Welcome to the website for the conference “Himalayan journeys,” an event organised by the CNRS’s Centre for Himalayan Studies.

The conference's aim was to focus on movement as a particular social dynamic and to consider mobility and circulatory regimes, trails, routes and roads as the “connective tissue” within various historical and political contexts and against the backdrop of rooted cultures and identities inscribed in particular landscapes.

The deeply historical and changing character of the Himalayan region and of its human settlements exemplifies how movement has been valued differently through time and across cultures. Social and spatial mobilities also result from inequalities and need to be connected with the pervasive delocalisation of social life.

The constraints and limitations imposed by the topography, climate and ecology are characteristic of the Himalayan experience, but equally distinctive are the various ways these barriers to social life have been creatively overcome and circumvented. Trade, political, religious or familial connections have allowed for the circulation of goods, skills and ideas. We wish to explore how these circulations relate to cultural practices, imaginaries and materialities and how they are socially transformative.

What can the study of circulation tell us about the Himalayas, their social and spatial dynamics? Does the Himalayan social fabric produce peculiar circulatory regimes and pathways? How have relations between states and circulatory phenomena evolved? What are the new cultural and moral geographies that emerge from this global-cum-local circulation?

These are some of the questions that were explored during this conference. For more information about the chosen themes and particular lines of inquiry, please see the Conference themes page.

Phaplu airport (Solukhumbu district, Nepal), March 2015. Photo: Olivia Aubriot.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the conveners, Tristan Bruslé and Stéphane Gros, at himalayajourney@sciencesconf.org