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# Les Bergers du Fort Noir: Nomades du Ladakh (Himalaya Occidental)

Author: Fort, Monique

Source: Mountain Research and Development, 33(2): 186

Published By: International Mountain Society

URL: https://doi.org/10.1659/mrd.mm121

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Les Bergers du Fort Noir:
Nomades du Ladakh
(Himalaya Occidental)

By Pascale Dollfus. Nanterre,
France: Société d'Ethnologie, 2012.
343 pp. € 25.00; outside Europe,
contact publisher for price quote.
ISBN 978-2-901161-99-8.

The title sets the scene. Where is the
Fort Noir? Who are the nomads of
Kharnak (Kharnakpa)? Nobody knows
where they come from, and their
territory has undefined boundaries...
Reading this book is like entering an
unknown country, trying to decipher
what is still a mystery. Pascale Dollfus
describes her many experiences
among this nomadic community—
she has been familiar with Ladakh for
the last 30 years—and the reader is
carried along by these tales from
beneath the sky.

Page by page, the book recounts
the history of nomadic herders who
have not always been, and soon no
longer will be, itinerant. Their way of
life is described with precision, and
the comparisons with other similar
communities are welcome. The
Kharnak community belongs to the
Drukpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Dat monastery is the center of
their territory and hosts celebrations
such as the winter solstice. The
monastery has no monks or nuns: All
members of the religious community
live within their “household,” a fa-
milial unit of settlement, production,
and consumption; every household
worships a single tutelary god. All
Kharnak community members be-
long to the same social strata, and
there are strong links of solidarity
between them. The different com-

munity members' roles are clearly
defined according to age and gender,
and the throw of the dice is used to
determine and assign duties and the
property of men and heads of
household, as observed in other
Tibetan areas.

The main activity of Kharnakpa is to graze and keep livestock—sheep, goats, and yaks—on dry, high-altitude pastures. Their livelihoods depend on wool, milk, and meat from the animals. Although only 10% of the livestock are yaks, they are praised most and are the key element of a household's wealth. Households move from one place to another all year round. Winter in the upper Kharnak valley is long and harsh and full of dangers and threats—illness, lack of food, cold—while summer in the high pastures is the happy season, with the renewal of the vegetation. This is the time of marriages and visits from relatives living in the Indus valley. Nomadic travel, whether for a few hours or several days, requires changing campsites; hence, the Kharnakpa have movable homes, traditionally large tents made of yak hair, which, however, are increasingly being replaced by lighter, weaker cotton tents.

In this type of society, the ques-
tion of location is crucial: Thoughts
and comments on the sites and
routes used by the Kharnak people
are significant. As Dollfus writes,
“The Kharnak country defends and
reinvents itself. Far from being static,
this territory with blurred outlines
may at any time be moved, recon-
structed, enlarged, or decreased
depending on the water or forage
resources, the increase or decrease of
livestock, political crises, or various
orders” (p 162). Yet, Kharnak does
exist physically, and the small

number of maps in the book (pp 29,
169, 207) is a constraint: Readers are
left to wonder where the lakes Tso
Moriri or Tsokar or the city of Ruthog
are, and will have trouble positioning
Kharnak in relation to the Western
Himalayas and Tibet and in the
context of new access roads. This
holds particularly true when consid-
ering the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and
its consequences—interruption of the
Kharnakpa’s seasonal migrations to
Tibet, and immigration of Tibetan
shepherds—or the development of
tourism, which led to conflicts that
were eventually resolved through re-
allocation of rangelands and camp
locations, especially with their neigh-
bors from Rupshu. The contrasts
between careful descriptions of a way
of life that seems to last forever and
the nearly imperceptible signs indi-
cating the fragility of such a way of life
and its imminent disappearance are
what makes the book particularly
significant and valuable.

The small Kharnak society is not
static and unchanging. It lives and
evolves, which is well summarized in the
introduction and conclusion. In
15 years, it has lost more than 80% of its
population, eager to enjoy the facilities
of the modern world, who have settled
down near the town of Leh. So this
book appears, unwillingly, to be the
testimony not only of a lifestyle, but
also of knowledge and expertise that
are progressively disappearing.

AUTHOR

Monique Fort

fort@univ-paris-diderot.fr

UFR GHSS, Rue Albert Einstein F, 75 205 Paris
Cedex 13, France

Open access article: please credit the authors and
the full source.