Close-up and wide-angle: On comparative ethnography in the Himalayas ? and beyond

When the lecturer arrived in Nepal for the very first time on March 10th 1965, he stayed a few days in a stucco palace on Kantipath, hidden behind a curtain of palm trees, – in the former Royal Hotel of Boris, before he moved to the thatched huts up in the eastern hills where he remained for the next six or seven months. These huts were in fact solid stone houses with wooden shingle roofs, built by the Sherpa of Solu Khumbu. Here, he collected data for a demography of the area and for a study of the local clan system. By chance he came across a number of historical documents, partly written in Tibetan, partly in Nepali, which were to shed new light on the migration of Sherpa ancestors from Kham in the eastern part of the Himalayas to their current dwelling places; on the subsequent segmentation of their clans; and on their relationship to the new Nepalese State. This forms the Mahesh Chandr a Regmi Lecture, held on December 15th, 2006. (Go to page 155 for this lecture).