Himalayan Habitat and Culture Change among Some Hypothetical Views the Magars

Abstract

This is a comprehensive sketch based on my field research on culture change as it relates to the hilly milieu of the Magars south of the Annapurna mountains of Nepal. The Magars are a semi-tribal, semi-civilized people. They received considerable impact of modernization within recent centuries. The impact reached them, not only through direct contact with the Western world, but also more forcefully through indirect contact with the adjacent high cultures, especially Hindu culture. Culture change is proceeding through constant adjustment and readjustment to their habitat. So far as I was able to presume, the earliest stage of subsistence was a combination of bow and arrow hunting, wild honey collection and slash-and-burn agriculture. The Magars dwelt in bamboo huts or tarpu. They were semisedentary and their sphere of movement was very restricted, being limited to a walking radius of a few days. The staple crops were perhaps African millet (Eleusine coracana), buckwheat, taro, Dioscorea spp., Amaranthus caudatus, and to some extent rice. The second stage was characterized by pasturage, upland field cultivation and hunting. Barley, wheat and maize were added, and twice-cropping within a year was realized. Cattle, buffalos, sheep and **oats were depastured in the jangal (forest) and bhugyen (alpine grassland). The combination of cultivation and animal husbahdry were closely interrelated. Thus, for instance, they would build a network-like series of terraced fields, which they would cultivate with a pair of oxen. Just before sowing, they would drive their animals down and corral them on the to-be-cultivated fields. They erected huts called goth on their respective fields and tethered their milk animals overnight on the fields in order to secure more dung. To further this method of manuring, they adopted the three-fields system as in the Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution: each quarter-field (pahal, or phat) was surrounded by piled stone walls to prevent devastation of crops by the depastured animals in the adjacent phat. This mode of cultivation encouraged communal regulation on depasturing and crop rotation. Housing in this second stage was of two kinds: one was the goth for the purpose of pasturing. The other was a permanent house thatched with a kind of grass khar. The third stage appeared only recently, supposedly within the past few score years.