2
A High-Altitude Economy

The distinctive way of life of the Khumbu Sherpas in many respects reflects adaptation to the environmental conditions of their high-altitude homeland. In some ways this way of life is unique and Khumbu Sherpas are well aware of how their subsistence system differs even from that of other Sherpa groups. But Khumbu subsistence practices also share many features with those of other Himalayan peoples and even with mountain peoples in other parts of the world. This chapter introduces the Khumbu economy within the larger context of the cultural ecology of mountain peoples. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the special conditions of life in mountain regions and especially in high-altitude areas. I then introduce several concepts through which the ways of life of mountain peoples can be compared and contrasted, including subsistence strategies and tactics, "verticality," and altitudinal production systems and zones. From this base I then highlight five different basic subsistence strategies that have been historically important in the Nepal Himalaya and examine in detail the two which are today the most important in the Dudh Kosi valley. This provides perspective for a closer look at the Khumbu economy, from subsistence strategies and patterns of altitudinal land use to the linkages between different sectors of the economy and types of land use and the role of differences in household wealth and demography in subsistence decisions and practices.

High-Altitude Constraints and Opportunities

High mountains are distinctive and in many ways difficult environments to live in, and at the altitudinal extremes of the higher reaches of the Himalaya they are one of the more challenging environments on earth. Peoples inhabiting the highest realms of the high country must cope with climatic and geomorphological hazards that come with the terrain and the altitude and that make high mountains places of relative unpredictability, low primary productivity, and high environmental fragility in comparison to many lowland regions. Agriculture can be a chancy endeavor here at the edge of the arable earth. Above 3,000 meters growing seasons are short and there are significant risks of killing frosts and snow in spring and early autumn. The fertility of local soils is often very low, especially where only skeletal soils have had a chance to develop since the last glacial advances and where the underlying rock that furnishes material for soil development is nutrient-poor granite or gneiss. Steep terrain can complicate crop production making it necessary to devote much time and effort to constructing and maintaining terraces in order to control erosion. High pastures may often not be suitable for winter grazing due to snow cover, making transhumance or the storage of fodder imperative. Severe temperatures may require stabling of livestock for part of the year or limit stockkeeping options to only the most hardy varieties. Settlements may be threatened by landslides, avalanches, and rockfall due to the nature of local slopes, climate, and geology, and the danger may be accented by deforestation, grazing, and agricultural expansion. At high altitudes, subalpine and alpine low temperatures and snow may make the use of fuel wood and the construction of substantial shelters important in areas where forest resources are scarce. Slow rates of tree growth make forests and woodlands particularly vulnerable to disturbances and recovery from them more difficult and uncertain. The combination of altitude, slow vegetative growth rates, and steep slopes makes many high-altitude areas particularly highly sensitive to erosion following forest and grassland degradation. Seismic activity, mountain torrents, glacial lake outbursts, volcanism, and other geomorphological hazards unique to highland regions may influence settlement and land-use patterns. And extreme altitude may also affect human physiology, influencing fertility and diet requirements in ways that also have repercussions on lifestyles and basic subsistence requirements (Moran 1979:142, 147-161).

High-altitude life may thus in a variety of ways pose significant constraints to settlement and offer relatively fewer subsistence options than many other environments. Yet mountains provide subsistence opportuni-

ties as well as challenges. Some mountain regions have volcanic soils of exceptional fertility. Mountains can be fertile, well-watered oases in arid and semi-arid regions. Sloped ground can facilitate field drainage in areas where high rainfall would otherwise inhibit crop growth and make it possible to relatively easily irrigate flights of terraces. Highlands offer rich summer pastures. Altitude may offer protection from low-altitude diseases affecting people and their livestock; the inability of the Anopheles mosquito to live much above 1,000 meters, for example, has undoubtedly played some role in the settlement history not only of the Andes but also of the Himalaya. Mountain lands often possess resources such as timber, minerals, and hydroelectric power which can be commercially exploited. Some regions have enormous potential for tourism development, as the Nepalese and Indians as well as the Swiss have discovered. There are sometimes even trade advantages to living in mountain lands, for mountain ranges often form environmental and political divides and those who control access and transport across them can benefit enormously from transmountain commerce. And perhaps, above all, the distinctive altitudinal and topographical variations in mountain climate and vegetation are a major resource, providing rich microenvironmental diversity in a relatively small area. Microclimatic differences within a single Himalayan or Andean valley, for example, can support crops ranging from subtropically suited rice, sugarcane, mango, and banana to temperate-thriving barley, wheat, buckwheat, and potatoes, and sustain livestock such as water buffalo, zebu (Bos indicus ) cattle and yak that are at home in diverse environments. Even the highest-altitude regions can be ideal country for raising potatoes, barley, yak, and llamas.

Adaptive Patterns of Subsistence: Strategies and Tactics

The peoples of the Himalaya, like those of other highland regions, have developed a number of different adaptive strategies and practices for subsisting in the distinctive conditions of mountain ecosystems. Mountain subsistence systems combine strategies to exploit the characteristic microenvironmental diversity of such regions with sets of land-use practices that have been found effective in the specific conditions of particular microenvironments. Both lifestyle strategies and land-use tactics reflect an appreciation of the constraints and possibilities created by the variations in precipitation, temperature, and vegetation which are generated by altitude, aspect, rain-shadow effects, and other mountain conditions. They are thus responses to a range of microenvironmental diversity characteristic of mountain regions and not simply to altitudinal environmental variation.^[1]

Cultural ecologists studying mountain peoples have analyzed adaptive patterns of mountain land use in the Andes, Alps, and Himalaya from the perspectives of both strategy and tactics.^[2] A set of general characteristics has often been noted (based more on Alpine and Andean examples than on Himalayan) including the practice of mixed mountain agriculture (with grain varieties related to altitude and with root crops increasingly important at high altitudes), agropastoral transhumance, scattered (and often multialtitudinal) land holdings, systems of land tenure and resource-use decision making that combine communal management of common-property pasture and forest resources (and sometimes also community influence in crop-production decisions) with private family land and livestock ownership, and economies that combine subsistence-oriented agropastoralism with other economic ventures such as trade with other regions having different environmental conditions and natural resources (Fricke 1989; Guillet 1983; Orlove and Guillet 1985, Rhoades and Thompson 1975). In Andean work, which has thus far provided a great deal of the theoretical and case-study development in the field of mountain cultural ecology, two concepts have been emphasized during the past fifteen years: verticality and production zones. The verticality approach has focused on the examination of cultural strategies of exploiting altitudinal variation whereas the montane production zone approach has focused more closely on the specific land-use practices employed in particular altitudinal microenvironments. The verticality approach introduced by John Murra (1972) and further developed by Stephen Brush (1976, 1977) draws on a concept of the altitudinal zonation of environment and land use which was particularly developed by Carl Troll (1966, 1988). Murra noted a pre-Columbian subsistence strategy, which he called the "vertical archipelago," in parts of highland Peru that was based on direct exploitation of the crop-producing and pastoral opportunities of a number of different altitudinal environmental zones (1972, 1985b :16). In some cases this strategy even extended to sending out colonists to distant low-altitude areas where crops such as coca could be cultivated.^[3] Brush identified several different strategies by which different Andean peoples have attempted to make use of a range of different altitudinal microenvironmental regions, including a "compressed" type of generalized strategy based on direct exploitation of these different altitudinal zones, an "extended" type of strategy in which a group specialized in agriculture at one altitudinal zone and relied on trade to obtain products from other altitudinal zones, and an archipelago strategy in which agricultural colonies were established at considerable distance from the main settlement area (Brush 1977:11).^[4] The production zone concept developed by Enrique Mayer proposes a categorization based on specific land-use patterns characteristic of particular

altitudinal zones. The basis of this classification system is crop production with emphasis given to both the crops grown and the specific ways in which they are grown, including the socioeconomic and political organization of production. He formally defines production zone as "a communally managed set of specific productive resources in which crops are grown in distinctive ways. It includes infra-structural features, a particular system of rationing resources such as irrigation water and natural grasses, and the existence of rule-making mechanisms that regulate how these resources are to be used" (Mayer 1985:50-51).^[5] Mayer (ibid.:77, n. 1) identifies ten different production zones, for instance, in one area of Peru, including two types of rain-fed agriculture (differentiated by individual household versus community decisions about crop rotations and fallow), five types of irrigated agricultural sytems differing in types of crops raised and crop rotations, and three types of fruit production.

In my view mountain cultural ecology analysis requires both of these approaches. The concepts of verticality and production systems seem to me to address two different dimensions of sociocultural adaptation to mountain environments, and emphasizing one to the neglect of the other risks the loss of important perspectives in understanding subsistence practices. The study of verticality (in the larger sense by which I define it) brings a concern with broad economic strategies of multienvironmental resource use and management and the cultural values, environmental perception and knowledge, and social organization that support these ways of life. The study of production systems brings an understanding of tactics, of the specific land-use practices (including local knowledge, repertoires of crops and animals, technology, land tenure, labor organization and community resource-management institutions within the context of local cultural values, regional political economy, and local economic and social differentiation) which particular groups of people have developed for use in their homeland. Combining the two allows us to examine economic activities from the standpoint of both the broad strategies by which a people (or a particular group, social group, or household) exploits a range of altitudes and microenvironments and the specific tactical means by which they accomplish this in particular microenvironmental settings. This dual approach illuminates adaptation both from the standpoint of the development of techniques in agriculture and pastoralism suited to mountain conditions and the evolution of environmental perception, social organization, and lifestyle values which make possible economic strategies designed to make use of the altitudinal and topographically based complexity and diversity of mountain microenvironments. They can also illuminate the variations in settlement and land use within a group, within a given community, or, through time, in the practice of a given household. From this base it is then possible to make larger inqui-

ries into historical change and the factors involved in it, variation in land use among villages, economic classes, and individual families, and cross-cultural comparisons with the strategies and tactics of other peoples inhabiting similar mountain microenvironments. Comparisons of economic practices among groups of a particular people who inhabit different territories can also be carried out in an attempt to highlight the degree in which some of these practices may reflect strategies and tactics of environmental adaptation whereas others may have quite different origins.

Subsistence strategies are typical of the way or ways of life followed by a people, ethnic group, social subgroup (be this defined by economic class, caste, clan, ethnicity, or other criteria) or household. Rather than speak of the subsistence strategy of a given group it is possible to identify a set of subsistence strategies used by different members of that group, a set which may or may not embody an underlying common set of principles. A group may, for example, tend to practice mixed agropastoralism, with virtually all households raising both crops and the livestock that furnishes manure to their fields. But the agropastoral strategies of different types of households may differ fundamentally. Some families may keep large herds for the purpose of selling dairy products, meat, and hides or wool and entrust them to herding specialists for transhumant shifts of pastures that cover considerable distances and reach areas remote from the main village. Other families may keep a single cow or a couple of goats which they care for themselves, live all year in the village, and let the livestock graze in the local environs and feed them fodder from nearby forests and fields. Households sharing a broadly similar strategy of growing a set of grains and tubers adapted to the altitude of nearby slopes may similarly vary considerably in the emphasis they place on particular crops and varieties, the degree to which they make use of fields in different microenvironmental sites, their use of irrigation, and the extent to which their crop production is influenced by market concerns.

All subsistence strategies make use of one or more production systems, and in mountain regions it is very common for multiple productions systems to be used at sites at different altitudes or other micro-environmentally different conditions. Each of these systems is a set of land-use techniques in specific environmental, social, political, and economic contexts. In a given microenvironmental site several different production systems are often in operation, sometimes implemented by different households making use of different subsistence strategies and sometimes by individual households whose subsistence strategy includes the use of multiple production systems at a given site. On Himalayan slopes below 2,000 meters, for example, it is common to find a diversity of production systems that can conveniently be characterized in terms of their cropping patterns, although each is an agroecosystem that also has

Figure 1.
Land-Use Strategies, Highland Asia

associated patterns of fertilization that may link it to particular types of local pastoralism and forest use. There is an irrigated rice (khet ) production system—or several of them—involving single or multicrop rice cultivation, rice cultivation with winter rain-fed crop rotations, and rice cultivation with winter fallow and grazing of the terraces. There may also be production systems based on irrigated millet. At the same altitude there are also rain-fed (bari ) production systems of various types which emphasize different crops and different types of fertilization, intercropping, relay cropping, double cropping, crop rotations, and fallow periods. There may also be swidden production systems in adjacent forests and woodlands. Some households in the community may make use of a number of these different production systems, each of which involves its own set of land, labor, and capital requirements, local knowledge, institutional resource-management arrangements, relationship to the state in the form of taxes, and involvement or lack of it with a wider market economy. Other households may confine their subsistence strategy to the use of a single production system and find their options limited by social status, wealth, family labor mobilization and talents, knowledge and experience, religious beliefs, or other factors.

Himalayan Subsistence Strategies

The environmental and cultural diversity of the Himalaya and its neighboring ranges has historically supported a diversity of different, adaptive subsistence strategies. At least five broad, traditional subsistence agricultural strategies and several common substrategies can be identified in the central and western Himalaya of Nepal and India alone: settled, mixed farming; swidden agriculture; middle-altitude agropastoralism; high-altitude agropastoralism; and pastoral nomadism (fig. 1).^[6] All five have been employed for centuries and continue to be followed today.^[7] Today middle- and high-altitude agropastoralism, both of which are based on mixed mountain farming and livestock herding with transhumance, are by far the most widespread adaptive strategies in the mountain regions of Nepal. Settled mixed farming is becoming more common, in part perhaps as a result of agricultural intensification following increasing population density (Boserup 1965), but also as a result of the commercialization of agriculture in response to changes in transportation (especially the expansion of road networks) and the increasing incorporation of formerly more remote areas into a developing national market economy.^[8] Historically integral swidden cultivation based on forest fallow rotations was important across large areas of the country and in much of the temperate and subtropical regions remained so into the nineteenth century.^[9] Supplementary swidden cultivation continues to

be carried out in a few regions in central and eastern Nepal today despite government efforts to halt it out of concern for forest conditions. True pastoral nomadism, in the sense of an economy entirely based on pastoralism with no crop cultivation whatsoever, is extremely rare in the Himalaya today and is only followed by a very few groups in the western regions of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Kashmir.^[10]

All of these except for the settled agricultural strategy share an emphasis on directly using resources across a range of altitudes. Although settlement patterns, crop and livestock emphases, and annual rhythms of movement up and down slopes and mountain valleys vary between the different strategies, all of these strategies except settled, mixed farming use seasonal transhumance, movement of livestock, and/or agricultural fields at multiple elevations to exploit land-use opportunities in different microenvironmental regions of the mountains. Trade is also an important mechanism used by peoples of all five patterns to gain goods from other altitudinal and microenvironmental areas of the mountains as well as from regions beyond the mountains.^[11]

Middle- and high-altitude agropastoralism vary in settlement emphasis and seasonal altitudinal use. In Nepal the distinguishing characteristic of the two is that middle-altitude agropastoralism is centered on life in main villages situated below 3,000 meters, whereas people following the high-altitude strategy have villages above 3,000 meters. These two strategies differ, however, not only in their emphasis on different types of microenvironmental regions but also in their basic characteristics of crop and livestock production. Groups following the middle-altitude strategy base their crop production below 2,500 meters in country that supports the cultivation of rice, wheat, maize, and millet as staple crops and where year-round crop growing is possible. Their pastoralism tends to revolve around cattle, water buffalo, sheep, and goats that provide a critical source of manure as well as other useful products and that are supported by considerable use of crop residue and forest fodder as well as by seasonal altitudinal shifts of grazing areas, which in some cases include major long-distance shifts of residence to summer alpine pastures. Groups following the high-altitude agropastoral strategy base their agricultural production on sites between 3,000 and 4,500 meters in altitude, generally in inner valleys, partial rain-shadow valleys of the Great Himalaya, and trans-Himalayan valleys that are shielded from the full force of the southwest monsoon. Crops are grown only in the summer at these altitudes and the crop repertoire consists primarily of barley, buckwheat, and tubers. High-altitude pastoralism is based on transhumant herding of yak, cattle-yak crossbreeds, sheep, and goats. These two different altitudinal strategies are complementary. Many groups fol-

lowing the high-altitude pattern carry out trade to obtain grain from middle-altitude groups, offering high-altitude resources such as Tibetan salt and wool in exchange. There is some seasonal overlap in altitudinal use as well. Both strategies make use of seasonal movement between different altitudinal microenvironmental zones. High-altitude groups herd sheep and goats in lower-altitude agricultural areas in winter, in the process also providing valued manure to middle-altitude farmers' fields. Many middle-altitude groups make use of high-altitude pastures for summer herding.

Middle-altitude agropastoralism was apparently long characteristic principally of Hindu Pahari hill-caste villagers in western Nepal and adjacent western India, whose cultural origins and characteristics are closely related to the people of the Ganges plain of India. High-altitude agropastoralism, by contrast, has been practiced almost exclusively by the Buddhist peoples who live on the frontier between India and Tibet and who, as discussed earlier, in many aspects of culture and lifestyle strongly resemble their Tibetan cousins. Many of the peoples of central and eastern Nepal were long distinct from both groups in land use. Gurungs, Tamangs, Rais, and Limbus, for example, were all formerly integral swidden cultivators who relied on rotational systems of shifting agriculture with long forest or bush fallows.^[12] Since the late eighteenth century, however, all of these peoples have adopted the distinctive style of transhumance and terrace agriculture of the middle-altitude agropastoral pattern, either abandoning swidden cultivation altogether or employing it only as a supplementary source of food production.^[13] In some regions of mountain Nepal, particularly in lower-altitude areas, some Pahari, Tamang, and Magar villagers and communities are now abandoning the seasonal transhumance of the middle-altitude agropastoral strategy for a settled agropastoralism with year-round residence in a single village. In some areas situated near urban settlements and roads this is often associated with new patterns of crop and dairy production developed in response to new market opportunities.^[14] Many peoples following the high-altitude agropastoral pattern have also shifted their adaptive strategies into less mobile patterns of pastoralism and trade during the past thirty years. These ongoing changes in lifestyle and land use highlight the need to bring to the analysis of adaptive land-use strategies not only consideration of the environmental setting and role of adaptation to environment and environmental change but also an awareness of the historical context of cultural, social, demographic, technological, and political economic changes and the ways in which these have influenced both household economic decisions and the evolution of cultural patterns of subsistence and adaptation.

Middle-Altitude Mountain Agropastoralism

The middle-altitude agropastoral strategy combines transhumant tending of cattle, water buffalo, sheep and goats with permanent agriculture that is often carried out at multialtitudinal sites. The main focus of crop production is found in the main villages that tend to be located between 1,000 and 2,500 meters. Here terraces are carefully maintained for the cultivation of rice, maize, millet, buckwheat, mustard, vegetables, and winter wheat. Much effort is put into irrigating fields for rice production, and farmers are familiar with techniques of manuring, intercropping, double and relay cropping, and crop rotation. Surrounding forest and woodland areas supply grazing, fodder, and forest-floor litter for fertilizer as well as furnishing fuel wood and lumber. In summer those households that own substantial numbers of cattle and water buffalo often take them up to the rich pastures between 2,500 and 3,000 meters (this is sometimes handled by a single household member or hired herder rather than by the entire family) and sheep and goats may be taken as high as 5,000 meters (again often by specialists). During these weeks herders may live in simple, movable, bamboo shelters, as is common in Nepal, or more substantial herding huts such as are common in the Indian Himalaya west of Nepal (Pant 1935; Berreman 1963a ). Summer herding bases sometimes provide a secondary crop-production site for the cultivation of potatoes and hardy grains such as buckwheat, wheat, and barley. In autumn livestock are led down to the main villages where they graze on field stubble and leave behind manure for the next round of field preparation. In winter the herds may be taken still farther down the valley, where herders again base in temporary shelters or herding huts.^[15]

Middle-altitude agropastoral peoples often also participate in complex regional interaltitudinal and trans-Himalayan trade networks. This trade brings the people of the lower-altitude regions salt, wool, seed potatoes, and other valued products from the high valleys and Tibet in exchange for agricultural surpluses grown in the midlands. Mid-altitude-grown grains, especially rice, maize, wheat, and millet, are traded to higher-altitude regions along with some meat, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. Much of this trade is carried out by high-altitude people who journey down valley in winter and who may make trans-Himalayan spring and autumn trade trips to Tibet. Some middle-altitude groups, however, transport their own agricultural surpluses into higher regions during the late autumn and winter and some middle-altitude farmers also trade agricultural products they have obtained from other middle-and low-altitude areas.

Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the geographic and altitudinal seasonal land-

Figure 2.
Middle-Altitude Agropastoralism, Geographic Patterns (Base drawing
adapted from Metz 1989)

use patterns associated with the middle-altitude mountain agropastoral strategy. In them I distinguish four different patterns of seasonal altitudinal and geographical land-use patterns. Two are relatively compressed in both altitudinal and geographical land use, making use of the resources of a single slope. Two are extended in altitudinal and geographical land use, making fuller use of the resources not only of variations in slope but also of longer-distance up and down valley movements. The first of the slope-based patterns is a village-based, relatively settled way of life such as is practiced particularly by groups living in the lower-altitude regions of the Nepal midlands. Here the entire focus is on crop production in the main village with herding and fodder collection from slope areas within easy reach of the settlement. All the other subsistence patterns require seasonal shifts of residence by at least some family members. The second pattern makes use of microenvironmental variation on a single slope, but the distances and relief involved make it necessary for herders to base seasonally in herding huts (goths ) a day or two away from the main village. Cattle, water buffalo, sheep and goats may thus be taken on a limited-distance transhumant migration that may nonetheless cover several thousand meters of altitudinal variation. This movement of only a few kilometers takes them to summer pasture high on the ridge in the temperate forest or even subalpine zone and may also take them to winter pastures below the village in subtropical reaches of the gorge. The third pattern is a longer-distance transhumance in which flocks of sheep and goats and possibly also herds of cattle, crossbreeds, and even water buffalo are taken up valley to summer pastures in the Great Himalaya above 3000 meters. The fourth pattern that traverses

Figure 3
Middle-Altitude Agropastoralism, Altitudinal Patterns

the ranges adds to the third pattern a longer-distance winter move as well, one which takes herders and their sheep, goat, and cattle across the Mahabharat Lekh and out of the midlands into the valleys north of the Siwalik range or even beyond the Siwalik range to its southern alluvial slopes and the Tarai.

In the Dudh Kosi valley and adjacent areas variations of middle-altitude agropastoralism are practiced by Rais, Gurungs, Magars, and several Sherpa groups including the Pharak and Shorung Sherpas. Some of these Sherpa groups have adopted land-use practices that they may have adapted from those of their non-Sherpa neighbors and which from the standpoint of Khumbu Sherpas are quite "un-Sherpa." Some Sherpa families in the Dudh Kosi region, as in the Arun watershed, for example, raise water buffalo and practice swidden cultivation. And in the Arun region some Sherpas even raise pigs and cultivate irrigated rice.

Within the range of microenvironments found in the Nepal midlands and the Great Himalaya between 1,000 and 3,000 meters a great diversity of production systems could be described through which middle-altitude agropastoralists use the resources of particular sites. In the 1,500-2,500-meter altitudinal range in which most of the main villages are located these systems include several different types of production based on rain-fed permanent crops with and without small-scale keeping of cattle, water buffalo, sheep and goats such as year-round cultivation, summer-only cultivation, different types of annual and multiyear crop rotations and fallowing practices, different types of intercropping and relay cropping, food and fodder crops, subsistence and commercial crops. There are also systems based on irrigated agriculture (including rice only and rice followed by winter-irrigated or nonirrigated crops), again with and without associated livestock raising, as well as a number of different types of woodland, forest, grassland use and management. These could be further differentiated on the basis of variations in the use of agricultural inputs (seed, fertilizer, and labor especially), by the social and cultural arrangements influencing crop production, and orientation towards subsistence or commercial production. While this approach would offer valuable insights into land-use techniques and institutions, a fuller understanding of local land use would require both attention to differentiation in wealth, power and other factors that influence household and community resource-use options and decisions and the investigation of the strategies by which particular families, economic classes, communities, and ethnic groups combine sets of these microenvironmentally based production systems into household and regional economies.

Different peoples within the middle-altitude region employ slightly different production systems in very similar microenvironmental sites, and individual ethnic groups make use of more than one system even in similar sites. Crop decisions and rotations, field-fertilization practices, grazing patterns, and other aspects of production systems may vary. Such differences may reflect cultural perceptions (including crop and livestock preferences and religious prohibitions), social arrangements (especially land tenure and communal resource-management institu-

tions), economic differentiation, and political power. There is accordingly no simple equation between given microenvironments and the production systems used in them, although environmental conditions (including altitude, slope, aspect, and the amount, type, timing, and intensity of precipitation) may broadly influence the range of what is and is not rewarding in terms of high yield and low risk.

High-Altitude Mountain Agropastoralism

Above 3,000 meters life is different for the high-altitude-dwelling peoples who make the high valleys of the Great Himalaya and trans-Himalaya their home.^[16] At these altitudes crops can only be produced during the summer and generally there is not time enough in the short growing season to cultivate more than a single crop per year of a small number of plants fit for high altitude. The cool temperatures and the risks of late spring, early autumn, and even summer frosts restrict the range of staple crops to barley, buckwheat, wheat, and tubers. Rice, maize, and millet cannot be cultivated and at higher altitudes even wheat production is not possible. Pastoralism is similarly limited in options. The climate is too difficult for water buffalo and cattle may be kept year round at such heights only if much effort is made to stable them and provide them with fodder through the winter months. But yak, yak-cattle crossbreeds, sheep and goats all thrive. Figures 4 and 5 show the geographical and altitudinal land-use patterns associated with variations of the high-altitude mountain agropastoral strategy. As with the middle-altitude agropastoral strategy both extended and compressed strategies are depicted. Extended strategies make greater use of seasonal transhumance, either across the Himalaya to Tibet for winter herding of yak and sheep, down-valley winter herding of sheep, goats, and cattle in the midlands or even the Tarai, or a combination of both of these. The compressed pattern relies on year-round use of the resources of the Great Himalaya alone.

For the past century, and very likely for long before that, peoples following high-altitude agropastoral strategies have usually relied on trade to supplement their crop production. Trade for lower-altitude-grown grains has been particularly important. Until the 1960s many families devoted much of their winter to trading trips to the south in order to barter Tibetan salt and other goods for grain and take advantage of the warmer weather, the readily available food, and the good grazing. Sheep and goats were often taken on these winter journeys as pack animals, whereas families who kept yak left them with herding specialists in the high valleys or sent them across the mountains to Tibet, where the grazing is often better in winter than on the south side of the Himalayan crest

Figure 4.
High-Altitude Agropastoralism, Geographic Patterns (Base drawing
adapted from Metz 1989)

since there is less snow and yak can find abundant grazing on the vast pastures. This way of life, however, is today no longer followed by many Bhotia groups. Political and economic changes in Tibet following the onset of Chinese administration after 1959 have greatly affected trade conditions for Bhotias, as did the 1962 war between China and India and its diplomatic aftermath. Some groups of Bhotias have been unable to continue trans-Himalayan trade on the old scale or to winter stock in Tibet. This has led to major changes in life for Bhotia peoples (see, for example, Fürer-Haimendorf 1975; Rauber 1982). Some have abandoned their former subsistence strategies and migration from the high country and other high-altitude peoples have developed new types of trade or become involved in the tourism industry.

Transhumance is an important feature of the high-altitude agropastoral strategy. After the crops are planted and well established in the main villages families follow the good grass into the upper valleys. Yak and sheep may be herded in mid- and late summer as high as 6,000 meters. Herders usually live in tents, often the black yak-hair tents familiar also in Tibet, moving through a series of different camps in a long-established routine modified to meet the pasture and weather conditions of the particular year. Sometimes additional fields are also cultivated in the summer herding settlements where fine crops of potatoes and barley can be grown even as high as 4,300 meters. Families who continue to trade with Tibet dovetail the demands of the agricultural cycle with one or more trips across the border during the period between spring and late autumn to obtain salt, borax, wool, and other goods for their winter trading in the south.

Figure 5.
High-Altitude Agropastoralism, Altitudinal Patterns

Only a few Sherpa groups follow a high-altitude mountain agropastoral strategy, the best known of which are the Sherpas of Khumbu and Rolwaling. The narrow valley of Rolwaling, seven kilometers in length and never more than one kilometer wide, is comparable in altitude to Khumbu. The main village, Beding, is situated at 3,600 meters. Fewer than fifty households inhabit the valley and they prac-

tice a mixed agropastoralism emphasizing transhumant yak herding and multialtitudinal crop production of potatoes and barley. Potatoes and barley are grown as high as the settlement of Na at 4,100 meters. Yak are herded in the summer to above 5,000 meters (Sacherer 1981:157-158). Khumbu Sherpa subsistence strategies are discussed later in this chapter.

Altitudinal Production Zones

Land use at the scale of an entire Himalayan valley such as that of the Dudh Kosi becomes exceedingly complex to analyze at the level of production systems. The range of altitudinal gradients and micro-environmental variation, the diversity of adaptive strategies, and the high level of cultural diversity (in the Dudh Kosi case four different Sherpa groups, at least two Rai groups, as well as Magars and Gurungs) make for a wealth of production systems. This diversity can be simplified at the regional scale for a general overview, however, by considering altitudinal production zones. These constitute broad categories of land use encompassing a number of different, discrete production systems. They narrow the focus of microenvironmental concern to a few broad altitudinal bands identified according to basic regional altitudinal variation in land-use patterns. From this perspective six altitudinal production zones can be discussed in the Dudh Kosi valley (fig. 6) ranging from irrigated and nonirrigated year-round crop production to high-pasture pastoralism. Table 2 shows the current upper altitudinal limits of the staple crops in the valley. Note that Khumbu is situated too high in altitude for the harvest of more than a single summer crop per year and is just out of the current altitudinal range of cultivation of such important Dudh Kosi valley crops as maize and wheat.^[17]

Sherpas, Rais, and Gurungs each make use of several zones through middle- and high-altitude agropastoral strategies and in each practice one or more different production systems based on different institutional, cultural, and technical arrangements for raising various types of crops and livestock and exploiting altitudinally related natural resources such as forests, woodlands, and temperate, subalpine, and alpine grasslands and tundra. Within a given altitudinal production zone the choice of cultigens and domestic animals, the scale at which they are raised, and the techniques employed may vary with cultural preferences, religious beliefs, political economy, household status and wealth, and historical processes and events such as the diffusion of terracing techniques, the introduction of new crop varieties, changing trade patterns, and changes in local affluence.^[18]

Figure 6.
Dudh Kosi Valley Altitudinal Crop-Production Systems

Regional Linkages

Himalayan valleys are typically the homes of a number of different peoples and groups each occupying its own territory and pursuing its own characteristic subsistence strategy or strategies and set of land-use

production systems. These different groups are seldom independent socioeconomic islands and even where there has not been a history of political conflict (conquest, raids, tribute), migration, pilgrimage, or intermarriage there is usually a complex interaction based on trade. It is common also for the dynamics of subsistence strategies themselves to create other types of more direct resource-use interaction. Both the middle-altitude and high-altitude strategies characteristically employ tactics of multialtitudinal land use and seasonal movement between several settlement sites. There is often some overlap in the microenvironmental areas exploited, especially for pastoral patterns. Both middle- and high-altitude agropastoralists value the grazing resources found in the high summer pastures and the lower valley forests, grasslands, and fallowed fields. This sometimes leads to different groups, often of different ethnicities, seasonally making use of the same areas or of crossing other groups' territories en route to their own secondary settlement and grazing areas. To coordinate this multicultural use of particular areas arrangements are made that include joint resource management, user or transit fees, defined common property resource-use boundaries, sequential resource-use arrangements, and other examples of temporal and territorial resource partitioning. In some cases differences in resource-use goals and land-use production systems make it possible to develop complementary multiethnic resource use. A given high-altitude place may be valued as a summer herding area for the sheep and goats of a middle-altitude agropastoral group, for example, and also be an agricultural area for a high-altitude agropastoral group that may value the additional manure provided by the outsiders' sheep. Such complementary resource use is even more common in the altitudinal reaches where middle-altitude main villages are situated. Here middle-altitude households may offer cash and other incentives and compete with each other to obtain better fertilization for their winter fallow fields by having them grazed by the flocks of high-altitude herders who have come down valley for winter grazing. In other cases, however, these same resource activities are seen to compete with local herders' access to pastures, and herding families demand compliance with local grazing restrictions and the payment of grazing fees, or even ban outside herds altogether.

The subsistence strategies and regional resource-use patterns of middle- and high-altitude agropastoralists in the Dudh Kosi valley have historically resulted in a complex pattern of regional trade, seasonal movement, overlapping land use, and resource partitioning and management within a broad general altitudinal differentiation of land use and associated production systems. Rais and Gurungs from the lower reaches of the watershed have taken sheep and goats up into the high pastures, often to their own areas (some of which they retain through claims predating the in-migration of Sherpas), but in other cases to Sherpa-

controlled regions where they have had to follow local grazing regulations and sometimes pay fees. Sherpas from both Khumbu and Pharak formerly took stock (at least on a small scale) into middle-altitude Rai areas, in some cases paying fees for the privilege. In other areas Sherpas have had to pay summer high-altitude grazing fees to Rais. High-altitude Khumbu Sherpas have engaged in trade with both middle-altitude Sherpas and Rais as a basic component of their subsistence economy and both middle-altitude Sherpas and Rais have also long traded to Khumbu. The scale, nature, and geographical extent of this trade, however, has varied enormously over the past century with considerable impact on local subsistence strategies.

Khumbu Sherpa Subsistence Strategies

In many respects Khumbu Sherpa subsistence is a typical high-altitude agropastoral strategy. Like other high Himalayan peoples Khumbu Sherpa have developed an integrated mix of agriculture and pastoralism based on the familiar crops and livestock varieties of the high country. And like other Himalayan peoples in these circumstances they have long supplemented the agricultural and pastoral resources of their high valley homeland by trade geared to obtaining lower-altitude-grown grains. Khumbu Sherpas traded crop surpluses and pastoral products, but they, like many other peoples who live along the Tibetan frontier, have particularly profited from playing a middleman's role transporting goods across the Himalaya between Tibet and the lower lands of Nepal and India. Since the 1960s this trade has dwindled and Sherpas have instead achieved a similar diversification of their subsistence by using cash to buy rice, maize, wheat, millet, and buckwheat grown in the lower Dudh Kosi and adjacent valleys and the Nepalese Tarai. Today, as for at least a century, Khumbu Sherpas do not need to achieve regional or household self-sufficiency in agricultural production. Instead they have the more limited goal of meeting household requirements in a small range of Khumbu staple crops.

Sherpa households' ability to obtain agricultural and pastoral products from regions below 3,000 meters through trade has enabled them to adopt a strategy of specialization in high-altitude-fit varieties of crops and livestock. At the same time, Khumbu Sherpas, like other high-altitude peoples, have made the use of a range of microenvironmental sites a prominent basis of their subsistence strategies. Within Khumbu itself Sherpas make adept use of the minor microenvironmental variations between different sites due to altitude, aspect, precipitation, and soil. Herding strategies for the various types of livestock all involve the

use of seasonal transhumance between lower and higher valley common pastures. Crops are usually planted in fields at a variety of altitudes. Some direct use has also been made of altitudinal and microenvironmental regions beyond Khumbu itself. Sherpas have never developed secondary agricultural areas in lower valley areas remote from their main villages in the way that some Bhotia peoples have in the western Himalaya, but like most other high-altitude peoples they have made use of environmental opportunities in adjacent regions for herding. Earlier in the twentieth century Khumbu Sherpas, like the peoples of Dolpo and Humla in northwestern Nepal, benefited from Tibetan winter pastures and some also took a few crossbreeds and sheep south to the lower valleys to serve as pack stock on trading journeys. In the Khumbu case, however, only a few families did so and then only on a quite small scale. Before the mid-1960s many families, like other Bhotias, devoted the winter to travels which might last five months and which were spent trading and visiting sacred places and shrines.

Since at least the late nineteenth century, and probably for long before, Khumbu subsistence has revolved around the cultivation of a very small number of staple crops which can tolerate the high-altitude conditions. Buckwheat is the main grain, grown in a biannual rotation with tubers. Some barley has also been grown in those few sites where it is possible to easily irrigate the fields, and the need to irrigate barley fields rather than cultural or political economic factors accounts for the distinct lack of emphasis on this preferred food. Formerly, Tibetan varieties of turnip and radish were the staple tuber crops, but during the twentieth century potatoes have become not only the most frequently grown tuber but the dominant crop in the region. Today more than 75 percent of all crop land is in potatoes, usually monocropped and often grown year after year without rotation.^[19] Regional diets are today based primarily on potatoes, which are consumed in one form or another as the foundation of virtually every meal. Adult Sherpas typically consume more than a kilogram of the tubers per day, and a family of four requires between one and two metric tons per year for self-sufficiency in this staple.^[20] Grain is much less important, and a well-to-do household might live well by local standards on less than 700 kg (10 muri ) per year.^[21] Diet varies somewhat with wealth, particularly in the amount of grain consumed. Wealthier families also differ in their choice of grains, and eat rice, barley, and buckwheat rather than the millet, maize, and buckwheat of the poorer households. Rice, maize, and millet are all obtained from outside the region and much higher prices are paid for rice than for the other grains. Recent affluence has greatly increased the amount of rice being consumed today in Khumbu. During the past decade well-to-do families, especially those in Nauje, have also added more processed

foods to their diet. Instant noodles, refined sugar, powdered milk, and even such things as mayonnaise have become popular.^[22] Some adverse effects on health and teeth are beginning to become evident.

Over the centuries Khumbu Sherpas have developed a set of different production systems to raise potatoes, buckwheat, and barley. Each makes use of different techniques and requires different knowledge. Some are in use throughout the narrow altitudinal reach of Khumbu whereas others are employed more specifically in a particular type of microenvironmental setting within the region. All of these crop-production systems are also linked with grazing and forest-use practices that furnish crucial field nutrients. Ten different crop-production systems can be identified in Khumbu today, all but two being unirrigated. Nine are based on the cultivation of crops in main terraced fields. The two most important systems in terms of the land devoted to them and the share of local food production which they account for are both unirrigated, single summer crop production systems. In one of these potatoes are grown in a mono-crop for decades with no rotation. In the other there is a two-year rotation between potatoes and buckwheat. Two other production systems that are now employed on a limited basis by a few families in some of the main villages build on these basic potato and buckwheat systems by adding intercrops. In one of these potatoes are intercropped with a Tibetan variety of radish and in the other a semivolunteer called to which produces an edible tuber is encouraged in either potato and buckwheat fields. There are also two production systems now practiced in Nauje which build on potato and buckwheat cultivation through following the main harvest with a second crop. Several families follow potatoes with a second crop of mustard that is grown as a green vegetable, not for its oil. A few families follow potatoes with a second crop of wheat or barley grown for fodder. In both cases the need for the second crop to mature before November limits the use of this system to the lower-altitude settlements of the region and often involves harvesting potatoes before they reach their full maturity in order to make field space available. Two further nonirrigated production systems are devoted to fodder. The most important of these is establishing and tending hay fields. In Nauje there is also some small-scale growing of nonirrigated barley and wheat as fodder crops. Finally, there are two crop-production systems in Khumbu that make use of irrigation. Both are very localized. The most important in terms of the area devoted to it is the cultivation of irrigated barley as a summer field crop. In this system barley is rotated biannually with unirrigated potatoes. The requirements of the agroecosystem for irrigation water in the late spring limit it today to a single site in eastern Khumbu. The other system is the household vegetable garden. Here water is carried by hand from the village water sources to the garden rather than being fed by a canal system

to the site, and is carefully delivered to the plants through hand watering in contrast to the techniques used to irrigate barley.

Agriculture is carried out by nuclear families on privately owned crop and hay fields. Khumbu Sherpas are all smallholders. Most families own less than a quarter hectare of land and wealthy families own little more than half a hectare. The tremendous productivity of potatoes, however, makes even this small amount of land sufficient to meet household requirements in all but the worst years. Indeed, the 1,200 kilograms required by typical Nauje families can be grown on only 600 square meters of land even in a relatively bad year. Elsewhere families have no trouble cultivating enough potatoes for their needs on less than 1,000 square meters of land, and those who own a quarter hectare of land may also reap two muri or more of buckwheat (120 kg), enough for household self-sufficiency in that grain (although far from the ten or more muri of total grain stocks required by a household). In good years families who own only a quarter hectare of land may be able to exchange or sell surplus potatoes or, as is more common, use them as fodder. In some years such a household may also have a surplus of buckwheat. Surplus production is mostly exchanged in Khumbu itself, but throughout the twentieth century dried potatoes have been exported on a very small scale to Tibet and some potatoes have been traded or sold as seed potatoes each January and February to Rais and Sherpas from lower-altitude areas. A relatively small number of families, however, sell potatoes or grain on an annual basis. The great majority of Khumbu families orient their crop production entirely to family consumption. Even the few households that often raise and sell a surplus have had their crop production practices less affected by commercialization than might be expected. These farmers do not, for example, base their decisions about which crops and crop varieties to plant on the basis of market demands and commodity prices. They maintain the same monocrop potato or biannual buckwheat-potato rotations as their fellow villagers, cultivate the same varieties of these crops, and raise them with the same fertilizer and labor inputs.^[23]

Pastoralism is based on the care of several species of stock that are hardy enough to winter in Khumbu conditions that are kept for their direct contributions to the family of milk, meat, blood, hair, manure, draft power, and transport and also as sources of income from the sale of calves or their use as pack stock. Yak and especially the female yak, known in Khumbu as nak , are the preferred stock. Cattle, yak-cattle crossbreeds, and sheep are also kept on a small scale.^[24] There is a very strong cultural preference for raising yak which is deeply entwined with local conceptions of wealth and status. During the past century the major emphasis in stockkeeping has been on the raising of nak kept both

as a source of milk and for crossbreeding with bulls to produce cross-breed calves that were commercially valuable for sale in Tibet and to middle-altitude Sherpas.

Herding emphasizes the use of the extensive Khumbu rangelands that are regarded as common property resources freely available to all Khumbu Sherpas. The use of some of these areas is regulated during summer by local pastoral management regulations intended to protect growing crops from livestock, reduce pressure on lower Khumbu winter pasture areas, protect areas that furnish wild grass for hay, and establish a form of rotational grazing of some high summer pasture areas. Today all herding is carried out entirely within Khumbu throughout the year. The full range of Khumbu pastoral resources from 2,800 to 6,000 meters is used. Cattle and crossbreeds are herded to high altitudes in summer and in winter are stabled in the lower floor of main village houses and fed fodder. The hardier yak and nak are taken to the very highest Khumbu summer pastures and also often spend much of the winter at high-altitude herding bases where they feed on what grass they can find in the snowy upper valleys and are fed hay that has been grown in nearby walled fields and stored in the high-altitude herding huts. This yak-herding pattern, with its distinctive reliance on year-round use of Khumbu pastures and the consequent importance of winter and spring moves to areas where hay and fodder supplies have been stored, is largely a development of the last sixty years. Previously many yak were taken to Tibet to winter and much less hay was grown in walled fields in Khumbu.^[25]

Pastoralism, in contrast to crop growing, is much influenced by commercial concerns and has been for at least a century. Livestock make many contributions to household sustenance, but they are equally as important for many families as sources of income and this affects decisions about herd composition and size. The sale of crossbreed calves bred from nak was long a very important Khumbu industry, although less so in the recent past than formerly. Early in the century it was one of the most lucrative of all Khumbu entrepreneurial avenues. And at various times the keeping of yak and male crossbreeds has reached high levels when it has become especially worthwhile to own pack animals. During the past fifteen years the number of male crossbreeds kept in several Khumbu villages has increased markedly, reflecting interest in opportunities for their use as pack animals in the tourist trade.

Altitudinal Land Use

Khumbu Sherpas make use of a span of vertical environments which ranges from 2,800 to 6,000 meters (fig. 7). Microenvironments within this region vary in climate from cold temperate to arctic and in vegeta-

Figure 7.
Khumbu Historical Altitudinal Land Use

tion from temperate forests of pine, fir, birch, rhododendron, and juniper to subalpine forests of fir and rhododendron and high-altitude, alpine shrubland, and from temperate grassland to alpine tundra. Local knowledge of this diversity underlies agricultural and pastoral decisions in everything from terrace siting and crop selection to the timing of planting, the siting of herding huts, and the seasonal movements of

herds of different livestock species. Khumbu Sherpa subsistence strategies emphasize the use of some local microenvironments more than others. The most intensive use is made of the sunny, south- and west-aspect slopes. Here substantial amounts of land even above 4,000 meters have been put into crop terraces and hayfields and considerable grazing is done on other land. Remnant woodlands are much used as sources of forest products, especially as sources of leaves for fertilizer, and they are also often valued as grazing areas. Much less use is made of north- and east-aspect slopes for farming or herding, but the extensive forests below 4,000 meters in these areas have historically been valued sources of timber, roof shakes, and fuel wood. At the higher altitudes the subalpine forest, shrub, and grassland ecosystems and alpine ecosystems of both north- and south-aspect slopes are used for grazing. Below 5,000 meters in these areas much land is also put to the cultivation of hay. Here the difference between sunny and shady aspects is less crucial. The historical emphasis on the use of south- and west-aspect slopes between 3,000 and 4,000 meters has apparently had a role in diminishing the extent of temperate and subalpine forest-woodland ecosystems and in creating the relatively large expanses of shrub and grassland in these zones.

Whereas Khumbu pastoralism, as already mentioned, is carried out through the full vertical range of altitudinal land use, agriculture is conducted in a much narrower range of altitudes. Most crop fields are situated between 3,400 and 4,000 meters with only a relatively small amount of land in higher-altitude fields. Hayfields, by contrast, have been established from 3,400 to as high as 5,000 meters. Multialtitudinal crop production is common. Individual families may own fields that span a thousand meters in elevation. There are four different altitudinal crop zones associated with different types of main and secondary settlements: the gunsa; main village; secondary, high-altitude agricultural site; and the high herding settlement or phu (map 6 and fig. 8). Multialtitude cultivation increases flexibility in labor scheduling, extends the growing season (thus increasing the amount of land that can be cultivated by individual families), expands villagers' access to land beyond the relatively scarce area in the vicinity of most main settlements, and reduces the risks of crop failure by dispersing staple crop production across several different microenvironments. The small altitudinal range between the different crop sites, however, means that no advantage is gained in terms of widening the local crop repertoire beyond buckwheat, barley, and potatoes. Families with gunsa land are able to get an early start on planting potatoes and harvest them before the later-planted, main settlement fields have matured.^[26] Generally only a small amount of land is farmed at these altitudes and many families own no gunsa land whatsoever. The main emphasis is on fields in the main village and

Map 6.
Multialtitudinal Agricultural Sites, Thamicho

Figure 8.
Thamicho Multialtitudinal Crop Production

especially those immediately adjacent to the house. Most households have well over 50 percent of their total cropland in the main village. High-altitude, secondary agricultural sites are the next most important agricultural zones. Here large amounts of land are put to potatoes, and at Dingboche a roughly equal amount of land is in barley. Formerly buckwheat was also produced in some of these settlements. High-altitude fields above 4,000 meters yield smaller harvests than lower-altitude ones and usually only consist of a small patch or two of potatoes. Harvests at these high herding settlements, however, release families who spend a good part of the year with herds in the high pasture from the effort of transporting as many supplies from the main village.

Distances between gunsa and high-altitude fields may be great enough that in the often rugged terrain a day or more is required to traverse them. Thamicho families with gunsa fields in the lower Bhote Kosi valley at Thamo, for example, may have their highest fields eighteen kilometers up

valley at Chule or Apsona. Some Khumjung, Kunde, and even Nauje families have fields as far away as Dingboche, fifteen kilometers to the east. The distances involved often make cultivating high-altitude, secondary agricultural sites and high herding settlement fields from a single, main village base impractical, and many families shift instead back and forth between dwellings in different reaches of the valley a number of times during the growing season. These movements must also be coordinated with the requirements of herding, community regulations governing the timing of field work and grazing, and social responsibilities at two major summer festivals held in the main village and a third conducted in some high herding settlements.

Integration of Land-Use Activities

Life in Khumbu is a complex integration of the requirements of conducting crop production and pastoralism at the altitudinal limits of both (fig. 9). The use of forest resources is also interwoven with agropastoral-ism as well as making an essential contribution to the provision of fuel and shelter. Agropastoral practices must also be integrated with the seasonal rhythms of conducting long-distance trade and with the required commitments of time and energy for tourism work and business operations. I have not heard of any Khumbu Sherpa family during the twentieth century which specialized in trade to the total exclusion of agriculture, and no Khumbu Sherpa family today relies solely on earnings from tourism. Farming continues to be carried out by all households and ways are found to compensate for the scheduling problems and occasional labor shortages created by the demands of tourism employment. Even the families which have grown wealthiest from trade and tourism continue to place great importance on maintaining the cultivation of their land and many also keep livestock. Some are among the largest stockowners in their villages.

Khumbu crop production is intimately linked to pastoralism even for those families who own little or no livestock. Annual fertilization of potato fields is a fundamental principle of Sherpa agriculture and although everything from composted weeds and forest-floor litter to human waste is used, the most important soil additive is undoubtedly manure. This is so important that the route and timing of herd movements is decided in part on the basis of where household fields are located and when the optimal times are to supply them with manure. Families without sufficient livestock of their own either scour the slopes for dung or devote scarce cash to purchase it--in some places even doing so a year in advance in order to be sure of an adequate supply.

Crop production in turn contributes to pastoralism. Livestock are grazed in autumn on field stubble and fed fodder in winter, which includes

Figure 9.
Khumbu Sherpa Land-Use Integration

carefully dried and stored stalks of buckwheat, barley, and danur , a perennial plant believed to have medicinal and stimulative qualities for cattle. Large amounts of land and labor are devoted to the cultivation of hay that is grown on fields in the lower valleys and in some main villages as well as on a large scale above the range of productive potato cultivation.

Both crop growing and herding are further linked to forest use. Khumbu is at the upper limit of tree growth, and only its sub-4,000-meter, lower reaches support temperate and subalpine forests. Sherpas depend on these limited forest areas for timber and fuel wood and also rely on them for grazing and for soluk , dried leaves and needles scoured from the forest floor.^[27] Open woodland in the vicinity of villages provides much-

used grazing and browsing, especially in winter, so much so that its intensity may be affecting forest regeneration in some areas. Forest-floor litter is gathered twice a year and carefully used as stable bedding, after which the urine- and dung-rich material is stored until spring when it is dug into the fields. In some areas and for some families this constitutes a far higher percentage of fertilizer by volume than does manure. The intensity of foraging for leaves and needles gives the forest in the vicinity of villages a freshly swept look and in places every fir needle or birch leaf seems to have been removed. Both the gathering of dead leaves and needles and grazing were permitted even in forests that were traditionally strongly protected by Sherpas from logging or lopping.

Economic Differentiation

The social complexity of indigenous societies has often been neglected or underemphasized in cultural ecological studies. Adaptive strategies and land-use patterns have often been generalized as if regions, settlements, and even individual households maintained the same practices. Yet there may be tremendous variation in household wealth, status, and political power within settlements, as well as contrasts among villages. This may affect lifestyles, types and scale of resource use, land-use practices, access to private and communal land, and the maintenance of local resource-management systems--all of which also can have considerable ramifications for local environmental change. The analysis of local economic and political differentiation may thus be as important an element in the study of environmental degradation as is the examination of the historical impact of national government policies on land use and resource management.

There is not as much differentiation of wealth among Khumbu households as is typical in many parts of Nepal where tremendous disparities in land ownership are common. There is no class of landless Sherpa families or tenant farmers in Khumbu, although there are a few families who own very little land indeed. Nor are there any great estates here like those in some other Sherpa-settled areas such as Shorung and Chyangma. Most families own enough land to harvest a supply of potatoes sufficient for their annual requirements, although in the relatively frequent years of bad harvests they may have some shortfall. No family today owns more than thirty-five head of yak and nak and almost all families, regardless of their wealth, carry out a substantial part of all the labor on their lands.^[28] All share the same types of local knowledge of environment and agronomy, the same assumptions about the culturally correct ways of working the land, the same technology and techniques, and the same basic strategies for coping with altitude and Khumbu microenvironments and their

distinctive risks and opportunities. This makes it possible to discuss a "Khumbu Sherpa" pattern of agriculture and of subsistence more generally despite differentiation in wealth. Yet all Khumbu Sherpa families do not uniformly implement the same adaptive land-use strategies and practices. Differences in individual inclination and, to an even more important degree, differences in household labor, land, livestock, and fiscal resources, have led to several different ways of organizing agriculture and pastoralism. Individual families may practice more than one of these over a period of years as their resources change and make possible or impractical different subsistence practices.

Khumbu society has sometimes been regarded by casual visitors as remarkably egalitarian. Yet there are important differences of status, wealth, and power within communities and have been for many generations. There are such differences among Sherpas, between Sherpas and Khambas, and especially between both of these and Khumbu's few families of Hindu blacksmiths. And there are differences in power between ordinary families and those wealthy and powerful families Sherpas refer to as "big people." Differentiation of wealth is clear in diet, amount of fuel wood use, house size, style, and construction materials, and the amount of land and labor they control. It is also clear in subsistence' strategies, not only in stockraising and in some cases in crop selection but also in such small but important things as when crops are planted and harvested and how much manure is put on them. Social differences are thus significant for describing Khumbu land use and exploring possible processes of environmental degradation both before and after the social and economic changes of the 1960s.

The wealthy lived better by Sherpa standards even during the pre-1960 era of "traditional" society. They occupied larger and more luxuriously furnished houses. They owned enough land to produce not only plenty for family consumption but also surplus for sale. If they wanted to raise yak they did, and could afford to maintain the necessary secondary herding huts and hay lands. They could hire sufficient labor to care for their fields and livestock. They had the capital to conduct the most lucrative types of trade with Tibet and to do so without the backbreaking labor of hauling their own loads over the pass. They ate better, being able to afford imported tea and sheep meat from Tibet and rice from lower-altitude Nepal. They dressed better, were better educated, and were better able to accrue merit and social status through support for religion. In many cases they were also the hereditary political leaders and generally had louder voices in village assemblies and in the smaller meetings of village "big people." Formerly there were relatively few such well-to-do families in the region, a disproportionate share of whom lived in Nauje and had acquired their wealth from trade. Tourism has led

to general affluence in the region as compared with both earlier times in Khumbu and current conditions in neighboring regions. This has affected lifestyles and resource use across Khumbu. It has enabled a number of families who formerly were not among the "big people" to gain more local socioeconomic status and political power. Tourism income has not, however, ended regional economic differentiation. Some types of tourism work and business are more lucrative than others and certain families and villages have prospered more than others.

Wealth influences land use primarily through affecting crop-selection decisions. The amount of crop land a family owns is a crucial factor in its decision over whether to cultivate both grains and tubers or only tubers. Although there are some exceptions, most land-poor families tend to emphasize potato production. This tendency is spectacularly visible in the monocrop potato cultivation that has characterized Nauje where crop land has been more limited than in any other main village since the early twentieth century. Wealth may also influence decisions about the variety of potatoes planted, in that rich families can better afford to choose varieties that are highly regarded for their taste even if their yields are inferior to other varieties. Wealth may also affect the amount of manure and other fertilizers which can be worked into fields, since gathering manure tends to be more difficult for households that do not own large numbers of livestock or possess the wealth to purchase manure. Poorer households obviously cannot afford to hire agricultural wage laborers and indeed may have to postpone their own field preparation, planting, weeding, and harvesting if their poverty leads them to work as wage laborers in others' fields. It may not be merely good luck and fine agricultural knowledge that result in some of the wealthiest families in the region also having a reputation as good farmers. They often own some of the best land and can afford to take the best care of it.

Difference in wealth has also been a major factor in variation among households in pastoral practices and in changes through time in herding by individual families. During the past forty years fewer than 50 percent of Khumbu households have kept livestock and fewer still have practiced the yakherding with which Khumbu Sherpas are so identified and which is the local herding preference. There are rather at least four patterns of livestock ownership reflecting different degrees of wealth as well as types of knowledge, skill, and lifestyle preference. These pastoral patterns involve differences in herd structure and size, associated ownership of multiple-altitude herding huts and hay fields, use of hired labor or family labor specialization, patterns of movement in terms of altitude, periods and timing of absence from the home village, and impact on land in terms of areas affected and intensity. They may also lead to differing environmental impacts. Yak and especially nak herding has long been the pre-

ferred form of pastoralism, bringing with it great personal satisfaction in a culture that prizes these animals above all others as well as great social status. But yak and nak herding is a pursuit for relatively well-to-do households, requiring the ownership of high-altitude herding huts and hayfields and either the money to hire leaders or household members willing to take up a relatively difficult and lonely lifestyle for most of the year. The herding of cows and female crossbreeds (zhum ) is primarily carried out by families who own only a few animals and make use of their milk and manure within the household. Male crossbreeds (zopkio ) are the livestock of choice for many families in the lower parts of Khumbu, who are not heavily involved in other stockkeeping and want to invest in animals to be used to earn cash from tourism. The seasonal herding movements, grazing preferences, and fodder requirements of these different types of stock are distinct. The recent regional trend towards more families raising livestock and especially towards the keeping of small numbers of cows and crossbreeds has put greater pressures on some types of pastoral resources, especially on rangelands in lower Khumbu.

Different degrees of household involvement in trade and tourism have also made for enormous differences in cash income and wealth, which have also had repercussions for land use. Such wealth has historically enabled some families to acquire land and livestock, to hire herders, agricultural laborers, and woodcutters, and to consume more non-Khumbu-raised grains, meat, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. Wealth from trade and tourism has allowed some families, particularly in Nauje and also now in Thamicho, to increasingly specialize their crop production by devoting their relatively small holdings exclusively to potato production. This means that all grain must be purchased.

The Demographic Cycle, Economic Differentiation, and Subsistence

Changing household demographics affect household wealth, resource use and land-use practices in Khumbu as they do in other societies based on subsistence agriculture and pastoralism.^[29] Chayanov (1966), in his early work on Russian peasants, was the first to note that household financial and labor resources and economic goals were related to the ages of family members and the rearing of children. He discussed household subsistence economy in terms of a domestic life cycle in which the key factor is the number of producers relative to the number of consumers. This concept of a household demographic cycle has become basic to studies of the domestic mode of production.^[30]

According to this view households are more constrained in their labor

resources when children are young and then increasingly improve their capacity for agricultural production as children become older and begin to contribute more labor. Chayanov found that this extra labor capacity was not necessarily, however, fully employed. Once families achieved self-sufficiency in food they tended not to produce surpluses for sale but rather to devote more time to other (often noneconomic) activities. The demographic cycle is significant in Khumbu subsistence today. Sherpas, however, may be more inclined than Chayanov's Russian peasants to channel surplus household labor into profit-making economic activities, including trade, craft production, and tourism development.

It is not yet possible to analyze fully the role of the demographic cycle in Khumbu. At this time the necessary statistical data and the interview-based data on family decisions, the perceived economic utility of children, views on the appropriate work roles of children, inheritance practices, and other key factors are not available. Yet some pertinent observations can be made about the composition of Khumbu households and the relationship between the demographic cycle and subsistence and wealth. Theoretically each Khumbu family passes through this demographic trajectory, each with comparable experiences. In reality, of course, there are major differences due not only to family size and the chronological spacing of children but to luck, skill, inherited resources, and income-earning opportunities. Yet it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the demographic cycle can influence household fortunes and to keep in mind that temporal variation operates at the scale of individual household economies as well as in larger historical and regional settings.

Khumbu Sherpa households are mostly virilocal, nuclear families formed at the time of the completion of the final marriage ritual (zendi ). After this ceremony a man comes into his full inheritance of land and livestock and moves with his wife into a house built for him by his parents in his home village. There are also stem families that result from the custom that the youngest son inherits his parents' house and the responsibility of caring for them in their old age. These stem families consist of the youngest son, his wife and children, and his parents. In cases where a couple has not had any sons another sort of stem household is developed. In this household one daughter remains in the home with her parents after her marriage and is joined there by her husband in an arrangement in which the son-in-law is referred to as a maksu . There are also a very small number of more complex households that are the result of polygynous and polyandrous marriages. In polygynous marriages each wife may be established in a separate house. Polyandrous marriages are usually entered into with two brothers, the spouses sharing a single household. In earlier eras the brothers divided family economic responsibilities, one

often specializing in herding. The establishment of such a household counteracted the usual fragmentation of family land which results from the custom of dividing it equally among the sons. In the 1950s an estimated 8 percent of Khumbu Sherpa households were polyandrous (Fürer-Haimendorf 1964:68). This has greatly declined, however, and none has been established as far as I know within the past fifteen years.

Households are largely economically independent. Communities enforce some resource-use regulations, particularly for pasture and forest use, but otherwise seldom interfere in household decisions about subsistence practices and land use. Much agricultural work is carried out by reciprocal work teams formed by groups of women friends, but relatively little cooperative labor is organized by clans, lineages, or extended families. Kin are called on to assist in difficult times and for such major efforts as housebuilding, at which time a careful ledger is kept of contributions of materials, money, and labor so that this can be reciprocated when the occasion arises. Wage laborers are also employed by those households who have the means for everything from crop production to building, weaving, and household tasks.

The Khumbu demographic cycle begins at the time of the establishment of the household after the zendi ceremony. Sons, who until this time have contributed their labor to their parents' household, now inherit their share of land and livestock and establish their own households. The youngest son remains a part of his parents' household and gradually takes control of the house and land, the parents working with him as long as they are physically able to. This stem family generally stays together until it is dissolved by the death of the parents.^[31] Occasionally an elderly couple decides not to remain as a part of their son's household and instead establishes itself in one of the family's gunsa or secondary, high-altitude agricultural site houses. Some old people go into religious retreat after their children's marriages and build a house for this purpose in a quiet place nearby the village or at the Tengboche monastery.

Young couples normally already have one and often two children at the time that they establish their own household. This reflects Sherpa cultural patterns of courtship and marriage, which involve a series of rituals and increasing commitments conducted over a period of years (see Fürer-Haimendorf 1979) during which time the prospective husband openly visits his fiancée at her parents' home and spends nights with her. Khumbu families thus begin their operation as a household with dependents. During the next few years additional children are usually born, and although infant and child mortality rates are high the family often increases to five or six members. During this first stage of the demographic cycle the number of consumers is high relative to the number of producers, since one pair of adults must care for several

children. In this situation either agriculture production must be increased (e.g., by the expenditure of relatively high amounts of labor to increase yields by more careful and time-consuming manuring and weeding) or more wage income must be made to purchase food. In this stage of the demographic cycle there is considerable pressure on both the young parents, on men to make income for food purchases and on women to grow as much food as possible for the family as well as to care for infants. Today men work for wages in the tourist trade. Formerly they might have attempted to profit through trade or, if all else failed, may have emigrated with the hope of returning with more capital.

A second stage in the demographic cycle begins when the oldest child reaches the age of five to seven. Even at this early age children begin to contribute to the household economy and cease to be merely consumers. Young children care for still younger ones, freeing mothers for other tasks. Some play at gathering manure, forest leaves, and water with diminutive baskets and carrying jugs. By the age of ten children are contributing significantly to household labor. Boys gather water, dead wood, and manure and take animals out in the morning and bring them back in the evening following instructions given by their fathers. Girls haul water, cook, perform other housework, gather manure and forest leaves from nearby slopes, and sometimes help with the livestock. Many girls have already dropped out of school by this age and thus have considerable time to help out with household responsibilities. By the age of thirteen to fifteen both boys and girls are usually performing nearly a full adult share of household labor during school vacations (if they remain in school at all) as well as working before or after school. Even at the age of twelve some strong girls handle an adult's share of agricultural work and represent their family in reciprocal labor groups. By the time they reach fifteen years of age many boys do the full work of an adult and some even go trekking by the time they are thirteen to fifteen. By twenty all young people are performing full adult work for their families. Sons who begin wage labor in tourism donate their full salary to the household. The ratio of producers to consumers thus begins to change as the children grow older and does so much faster than in the Russian peasant families with whom Chayanov worked. Because the eldest child is usually one to three years old at the time the household is established the family begins in only a few years to escape from the early pressure on the adult couple to support and care for the entire household.^[32]

Khumbu Sherpas today marry relatively late, usually not until after age twenty-five. Young men and women are expected to contribute their full labor to the household until the time that they marry and leave it and also to turn over wage earnings to the family. This means that the Sherpa household typically matures into an economic unit of four or more producers and remains together for a number of years after the children

have reached adulthood. During this time there are opportunities for considerable increase in family wealth. Older males can be freed from herding responsibilities by younger ones and devote more time to wage earning in tourism, or the family may build up a larger herd now that it has the hands to care for it. The family women may be able to farm their own family land without participating in a reciprocal labor group or hiring wage laborers, and they may also engage in some wage-earning activities such as operating a lodge or shop or producing handicrafts for the tourist industry. And rather than depending on a single income from a tourism-related job the family may now profit from several, for the sons may contribute a decade or more of earnings to the family welfare. During this time the family may expand its land holdings and (more frequently) its livestock ownership, and may accumulate more capital for trade ventures or entry into the lodge or shop business. As children become engaged (the demchang ceremony is usually held three or four years before the final zendi marriage ceremony) the family labor situation may change slightly as young men begin to contribute some of their time to helping their fiancée's family with its herding, even to the extent of taking pack stock trekking and giving the income from this to the young woman's family. They help out in this way from six months or a year after the demchang engagement to the time of the marriage.^[33] In some cases there is some reciprocity, and young women help their fiancée's families when asked to.

The family enters another stage as the children begin to marry. As sons wed and leave home they take with them an equal share of the land and livestock; daughters carry with them a dowry of cash, jewelry, and household possessions. The wealth a household has accumulated during the past twenty-five or more years begins to be fragmented, and seldom are the sons of wealthy men themselves wealthy simply through inheritance. If the sons share a wife in a polyandrous marriage this fragmentation is avoided. It may also be minimized if there is no son and a son-in-law is adopted into the family lineage and given the family house and property. In most cases, however, the nuclear family ultimately fragments.

A stem family in which a parental couple share a house with their youngest son and his daughter often has labor resources that are superior to those of the new nuclear families of the older brothers, for the parents may remain economically active for many years. The aging parental couple continues to work, and in former eras might still be major traders well into their 60s and 70s as well as sharing in the fieldwork and herding. Some men and women continue to make major income from the tourist trade into their later years, especially from operating lodges and shops. The stem family of the youngest son may ultimately be burdened more than advantaged, however, if the parents' health declines and they require much support in their old age.