High Plains Applied Anthropologist No. 1, Vol. 18, Spring, 1988 63

Holding to the Middle Path in Ladakh: Tibetan Plateau

Ernest Atencio1

Abstract

Traditional Ladakhi culture, thriving in a brutal region of the Tibetan Plateau in the isolated northern corner of India,has struck a balance with the natural world and outlived many more complex and technologically sophisticatedcivilizations through a combination of practical conservation, strong communities and religious wisdom. This centuries-long history of sustainability is threatened by modernization and ill-suited development schemes. This article discussesthe effects and local response to these recent pressures from the “outside world” and, in particular, the work of theInternational Society for Ecology and Culture/Ladakh Project, which has been an exceptionally successful model of“applied anthropology” that has never called itself applied anthropology.

“‘Change’ is ravaging Ladakh today. It came to us through different mediums and different sources, very distortedin shape and very manipulative in nature, whatsoever, it all emanated from the west, and today, ironically only youcan bring us redemption.”

—Sonam (Soso) Dorje, from the text accompanying his 1995 photo exhibit in Leh, Ladakh

Life here is simple and hard and has been anextraordinary success for centuries . This must be one ofthe last places on the planet where land and people stillflourish without the interference of industrialdevelopment. “Progress,” such as it is, has not yet foundits way into many parts of Ladakh, hidden in the mostremote corner of India on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau.The consequence of that fact can be seen in the cheerfulgreeting you hear on a village path, in the smiling face ofa farmer plowing a patch of rocky ground with his yak, orin the peaceful silence that lies like a blanket across thevast landscape.

Tourists from the industrialized world come to Ladakhby the thousands every summer, as if on someinvoluntary pilgrimage. They come for all the typicalreasons—to collect photographs, souvenirs andadventures in this lost world of Tibetan Buddhism—butthey come also to see a way of life that has become rareand precious in our modern world. It is a life of sanity andscale, the likes of which we future-shocked Westernersmight never see at home.

After centuries of isolation in the upper Indus Valley– cut off from the outside world by lofty, snow-coveredpasses for most of the year– Ladakh has been inundatedby a flood of modernization over the last t wo decades byway of new roads, an airstrip and the mindless panaceaof economic development. Well-meaning tourists, thebaffling alienation of an increasingly global economy,even American TV beamed in by satellite, all endanger

Ladakh’s traditional life. These forces threaten to turnLadakh from what has been called the last Shangri-Lainto just another impoverished neighborhood in thetechnotopic global village. The fragile beauty of thishigh desert environment and the joyful Ladakhi spiritthat endures even the long, brutal Himalayan winters,would surely not survive a head-long plunge intomodernization, and a world in which culture and beliefand nature have harmoniously coevolved could be lostforever.

But even as these overwhelming winds of changethreaten the continuity of traditional life, they have alsostirred an acute awareness of the perils of the modernworld. In a response that is rare for developing areasaround the world, many Ladakhis look with suspiciondown the glittering modern path, and are struggling toprotect their ancient and well-adapted way of life fromthese strange, corrosive influences.

Sustainability in Simplicity

Ladakhi people have persisted and prospered in thesevere climate of the Tibetan Plateau for about twothousand years. The imposing barrier of the Himalayasblocks the southern monsoons, allowing less than fourinches of precipitation each year. Lying between 10,000and 14,000 feet in elevation, the agricultural fields getfour months of growing season at best. It is a land ofgenuine scarcity where ecological efficiency is n o t amatter of fad or government legislation, but a simple

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matter of survival. A pragmatic conservation ethic runsdeep in Ladakhi history and culture.

With no trees to speak of in this high desertenvironment, Ladakhis collect yak and cattle dung toburn in traditional stoves. Hand-patted and sun-dried,yak pies have provided centuries of reliable, clean-burning fuel for cooking and keeping warm during thearctic-like winters. Human waste from simple compostingtoilets becomes fertilizer for the barley fields andvegetable gardens. Small groves of poplar trees arecollectively cultivated along glacial streams to provide asupply of essential building material for each village. Inthis traditional world nothing is wasted: every scrap ofclothing or wood or metal is used and reused in endlesscreative ways.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, a sympathet ic foreigner whohas pioneered sustainable development projects inLadakh for the last 20 years, writes in her book, AncientFutures: Learning from Ladak h, that this “frugality” isfundamental to the people’s prosperity and success:

Using limited resources in a careful way hasnothing to do with miserliness; this is a frugality inits original meaning of ‘fruitfulness’: getting moreout of little.

One key to Ladakhi success is a strong sense ofcommunity. People share their scarce resources and theirlabor in elaborate customs of community cooperation,without which their sizable barley fields could not beharvested and their graceful, multi-story homes couldnot be built.

In our village it was like that,” recalls SonamDolma, a family matriarch and director of theWomen’s Alliance of Ladakh. “If you help othersyou will be helping the village, and we will all haveenough.

This way of life is more than a helpless response toscarcity, it also reflects a basic Tibetan Buddhistphilosophy which stresses austerity and theinterconnected unity of everything in the universe. TomSkurky, a psychology professor I met traveling inLadakh, believes that the community of the natural worldin which Ladakhis live is as important to their sense ofbelonging and personal identity as the community ofpeople. In the traditional world, a person’s relationshipwith nature is based on the same moral obligations they

have toward other people. With this sense of belonging,something like polluting a stream from which drinkingwater comes is considered not just environmentallyirresponsible, but a sin against nature. It is the simpleecological recognition that all things are interrelated andinterdependent.

Through this combination of practical conservation,strong communities and religious wisdom, traditionalLadakhi culture has struck a balance with the naturalworld and outlived many more complex and“sophisticated” civilizations. Tsewang Dorjey, a youngman who grew up in a rural village and now works onrural development projects for the Ladakh EcologicalDevelopment Group, explains, “You see, in many yearsback, when Ladakh was not open for the tourism ‘til 1974,the people were living in a sustainable way and they werenot dependent upon the outside world.”

“Sustainability,” that fashionable buzzword ofenvironmental rhetoric, meets the real world in thesimplicity of Ladakhi life.

A Woman from Far Away

In 1974 Ladakh was opened to foreigners for the firsttime since the late 1940s. At the time it was an unknowncorner of the Himalayas to most Westerners, which madeit an automatic target for adventure travelers and an armyof anthropologists and other researchers hoping t ocatch a glimpse of this lost world. It also quickly becamefodder for a dizzying array of development projects.

Originally planning only a six-week stay, HelenaNorberg-Hodge traveled to Ladakh and neighboringZanskar in 1975 as part of a film crew from England. Shewas immediately smitten by the wild Tibetan Plateaulandscape and the cheerful Ladakhi people, and shestayed. As a trained linguist, she became the firstWesterner in this century to master the Ladakhilanguage and quickly came to appreciate the value of thisunique culture.

Within three years of her first visit to Ladakh,Norberg-Hodge says she could already see many of thenegative impacts on traditional Ladakhi culture frommodernization and ill-conceived development schemes.For all their noble intentions of eradicating Third Worldpoverty and increasing standards of living, conventionaldevelopment projects around the world often backfire. Agrowing number of anthropologists, economists and

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other development professionals have begun to see thatby ignoring traditional local wisdom and force-feedingoutlandish foreign projects, conventional developmentcan unravel centuries of continuity and success. Theresults can include everything from deterioratingenvironmental health and loss of economicindependence to loss of cultural self-esteem. Even formaleducation has caused problems to the traditionalsubsistence economy. Tashi Dawa, of the Nature andEnvironment Conservation Group of Ladakh, explainssuccinctly, “The more you are educated, the more youare far away from your farm.” Growing numbers oftourists coming to Ladakh for the romance of an“untouched” culture only made it worse. Theirappearance of infinite wealth and leisure time reinforcedan idealized image of life in the industrialized world,spurring many younger Ladakhis to forsake tradition andembrace all things shiny and modern.

“It was all so evident,” Norberg-Hodge says aboutthose early days. “Almost every foreigner who camehere said, ‘What a paradise – what a pity it has to bedestroyed.’”

Norberg-Hodge was not the first or last Westerner tofeel a protective urge toward this enchanting world, butin 1978 she founded the Ladakh Project to do somethingabout it. The project started out intending only todevelop a handful of simple solar technologies asalternatives to the new fossil fuel-based technologiesmaking their way into Ladakh. Solar technologies forheating and cooking seem an obvious and moresustainable way to go in a high desert, preindustrialenvironment, but many Ladakhis were being lured byconvenience into a growing dependence on importedkerosene and propane. The appropriate technologyprogram grew to include hydraulic ram pumps and micro-scale hydroelectric generators, all of the projects usinglocal materials, local labor, and resisting fossil fuels andother technologies from beyond the mountains.

Eventually Norberg-Hodge had to confront what sherealized was perhaps the greatest threat to traditionalLadakhi life: gloss, hype, and misinformation amountingto prop aganda about modernization and development.This “development hoax,” as she calls it, is what createsand sustains the momentum behind most conventional,Western-style development projects. Ladakhis andother people in the developing world are sold a bill ofgoods without ever learning about the long-termenvironmental, social and economic impacts. But those

of us who have been through it ought to know better,says Norberg-Hodge, and Ladakhis have a right toexamine the whole picture. So she took it upon herself tofill the information gap through “counterdevelopment”education:

My main function was to provide more informationabout the Western world: how the West hadexploited other economies, other cultures; how ithad worked – bringing in schooling and forcingpeople to abandon their language; what the Westmeant for us – you know, DDT and asbestos – howwe had had that presented to us as beingwonderful and then found that there were sideeffects; how we had been told that petroleum wasthe only possibility. But here in Ladakh wasanother alternative.

The Ladakh Project started as a Western ideafounded on somewhat abstract Western concepts –cultural preservation, sustainable development, thescience of ecology – and, for the first few years, Norberg-Hodge and her Western associates dealt with localresistance that ranged from simple skepticism to outrighthostility. Eventually her unrelenting message began tostrike a chord with some Ladakhis. Sonam Dolmaexplained through a translator that “this woman from faraway had such a sadness in her heart that Ladakhiculture will vanish. I thought that nobody from our ownplace, Ladakh, has talked about this, and I realized thatshe is right and we should obey her. I was very happyabout this.”

Norberg-Hodge admits that her motivations have notbeen entirely altruistic, but that she wanted to saveLadakh as an example of a sane and balanced way of lifefor her own reckless industrialized world that wasgrowing precariously out of balance. “When I startedthis work, I wasn’t trying to ‘help’ the Ladakhis, I wastrying to help myself. Because I felt it was so vital to theplanet as a whole to have living examples that it’spossible to do things differently. It’s just veryfrightening to me that, in a way, all the evidence isdisappearing as people are made more dependent onMcDonald’s burgers and all this. No remnant anywhereleft of a more diversified indigenous agriculture.” Shepromotes these ideas in the West through a recentextension of the Ladakh Project called the InternationalSociety for Ecology and Culture. ISEC’s dauntingmission is to question and redefine the whole Westernnotion of “progress,” which Norberg-Hodge believes

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lies at the heart of modern predicaments from socialmaladies to global environmental problems.

Whatever her motivations, Norberg-Hodge’s workhas taken firm root in Ladakh. A slew of local NGOs,dealing with everything from development andeducation to environmental and health issues, is part ofNorberg-Hodge’s legacy. These organizations aresuccessfully promoting solar and small-scale hydrotechnologies, increasing local food production throughgreenhouses and permaculture projects, discouragingthe use of toxic agricultural chemicals, making publiceducation more relevant to Ladakhi culture, and areworking together to make the growing tourism industrymore truly “eco.” As a result of years of stubborncounterdevelopment work and a growing awarenessabout the perils of convent ional development, Ladakhisare moving in more sustainable and locally appropriatedirections at a point much earlier in the process thanmany other developing areas in the world.

Sonam Tundup, a friendly guesthouse proprietor andresident of a village near the capital town of Leh, says, “Ifthere is modernization, it is good to show other ways, butwe don’t forget our Ladakhi culture. Why should weaccept things that are harmful for my family, my culture?”

Today, Helena Dolma, as Norberg-Hodge is called inLadakhi, is near legendary throughout the area. Thestory of the “woman from far away” is known even in themost remote villages and nomad camps.

In the Winter We Become Ladakhis Again

“ In summer people are very busy. People havechanged, they are modern. But in winter, you can see theactual Ladakh. People wear the proper dress, it’s clean,and you can see only few tourists, and they also wearLadakhi dress. In the winter we are very happy becausewe have many festivals. Ladakhis indeed will neverchange.” Sonam Tundup told me this in response to aquestion about Ladakh’s future. To me, his statementdescribes not only a strong sense of cultural identity, buta certain resiliency in Ladakhi culture that has made forits astonishing success.

At any communit y event you can witness theadaptive blending of the traditional with themodern—what anthropologists are fond of calling“change and continuity”—that Sonam Tundupdescribes. One sunny day along the banks of the Indus

River, amidst what looked and felt like an vast nomadencampment, I watched thousands of devout Ladakhiscelebrating the birthday of the Dalai Lama, the spiritualleader of Tibetan Buddhism. Another day I attended aLadakhi wedding as the only Westerner among about180 guests. Both events involved music and exuberantdancing from Western-style “disco” to traditional folksongs, and people’s dress ranged similarly from designerclothing to traditional local costumes. The youngerfolks, sometimes sporting tight jeans and the latest hairstyles, performed choreographed music video routinesand exaggerated hip-thrusting disco moves to thecackling delight of the older generations. A few of themore outgoing elders, donning the traditional heavywoolen robes and great coats, were persuaded to join in.But when it came time for the traditional dances,everyone, no matter their age or hair style or clothing,knew the steps and happily joined in.

Many Westerners I talked with lamented the weirdforeign influences of popular music and dance andWestern monoculture in general, even as theyinadvertently spread its influence. Looking at the effectsof popularized Western culture in other parts of theworld, there is plenty of cause for caution. Still, most ofwhat I observed in Ladakh left me with a strong feeling ofcommunity solidarity and unambiguous cultural identity.At these public events people were simply having fun,affirming their identity in the celebration of culturallysignificant occasions, and weaving together the old withthe new, just as people everywhere have always done.

The weaving of old with new also provides aneffective way to deal with the unfortunate realities ofmodern rubbish. Along with all the other questionableresults of “progress,” a new variety of non-biodegradable plastics, metal alloys and glass haveinfiltrated most Ladakhi households. But the Ladakhihabit of frugal conservation applies even to seeminglyuseless garbage that we would toss without a thoughthere in our world of conspicuous consumption andwaste: Tin cans have the ends cut off and becomeprotection for sapling poplars against browsinglivestock, and as the trees grow the cans slowly rust offinto the ground. Glass bottles are buried upside down inrows to become exquisite garden boundaries. Plasticbottles are used and reused for sundry liquids until theyfall to pieces. Old fabric and plastic bags block drafts inwalls and roofs or are used as floor covering to keep thedust down. Paper is burned or becomes toilet paper forthe composting toilets. Anything organic is feed for the

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livestock. And every household has a stockpile ofmiscellaneous junk that might someday be useful forsomething. I learned, after asking stupidly of my hosts,“Where do I put the garbage?” that in most traditionalhouseholds they have none.

The Ladakhi conservation ethic, borne of a land ofscarcity and a sense of interconnectedness, makes ourown efforts at “reducing, reusing and recycling” lookpretty feeble. It is a powerful lesson for any of us from theover-consumptive industrialized world who choose topay attention. More importantly for Ladakh, it is a clearexample of adaptive Ladakhi tradition coming to gripswith the practical realities of the modern world. In acareful blending of old with new, change with continuity,may lie the path to Ladakh’s future.

Tashi Rabgias, a well-known Buddhist scholar andpoet in Ladakh, has written: “We now understand thatexcessive material development is not sustainable, oftenleading to ecological disasters, environmentaldegradation, and depletion of resources. For us, thesolution lies in the wisdom of the Middle Path, avoidingany extremism. Increased production leads tothoughtless consumerism—that is one extreme. Rottingstagnation leads to poverty—another extreme. While wenow know what sustainable development and renewableresources are, we have yet to find the appropriatetechnologies to realize them. However, we should becareful not to lose the sense of adaptation and flexibilitywhich our ancestors showed so admirably in the past.”

The centuries have certainly shown the Ladakhipeople to possess a sort of cultural genius foradaptation, and that ability might just carry them onthrough this bewildering and tumultuous modern age.

For more information contact:

C The International Society for Ecology &Culture/Ladakh Project, 850 Talbot Ave., Albany, CA94706, USA (510-527-3873) or 21 Victoria Square,Clifton, Bristol BS8 4ES, ENGLAND (0117-9731575)

For specific information about some of the NGOscurrently working in Ladakh:

C Ladakh Ecological Development Group, Leh, Ladakh194101, INDIA

C Students Educational and Cultural Movement ofLadakh, PO Box 4, Leh, Ladakh 194101, INDIA

C Nature & Environment Conservation Group ofLadakh, Leh, Ladakh 194101, INDIA

* * *Notes

1. Ernest Atencio is an anthropologist, writer, andenvironmental activist who spent the summer of 1995completing an applied anthropology internship inLadakh with The International Society for Ecology andCulture and the Ladakh Ecological Development Group.He would like to thank Helena Norberg-Hodge forhelping arrange a very rich and unique experience inLadakh, and too many Ladakhi friends to list here fortheir infinite friendliness and tolerance. Ernest Atenciocurrently tries to follow the Middle Path in his ownhomeland of northern New Mexico, where he works forAmigos Bravos, a river advocacy organization thatfocuses on rural environmental and social justice issuesthroughout the Río Grande watershed. Contact: AmigosBravos—Friends of the Wild Rivers, PO Box 238, Taos,N M 8 7 5 7 1 ; ( 5 0 5 ) 7 5 8 - 3 8 7 4 ; e - m a i l :e a t e n c i o @ t a o s . n e w m e x . c o m ; h t t p : / / w w w .newmex.com/amigosbravos.