Crooked Cats, Nayanika Mathur uses the notion of ‘beastly tales’ to refer to stories through which people make sense of the Anthropocene and its implications for changing human–big cat relations. These tales, Mathur explains, ‘ground the Anthropocene within localized politics and eco-systems and can serve to relay the voices, imaginaries, and opinions of those people . . . who are already coping with the damaging consequences of climate change’ (2021: 12). Similarly, the tales I present are less oriented toward providing a clear explanation of the causes and consequences of melting ice under climate change. Rather, they are focused on the impacted communities’ appraisal and experience of these changes, which are an important aspect of life in the Himalayan Anthropocene.
In what follows, to capture the relationships between the human and non-human bodies that are central to these tales, I discuss the idea of ‘vital bodies’. The next three sections build on ethnographic material from Ladakh and Zanskar in the Indian Himalayas, where ice – in the form of glaciers, snowfall, frozen bodies of water – is central to icy ecologies, or relations between living beings in an environment that flourishes with ice.2 The first two tales bring into focus sensory mediation in engagement with melting ice, while the last examines the metabolic connection between bodies in icy ecologies. The ethnographic material calls attention to the relevance of bodies (human, non-human) in understanding climate change. First, it demonstrates the capacity of people, through bodily engagement in everyday life, to mediate global climate change. Second, it highlights the vitality of ice bodies. For in a departure from a focus on what ice is, or ice as an object to scrutinise, this article takes seriously what ice does. This entails an appreciation for the materiality of ice and its commanding effects in encounters with climate change.
Vital Bodies: Engaging Non-human Interlocutors
In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh presents the idea of the environmental uncanny to describe the capacity of climate change to have disparate and often improbable effects that impact the everyday, from flash floods and landslides to persistent droughts. The manifestations of climate change are not just strange because they are unknown, Ghosh explains, ‘their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors’ (2016: 40). The notion of the uncanny is particularly useful in considering how Ladakhis and Zanskarpas are pondering changes in the environment. Over the past two decades, the non-human interlocutors of climate change have been materialising in various ways. In 2010, Ladakh saw massive floods following a cloudburst, which claimed the lives of hundreds. Five years later, a landslide dammed a river in the high mountains of Zanskar, and eventually led to a destructive flood (Gagné 2019a). But climate change does not always manifest itself in spectacular events. It is also tangible in slow processes like glacier recession or reduced snowfalls, along with their cascading effects. What also makes climate change uncanny is that it is ‘so broad and capacious that it touches nearly everything’ (Peterson and Brennan 2020: 373). Thus, at once elusive and hyper-real, the environmental uncanny is nonetheless tangible through the material consequences of climate change. It is in their capacity to interact with and be affected by this non-human interlocutor that Ladakhis and Zanskarpas are making sense of climate change, from visceral feelings to the negotiation of its consequences.
Ghosh's notion of the uncanny aligns with what scholars have forcefully argued, namely that climate change cannot be reduced to a single thing, as it is enmeshed in several connections that are not always apparent, therefore making it an elusive phenomenon (Hulme 2009; Latour 2017). Timothy Morton's notion of ‘hyperobject’ is an apt framework to think about climate change (see Baldwin 2017; Boulton 2016), an idea that Morton certainly engages with, though through the notion of global warming.3 Morton describes hyperobjects as ‘things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ (2013: 1) and that, owing to their characteristics, remain inaccessible to humans. In the tales I present, climate change resonates with Morton's hyperobject. For one, these tales are not based on an engagement with climate change in its entirety. Profoundly local, they do not allow us to grasp the distribution of climate change across multiple geographies. Moreover, they are not predicated on an engagement with climate change as a thing, an object, but rather on the experience of climate change through a mediating object, ice. However, these tales contrast with the hyperobjects described by Morton, which emphasise unknowability and human powerlessness.4 Rather, these tales foreground human agency in knowing climate change, a capacity predicated on a relational and intimate knowledge about the environment (Raffles 2002).5
Understanding placed-based knowledge about the environment requires attention to the sensory experiences of the environment (Ingold 2000; Pálsson 1994). These same experiences are equally central to how impacted communities are making sense of climate change in the day-to-day (Kunuk and Mauro 2010; Rudiak-Gould 2013). A situated account of climate change can start from the human body. As the anthropology of the body and sensorial anthropology have demonstrated, the body is ‘a locus from which our experience of the world is arrayed . . . it is a living entity by which, and through which, we actively experience the world’ (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 89). This is well illustrated by ethnographic studies of sensory experiences of the environment. For instance, Phillip Vannini and his colleagues examine the multisensorial experience of ordinary weather, something that ‘cannot be understood in abstraction from the self . . . and the sensual and affective body’ (2012: 361–362). Nicholas Shapiro (2015) and Nerea Calvillo (2018) describe similar bodily engagements, delving into how people are attuning to toxic and polluted environments. Furthermore, Laurie Willis (2018) and Assa Doron (2021) focus on olfactory experiences, demonstrating how the senses can be central to the more-than-human relations that characterise engagement with polluted landscapes. Significantly, these studies demonstrate that we are ‘becoming with’ (Haraway 2013) the environment, something that is not a passive experience but takes place through bodily awareness.
Bodily and sensorial dispositions also allow people to develop sensitivities to and embody changes in the environment under climate change, from the physical experience of suffocation in cities during warmer summers (Singer et al 2016; Wainwright 2017) to emotional distress linked to a sense of place (Brugger et al 2013; Drew 2013; Tschakert et al 2013). The locus of the body also highlights the importance of the senses in engaging with climate change; indeed, all the senses can be engaged – sight (Orlove et al 2008), taste (Arceño 2020), touch (O'Reilly 2016), hearing (Peterson and Brennan 2020) and smell (Fallik 2022). Overall, these studies demonstrate how our bodies are profoundly implicated in climate change. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Walker (2014) even put forth our bodies as ‘archives of climate’. Based on Stacy Alaimo's (2010) reflection on the material connections between human bodies and non-human nature, they propose considering our bodily capacity to register the changes in the weather and the climate over time as experiences of transcorporality. These embodied experiences are also linked to ethical considerations. Conceptually, they bring to the forefront the agency of non-human nature in a way that demands the recognition of the permeability of the human body, that is, that nature acts on us and forces us to respond. The ensuing sense of shared presence challenges a human exceptionalism predicated on agency (Neimanis and Walker 2014: 563–564; Peterson and Brennan 2020). In terms of lived experiences, to feel that one's body is responding to and sometimes struggling with changes in the environment raises questions of why certain lives are more affected in place and time than others (Shapiro 2015; Willis 2018).
Non-human bodies are also affected by climate change. To understand ‘how people mediate between climate change at once lived and unfathomable’, O'Reilly proposes a material approach to nature, one focused on ice. This entails recognising that ‘ice is a substance of climate’ that is ‘material with physical properties as well as less tangible signals and effects that require experience to understand’ (2018: 1). It is this very materiality that ‘makes climate change palpable and comprehensive’ (O'Reilly 2018: 4). Beyond scrutinising ice as an object to decipher, considering ice as a climate substance requires an appreciation for the vitality of ice. The work of Jane Bennett is particularly relevant here. Bennett (2010) proposes considering the vitality of matter and things to capture how the material world has an inherent vitality, or a form of agency. This agency is not actualised through the imbrication of non-human objects into networks of relationships – as a Latourian model would have it – but is inherent to objects, a part of their ontology (Bennett 2010: xii).
Challenging human-centric frameworks for the capacity to have physical energy and to affect people and processes accordingly, this work provides fertile ground to consider an intimate account of engagement with ice. For instance, the European explorers’ accounts cited above show how ice has a vitality – or, to quote Bennett (2010: viii), it has a ‘vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans’. In these accounts, ice is a vital body: a lively non-human object, it has, by means of its material and physical energy, the capacity to affect humans by engaging the senses and stimulating the imagination.
Ice vitality takes various forms. For instance, while ice has long been considered an inert substance in the traditional scientific understanding of ice, contemporary research provides a contrasting account, showing that ice also affords organic life within its very body, by holding a host of microbes (Simonetti 2022). But the aspect of vitality that I want to focus on here is the capacity of ice to affect bodies, which has effects that also extend beyond the bounded nature of ice as an object. Icy bodies have vitality because they can absorb atmospheric conditions and grow, live and vanish in relation to earthly processes. In Ladakh and Zanskar, this takes place as part of an icy ecology and through a metabolic connection between bodies and the environment. As glaciers and snowfall accumulations seasonally melt, they provide water for the crops and replenish the pastures that feed the animals. That climate change has an immediate impact on living bodies – plants and animals – is frequently evoked by Ladakh and Zanskar farmers and herders when observing the depletion of pastures due to a lack of snowfall, or the changing quality of the crops during periods of water stress. This in turn has implications for the transformation of bodies, with domesticated animals becoming weaker as they feed on less nutritious pastures. Overall, these observations further call attention to the uncanniness of climate change, which is not always experienced as a coherent narrative and through concrete events, but also in sporadic, patchy, mediated effects that are sometimes slow-paced and mundane in their manifestations.
A Tale of a Frozen River
With no road open in winter, travel within and outside the Zanskar region has until recently been along the Chadar, the name given to the Zanskar River once it freezes in winter.6 The journey to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, takes about seven days from Padum.7 Decades ago, the Chadar was fundamental to the butter trade conducted by Zanskarpas (Crowden 2020). Today, adventure tourism is the only commercial activity linked to the Chadar. A trip on the Chadar involves careful planning and requires an experienced guide. Once travellers are in the narrow gorge of the Zanskar River, they must attune to the river and its environment. Along the way, sleeping in caves or tents is the only option. Any weather changes can have dramatic consequences for travellers.
Gyatso made his first journey along the Chadar about three decades ago, when he was seventeen. He learned to read the frozen river from veteran travellers. One of the main dangers on the Chadar is the possibility of slipping towards open water. To avoid this, one must develop the proper walking technique, which requires unlearning regular walking. In slippery areas, travellers must slide their feet so that they always maintain contact with the ice. The tactile quality of the ice is also sensed through the feet. In the past, Zanskarpas used to wear pabu, woollen shoes with a flat leather sole. When a firm grip was required, a piece of cloth would be wrapped around the pabu. Though boots with crampons are now available, Gyatso still prefers to wear pabu because they allow him to better sense the ice. A walking stick is also helpful for balance, especially when the ice is smooth and slippery.
Ice on the Chadar is always changing. To be able to read the river is to take part in what Eduardo Kohn (2013) describes as more-than-human semiotics, not rooted in the animacy of a forest, but in this case in the vital materiality of ice. The ice is repeatedly sounded (especially by the person in the lead) by tapping the ice surface with a walking stick (Figure 1). If the ice is strong, the sound is loud; if the ice is weak, the sound is faint. Because the sound of ice must be constantly monitored, Gyatso likes to remain silent on the Chadar. This also allows him to listen for the flow of water under the ice. If water can be heard, the ice is thin. If the flow of water under the ice sheet is strong, ‘then it is the end’, Gyatso dramatically declares. The ice is also visually read. The Zanskar River is sinuous and needs to be crossed several times to avoid unstable areas, especially at river bends. One must scan the horizon to look for thick ice. Thick and thin ice can be differentiated by its colour: when the ice is thick, cracks are wide and white, and the ice is opaque and white. When the ice is thin, the cracks are small and the ice is clear, revealing the river's bluish colour.
Sensing the Ice on the Chadar. Photo credit: Stanzin Angchuk, 2019.
Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 1; 10.3167/saas.2024.320103
Travelling the Chadar can be risky. There are many stories of people being trapped in caves for days when the river becomes too powerful. In the narrow canyon of the Zanskar River, avalanches can be fatal. They can engulf travellers or leave them trapped in one spot for days. Today, avalanches are far less frequent, but other changes are complicating the trek. Gyatso believes that the destructive flow of the 2015 flood (see above) has changed the river's morphology. With the flood, the riverbank has changed, forcing travellers to find new places to cross.
On the Chadar, a series of warmer days signal trouble ahead. If the river rises by a few inches, the icy path along the riverbank will become narrow, sometimes preventing passage. But experts know how to make the ice grow. When this happens, sticks are planted in the streambed, and the floating ice slowly accumulates, allowing passage again after a few days. Warming weather can also make the water spill over the frozen parts of the river. A new layer of ice then forms, making it practically impossible to read the Chadar, visually and sonorously. When the ice rapidly becomes thin, vulnerability to what is feared the most, ice giving under one's feet, increases. Someone who falls into the water will be pushed under the ice by the merciless flow. Gyatso is still haunted by the cracking sound of the ice that once broke under his feet. Had a fellow traveller not been quick enough to grab his walking stick, Gyatso thinks he would have perished.
Today, the conditions associated with warming weather are increasingly common. Elders used to say that if the Chadar is good, it barely has any water, only in steep areas, where the river current is fast. According to regular travellers on the Chadar, the river's water level is much lower now because of dryer winters. Decades back, Gyatso would sometimes struggle to walk on the river, with the snow reaching above his knees. This also impacts the ice conditions. Today, the stretches of open water often exceed frozen areas. The window for travelling the Chadar has also become shorter, often preventing travel in March.
Many travellers fear journeying on the Chadar. Nawang undertook the trip for the first time in the winter of 2019, when he had to travel from Leh, where he was working, to help his wife, who was sick and alone with their two young children in Zanskar. Nawang remembers how his body trembled with a fear that never dissipated during the journey. While trekking the Chadar has become a popular adventure tourism destination, and while for Gyatso, the river is a source of income, for others, like Nawang, it is an unavoidable necessity. There are many reasons why people need to trek the Chadar: to seek medical services, return to school after the winter break, or meet family members. A lifeline with the rest of India, the river, as a frozen body, is therefore an essential infrastructure. But it is also a ‘vital infrastructure’ as per a socio-technical approach, which recognises the agency of the material that forms infrastructure and its capacity to mediate relations between humans and the environment (Fredericks 2014; see also Anand 2017).
For many, this vital infrastructure is indicative of the marginalisation of the region. For decades, Zanskarpas have been asking for an all-weather road. Initiated in the 1970s, the Zanskar highway should address this issue, but its construction is proceeding at a snail's pace and is regularly stalled for months. This was brought to the attention of the media in 2018, when a student perished on the Chadar while travelling from Leh to Jammu. The ice broke under her feet and the river swallowed her up. The tragic incident profoundly affected the community. On Facebook and in conversations, people talked about how the young woman was a victim of the state's neglect of the region. Writing for the State Times, a local activist noted how India's modernisation discourse should not only be about high technologies but also ‘about a marginalized population of Zanskar struggling to get basic road connectivity’ (Dorje 2018: np). Although accidents have always happened on the Chadar, Gyatso feels they are more frequent today. In his view, they cannot be dissociated from the changing ice conditions on the Chadar due to warming temperatures.
A Tale of Silent Glaciers
In her acclaimed book Do Glaciers Listen? (2005), Julie Cruikshank describes how in Tinglit epistemology, the land listens and responds, something manifested in the behaviour of glaciers. Appreciating the Tinglit perspective on glaciers entails recognising an ontological plurality, rather than relegating this epistemology to a different worldview (Kohn 2013: 10). Glaciers, for the Indigenous communities living near the Mount Saint Elias ranges in what is now Alaska, British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, are more than matter. They are also animate sentient beings that heed human behaviour. Accounts of colonial encounters suggest that the presence of European settlers and their unfamiliar practices did not leave glaciers indifferent. But glaciers not only listen, they also make themselves heard, such as when they responded to this unfamiliar presence by surging. Glacier surges, Cruikshank explains, profoundly appeal to the senses:
Visually, they are spectacular. Aurally, they are alarmingly noisy. Hunters, scientists, hikers, and Aboriginal elders all remark on the thunderous cracking and explosive noises they make. Tactile imagery is central to many stories that portray glaciers as bitterly cold but also, surprisingly, as emitting unbearable heat. (2005: 69)
Ice, as a vital body, had the capacity to affect. Its movements, taking place during a critical historical conjecture, and noticeable in its barrage of the senses, had a particular resonance for the Tinglit communities.
The liveliness of ice, manifested in the sounds it emits, and its relevance for our understanding of a world transformed by climate change, has garnered increasing interest among social scientists (Spray 2012), earth scientists (Glowacki et al 2015) and artists (Schuppli 2021). Captured through field recording, the sounds of glaciers are also seen as communicating something about human behaviour – here anthropogenic climate change. Beyond sound extraction, Peterson and Brennan (2020) propose a sonic ethnography that focuses on listening as a mode of attuning to sounds in everyday life, one that allows us to sense climate change. Peterson and Brennan's proposition, in its focus on the lived and sensorial experience and its departure from an emphasis on the visual aspects of climate change – especially when it comes to receding glaciers – is particularly relevant to how Himalayan herders encounter climate change.
Through their movement in the mountains, herders sometimes come into close contact with glaciers. As I have reported elsewhere, a noticeable feature of these close contacts with glaciers is their sonorous aspect (Gagné 2019b). The same sounds also allow herders to encounter climate change. Near the village of Nye in the Sham area of Ladakh, there is a glacier named Chilchil, an onomatopoeia that imitates the sound of the glacier.8 Tsering Dolma, a woman in her seventies, spent years grazing her livestock in the mountains. One day, she reached what she described as the ‘vein’ of the glacier. Leading to the glacier was a very steep gorge and from there was always a loud, steadily echoing ‘bong, bong’ sound; Tsering Dolma suggested that this could have been created by the water inside the glacier. About three decades ago, some herders started to share unbelievable news about Chilchil. Tsering Dolma went to see for herself: the glacier had receded considerably and had become silent. Many in Nye saw in this a failure to pray to the local deities, a consequence of people's increasing self-centredness. ‘If the deities are happy, then the glacier is good’, explains the woman.
Similarly, the village of Tahan in Zanskar used to be bounded by the massive glacier of Rimali Mountain, the terminus of which used to be a few metres from Sonam Paldan's house. From his land, the man could hear the glacier's cracking sounds, which were always louder in summer. Extremely feared by villagers, the most dramatic of these sounds would be that of avalanches. In the 1980s, one such avalanche destroyed the lower part of nearby Shagar village. Avalanches were more common in the past, and today they are a rare occurrence. The glacier has receded tremendously since Sonam Paldan's youth. It has also become silent. The octogenarian finds the glacier's stillness unsettling: ‘It is as if the glacier has become old, like me.’ In the past, people would pray to Omasi Lhamo, a local deity, so that the winter would bring enough snow for the glacier to be healthy. But today, ‘people don't do this, they don't have time and they are not really interested’, laments the man. His reflection echoes those of many of his generation, who feel that the increasing interest for material gain is detrimental to a sacred geography. Just as for Cruikshank's interlocutors, for Sonam Paldan and Tsering Dolma, the state of glaciers is closely connected to people's behaviour, and to local developments. But here, glaciers are communicating their troubled state through their growing silence. For these two interlocutors of Buddhist confession, this calls for a response, namely, acknowledging the local deities.
Similar feelings are shared by people in Parkachik, a village of the Suru Valley that is partly fed by the Parkachik glacier. The glacier is massive and very accessible, nearly touching the road that bounds the village and which it used to cover in winter. The proximity is such that villagers have always been attuned to the glacier's movements and the noises it emits. In summer, the glacier would, in the past, regularly lose huge chunks of ice that would fall in the river in what Hussain Hadi described as an explosion. One day, one such piece of ice was so big that it blocked the river, forcing travellers to stay in the village for several days. Like the glaciers of Tahan and Nye, the Parkachik glacier has receded tremendously over the years, its terminus no longer touching the road and its summer concerto of fearful debris no longer putting on its seasonal performance. In this Muslim community, these changes also call for a response and prompt people to episodically pray for good snowfall at the mosque.
A Tale of Non-human Bodies
The summer of 2018 was quite challenging for Zanskari farmers. The previous winter brought so little snow that the only road connecting the region to the rest of India opened much earlier than usual. In this part of the Himalayas, where agriculture depends on glacier and snow melt for irrigation, a dry winter signals agrarian hardship. This was particularly alarming for the farmers of Pishu and other villages that are especially vulnerable to droughts due to their physical location. The village is not on a glacial watershed and relies only on snow accumulation. With the dryer winters of the past decades, which bring increasingly less snowfall, water stress has become a recurring issue for these communities. It has taken a heavy toll on farmers.
This last tale from the Anthropocene examines the implications of climate change for human and non-human bodies. The body is a frequent trope in how Ladakhi and Zanskarpas are making sense of climate change. Embodied witnessing of climate change includes dramatically warmer winters, which have left the shanglak, the traditional sheepskin garment, once a must to survive winters, redundant. Allusions to how easy winters have become are common. Narratives of past winters emphasise the physical hardship of slogging through the accumulated snow in the village. Paths had to be dug through deep snow to reach the animal pens. Life could be so hard in winter that children and the elderly were always considered at risk. Animals would also regularly die.
While these experiences are immediate and deeply situated within the human body, the metabolic understanding of the relationship between ice bodies and non-human bodies is also quite evocative of the uncanny nature of climate change. How the environment of Zanskar is thriving is intricately linked to the amount of winter snowfall. But dryer winters are leaving the pastures and the mountains depleted of the moisture needed for shrubs and plants to thrive. This, in turn, introduces new species. In recent years, bears, which are said to normally stay higher in the mountains, have increasingly appeared in the villages. Several incidents of bears breaking into houses, monasteries and animal pens have been reported. Their presence is often linked by the villagers to the growing lack of food in the high mountains. Other creatures have also intruded on the villages. During the summer of 2016, Zanskar saw a massive locust invasion. The insects moved through, systematically ravaging crops from dusk till dawn. A decade prior, for two successive years, Zanskar was also subject to damage from these unwelcome visitors. Based on farmers’ memories, no such incident had ever happened in the past. Many farmers associated the disaster with acutely dry winters, as the presence of the locusts had followed years of dry spells.
Along with these strange presences, climate change is also said to transform non-human bodies. The relationship between the body and the environment is often described by Ladakhis and Zanskarpas as predicated on symbiosis. This has implications for how climate change is seen as affecting bodies. Writing about an anthropology of air, Tim Choy explains, ‘if bodies are an intimate location of effects and agencies, air is the substance that bathes and ties the scales of body, region, and globe together’ (2011: 156). Choy's description of the porosity rendered by air is fruitful to think about how the bodies of animals are affected and transformed by global climate change and its impact on local ice. Warming temperatures and the implications on the vitality of icy bodies affect the quality of crops and pasture vegetation, which are often described as less nutritious than in the past. Many believe that, in a metabolic process, this affects the animals’ bodies. For instance, because of the depleted pastures, cows’ milk is no longer as rich. More endemically, animals are commonly described as frailer today. Commenting on how horses are smaller and weaker, a man once told me, ‘This is like the age of men, people live longer, and animals live less longer’, alluding to the uneven effects of climate change. Animals, whose sustenance is, unlike humans’, exclusively connected to locally growing resources, are seen as changing with climate change.
The uneven effects of climate change within the same region are also an aspect of the environmental uncanny in the Anthropocene. Returning to the 2018 drought, we can appreciate the agency of ice in its recession. Although many communities of Zanskar faced water stress, some like Pishu suffered more than others because of their geographic location. In Pishu, people could not sow their fields at all. Such a scenario does not align well with generalising accounts about climate change, which tend to obscure local particularities. And indeed, the local specificities of climate change in Zanskar never translated into the bureaucratic rationality. While villagers of Pishu put much effort in appealing to the state for help, no drought was declared for these communities. The state authorities failed to recognise that climate change does not affect ice evenly and that some ice bodies, and therefore some communities, are more vulnerable than others. Instead, the farmers of Pishu received a meagre compensation, which they collectively refused as a sign of protest (see Gagné and Chostak 2023).
Conclusion
I opened this article with accounts of encounters with glaciers by European explorers in the Himalayas. These early scientific accounts call attention to how knowledge about ice was predicated on bodily and sensorial engagement. This knowledge was enmeshed in deeply affective experiences, to which the vitality of ice contributed. Today, the relationship that scientists are developing with glaciers of the Himalayas is largely mediated by technologies that make it possible to study them from a distance. The contemporary science of ice in the Himalayas also departs from earlier accounts in its focus on global climate change, of which glaciers have become an emblematic barometer. Scientific knowledge earns its credibility through accuracy. In the process of becoming an object that needs to be deciphered, ice often emerges as an abstraction. Conceptually extracted from its locality, converted into data, its vitality remains undervalued by the technocratic imaginary. Overall, there is a greater relative credence given to scientific narratives on the production of knowledge about glaciers, a reflection of the ‘asymmetrical power relations within human societies’ (Nüsser and Baghel 2014: 147). But the detached and dispassionate scientific outlook is only one way of knowing glaciers and ice, which are known through different epistemic practices (Carey et al 2016; Cruikshank 2005; O'Reilly 2016; Orlove et al 2008).
Climate change, because of its often elusive nature, is commonly perceived as a distant issue, one from which humans commonly extract themselves and feel disconnected (Renouf 2021: 3). But in Ladakh and Zanskar, where ice is fundamental to the relations between living beings and their environment, climate change, a salient feature of life in the Himalayan Anthropocene, is not just an idea but a daily experience. The tales I presented recount varied intimate encounters with climate change. They also highlight the patchy impacts of climate change and its uncanny nature. Traceable to ice as a lively body, these accounts point at the pervasiveness of the vitality of ice in shaping these encounters. Being central to local ecologies and to how people relate to a place, its gradual demise has an immediate resonance and concrete implications. Through a frozen river, as a vital infrastructure, ice mediates relations between Zanskarpas and an environment transformed by climate change. As sonorous bodies, glaciers communicate their distress and signal to humans how they have failed a sacred geography. Ice is also an agent in its capacity to influence the health of animals, plants and vegetation and to bring the presence of new visitors. Its materiality, expressed in different patterns of loss within the same region, challenges generalising scenarios about climate change.
These tales locate the Anthropocene in a place where people are affected by the consequences of climate change. In recognising the agency of ice in encounters with climate change, they point at Himalayan communities’ impressions, lived experience and interpretations of these changes. Here, ice is not just abstracted from a place and an object for scrutiny as it is dying. For Ladakhis and Zanskarpas, receding ice cannot be dissociated from feelings of being marginalised by the Indian state, from an ethics of responsibility for these changes and from ideas about social justice. Ultimately, these tales also draw attention to how differently situated communities are living with climate change and to the importance of cultivating an imagination of proximity to ice, one that appreciates the vitality of ice and the stories it weaves.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am thankful for the feedback from two anonymous reviewers, which enhanced this article. My gratitude extends to my interlocutors and collaborators in Zanskar and Ladakh who generously shared their time, enabling this study. Any mistakes solely rest upon my responsibility.
Notes
While contemporary experts continue to know ice or make sense of climate change through personal experiences, embodied knowledge and emotions, this aspect of knowledge rarely figures in their accounts (see O'Reilly 2016; Renouf 2021).
Fieldwork was conducted over 26 months from 2011 to 2023. More ethnographic and regional information about Ladakh and Zanskar can be found in Gagné (2019b) and Gutschow (2004).
Ghosh (2016: 30, 62) also engages briefly with Morton's notion of hyperobjects.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.
See Boulton (2016) for a critical review of Morton's hyperobject as a framework to think about climate change.
This situation seems set to change. For the first time, during the winter of 2022, the road between Padum and Kargil remained passable. This is due to an unusually mild winter and substantial construction efforts initiated in 2021 to enhance the condition of the Suru-Padum road, typically closed during the winter season.
Depending on the weather and road conditions, the journey is today shorter, thanks to progress on the section of the Zanskar Highway linking Padum to Leh via the Zanskar Gorge.
More accounts of Chilchil can be found in Gagné (2019b).
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