Khumbi yullha and the Beyul: Sacred Space and the Cultural Politics of Religion in Khumbu, Nepal

Lindsay A. Skog

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017, vol. 107, issue 2, 546-554

Abstract: Many parts of the Himalaya are at once indigenous people's homelands, national parks or conservation areas, world-renowned trekking and mountaineering destinations, and the sites of ongoing ecological and socioeconomic development interventions. In addition, for many residents, protective territory deities reside in nearby peaks, and valleys between provide sacred places of refuge. Like in mountain regions elsewhere, these meanings represent overlapping and entwined claims of authority and territory from the state, indigenous communities, development agencies, and religious institutions. In this article I consider the ways in which resident Sherpas in Khumbu, Nepal, negotiate the overlapping spaces, authorities, and territories associated with understandings of the region as Khumbi yullha's—a local deity—territory and the Nyingma Buddhist institutional claim to the region as a beyul—a sacred, hidden valley refuge, which development actors, both inside and outside the Khumbu Sherpa community, have attempted to mobilize as a sacred landscape supporting environmental conservation initiatives. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in 2009 to 2010 and 2013, I focus on the spatiality of the cultural politics of religion in Khumbu in competing claims of territory from the Buddhist monastic institution and localized practices and the ways in which such constructions shape the outcomes of intervention programs.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2016.1210498 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:107:y:2017:i:2:p:546-554

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1210498

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().