Book Project

I am working on a book project, "Sacred Trash and Personhood: Living with Daily Waste Infrastructures in the East Himalayas." This project is built upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in summer 2011, summer 2012, and between July 2014 and July 2015.

China’s recent twenty years' explosive tourist boom has made solid waste one of the greatest challenges on the Tibetan sacred mountains. Being the first monograph on Himalayan waste, this project examines the uncertainty of whether it is wise to prioritize recycle facilities than Buddhist prayer flags on the presumed sacred mountains to minimize waste.

Based upon comparative and multi-sited ethnography of a mountain village and a city, I analyze how villagers, tourists, and city government officials develop their own distinct notions of what is waste and what is sacred and how these notions are intertwined and producing unexpected outcomes. How do animistic, touristic, and growth-maniac views shape the Himalayan landscape, the ecological future, and the well-being of the people?

I aim at showing an indigenous notion of sacred waste and personhood that treats valuable materials and waste objects with mindfulness and with cosmic fear for personal misfortunes as well as ecological harms respectively. I employ participant observation, life history, and 40 in-depth interviews in the rural and urban Sino-Tibetan borderlands.