“What Are you Doing in this Place of Nothing but Rocks and Trees” - Inaugural Professorial Lecture by Professor Ben Campbell

The area of Northern Nepal where I found myself repeatedly attracted to spend time over the last four decades is spoken of as remote, and not nearly so alluring as other parts of the Nepal Himalayas. The Tamang-speaking villagers had their doubts about what I could find interesting in their precipitous homeland, from which they struggled to make a living “chasing hunger high and low on the mountainside”.

The Rough Guide to Nepal stated “There’s not much culture up here”. For me it has been a location yielding profound cultural, social, political and environmental insights. It has been a place that stretches the reach of concepts, theories, languages, infrastructures and polities, and with a radical, ridge-dwelling ontological ‘politics of location’ opens up possibilities for learning from indigenous reflection on multi-species relations, gender, livelihood prosperity, environment and sustainability.

In this lecture I will gather some insights and images that have inspired phases of my research into mutual aid and gender in agro-pastoral subsistence, Himalayan biodiversity and regimes of participatory conservation, climate change, and energy transitions. Interspersed with these thematic interests has been a life pursued in the ways of compost-making and goat-keeping (from East Anglia to the South Pennines), with which to ground the comparative ethnographic study of food growing as fertile folk knowledge that anthropologists have in fact long shared with publics well beyond academic readerships (and now visual platforms).

Find out more about Professor Campbell's work here.