The region of Ladakh, bordering Tibet and located in the extreme northeast of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, has elicited great attention from early scholars of South Asia. For the most part, this scholarly emphasis has focused on Ladakh's relationship with Tibet. As part of Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, the present volume brings a complementary and expansive perspective to Tibetan studies through its concentration on contemporary Ladakh and its ties with India and, more broadly, South Asia.
Beginning with an introductory review essay, the volume is divided into five sections and composed of thirteen anthropological essays (two in French, the remainder in English), largely by scholars educated or teaching in the United Kingdom and Europe. The sections cover (1) historical trends, (2) regional identities, (3) ritual, (4) kinship and gender, and (5) agriculture. With the exception of the first section, the volume covers post-1974 Ladakh, although many of the topics addressed naturally reference earlier phases of Ladakh's history, including the colonial era. Additionally, the volume includes an essay by Sophie Day on the contributions of Nicola “Nicky” Grist (1957–2004), an English anthropologist who began fieldwork in Ladakh in 1976 and to whom the volume is dedicated (pp. 29–40).
For those seeking an assessment of current scholarship on Ladakh, the introductory essay by Martijn Van Beek and Fernanda Pirie (pp. 1–28) provides an excellent overview and bibliography. As the editors discuss, older scholarship on Ladakh tended to focus on issues of cultural conservation and the region's ties to Tibet. The editors argue that some have tended to represent Ladakhi civilization as a preserve of Tibetan culture that is under threat of dilution from contemporary influences. The current volume, while not neglecting analysis of Ladakh's ties with Tibet, takes a more directed focus on unique aspects of Ladakh and the region's continuities with lesser-studied places, including the contiguous regions of Kargil, Zangskar, and Baltistan.
More generally, the present volume's valuable contributions lie in its breadth and emphasis on empirical studies; it explores themes ranging from the impact of urbanization on Sunnis and Shi'as in the Suru Valley (Nicola Grist, pp. 79–100) and geomancy, divination, and weather (Pascale Dollfus, pp. 119–37), to the celebration of Losar (Ladakhi New Year) (Fernanda Pirie, pp. 175–93) and patterns of land use in Baltistan (Matthias Schmidt, pp. 243–65). These wide-ranging contributions are united disciplinarily through the presentation and analysis of anthropological fieldwork; they also provide a useful overview of the great variety of research now being conducted in modern Ladakh.
With four essays, “Ritual” is the book's largest section; here, we find interesting and recent studies of Ladakhi ritual practices in terms of contemporary inflection. For example, Laurent Pordié's chapter (pp. 153–74) considers how consecration rituals in amchi (Tibetan) medicine in Ladakh are “recomposed” by the “ubiquity” of externally initiated development projects targeted at improving social conditions; he argues that the interaction between amchi practitioners and foreign donors in this domain results in a “revitalisation” of the ritual of consecration of medicines and of traditional medical practices in general (pp. 153–54). Collectively, the essays in this section provide a satisfying overview of current research on ritual in Ladakh.
The volume's ambitious range of topics does, however, leave a somewhat disjointed impression. For example, the section on “Historical Trends” contains two very different essays. The first essay by John Bray (pp. 43–66) examines corvée labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its relationship to local power structures and social status, while the second essay by Monisha Ahmed (pp. 67–75) profiles Sonam Paljor, a hitherto unidentified progenitor of carpet weaving in Ladakh, and traces Paljor's role in the development of this craft in Ladakh. While both of these essays make valuable contributions in their own right, they cannot be said to speak generally to the subtopic of “Historical Trends.” Finally, with the inclusion of the two French essays in this volume, this effect of discontinuity is compounded; English translations would have helped to ensure that the contributions of Dollfuss and Patrick Kaplanian (pp. 197–227) were equally accessible.
In summary, a more balanced treatment from section to section is indicated, as some are disproportionately underdeveloped. However, in its most fully developed sections, this volume makes a strong contribution to Ladakh studies in its rich presentation of anthropological data and, more generally, as a survey of current scholarship on Ladakh.
