Three QuesTions wiTh MARTIN SAXER author of Places in Knots

1. How do you wish you could change the field?

While global development agendas in their current incarnation put much emphasis on participation, gender equality and the environment, they are often used as simple templates to address complex and quickly changing socio-environmental problems. I wish that those on the receiving end of these development interventions had more of a say in policies that aim to protect mountains and people.

3. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

That would be having lunch in a trader’s house in Dzang, which is one of the three villages in the Limi Valley close to the Tibetan border in Nepal. The woman of the house commented on the food she is preparing. Food grains like rice and flour, a staple in the old Himalayan exchange of Nepali grain from Tibetan salt, are not imported from China; the salt, instead, now iodized and subsidized, is flown into the valleys from the south. A world upside down. And the dried yak meat she prepares is probably the last she will ever eat. A local Buddhist leader announced a no-kill zone, pushing pastoralism further to the brink. hosTed by JonaThan hall

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I started writing this book during a phase of revival of trans-Himalayan exchange across the Chinese border and I read it as a sign for the resilience of trade as the main source of income in the mountain valleys in northern Nepal. A combination of increasingly strict policies on the Tibetan side of the border and then the global pandemic put, at least for now, a big dent in the livelihoods of these trading communities. I wish I had witnessed the fragility of the entire system earlier in my research.