Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xix, 217 pp. (Tables, maps, figure, B&W photos.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-295-74659-3.
The book offers a combination of theoretical and analytical reflections on snow leopard conservation and develops on more than 15 years of qualitative fieldwork to present an engaging ethnographic portrait of the tangled relationships of wildlife-farmers and villager-conservationists in the Baltistan region of Northern Pakistan. The theoretically dense and historically rich chapters provide a nuanced understanding of how the life of the snow leopard is intertwined with the life of the goat and other livestock that are kept by the poor Balti herders in open corrals to meet their everyday nutritional needs. Despite the availability of its natural prey, such as ibex, markhor, and blue sheep, the elusive and rare snow leopard attacks these herds in broad daylight and tarnishes the boundaries of the domestic and the wild. Shafqat Hussain’s careful analysis invites us to consider the agentivity of this elegant predator in harsh remote terrains, and by combining empirical evidence and scientific analyses, explains how domestic livestock continue to sustain the numbers of this vulnerable cat in the wild. This, however, leads to two often-oversimplified and politically polarized issues that the book brilliantly addresses.
The first is a dominant opinion among conservation scientists who conceive the presence of domestic livestock as a looming threat to the snow leopard population as they compete with wild ungulates for fragile mountain meadows. Moreover, they argue that the killing of livestock happens when “ignorant” herders take their animals to the snow leopard’s habitat, and remain “careless” and “lazy” against any potential snow leopard attack. The suggestion they offer is encapsulated in a “standard conservation narrative” (15–16), that the charismatic megafauna, such as large carnivores, who became rare due to human encroachment and systematic killing, need protection to maintain the cycle of natural life. The book challenges such rhetoric and posits that instead of uncritically accepting such conservation narratives, we should explore the lifeworlds of the snow leopard, farmers, and their herds in their respective socio-cultural contexts. For example, evidence from Pakistan suggests that the human population is decreasing in the snow leopard habitat and that local people are not depleting the wild ungulates but rather preserving them to align with the provincial government’s programs of trophy hunting. Also, snow leopards are usually found in areas where most livestock are available despite an abundance of wild prey, and scat analysis confirms that about 70 percent of the snow leopard diet contains biomass of domestic livestock. This may mean that the lives of snow leopards and herders are tangled in complex and multiple ways and that farmers and their herds are keeping the population of this IUCN listed “vulnerable” cat at artificially high numbers (124).
The second is wildlife-human conflict, often understood through the retaliatory killing of snow leopards by farmers to protect their livestock. Again, the book engages in critical dialogues with conservation scientists, who without considering villagers’ point of view, argue for the establishment of protected areas to preserve the cat. In a conservation practice originating in the US in the nineteenth century, protected areas try to separate wild and domestic realms by privileging the idea of an untamed wild. However, the book argues that for the Balti farmers, wild and domestic are fluid domains, where domestic animals such as rashore goats can become wild and join ibex herd or the wild snow leopard can raid domestic spaces. An important concept is broq, or semi-domesticated pastures which are occupied by wild and domestic both for grazing and hunting (93). Therefore, instead of conceiving wildlife-human conflict through a modern Western-influenced scientific lens, the book asks us to consider the ideological and social forces at play and to see how intergenerational experiences of the Balti farmers shape their attitude towards coexistence with this ghostlike mysterious cat.
The main argument of the book lies in presenting a radical solution to these issues while also unveiling the specter and spectacle of conservation efforts. The specter is created through the need to count the numbers of snow leopards left in the wild and an urgency to save this “threatened” species in a timely manner. These specters form spectacles, such as a conservation NGO sponsoring an advertisement with the caption “one snow leopard is killed every day,” that commodify the animal and help to attain public funding for conservation efforts. However, the book argues, the economic, labor, and psychological costs incurred by farmers who actually sustain snow leopards through their livestock remain invisible, and most benefits go to “conservation NGOs, urban elites, and state agencies in the form of aesthetic and ethical satisfaction, professional achievement and funding, and social and political power and prestige” (12). An effective solution, he suggests, lies in village-based insurance schemes where farmers pay a small premium for each livestock and are compensated in the case of snow leopard predation. The author initiated such an insurance scheme in some villages of Baltistan through “Project Snow Leopard” in 1999 (renamed the Baltistan Wildlife Conservation and Development Organization in 2007), and effectively presents it as a long-term and transparent solution for protecting the snow leopard as well as poor farmers’ interests in the region.
The Snow Leopard and the Goat is a valuable resource for a range of educational purposes, including for students in environmental anthropology and the anthropology of development. Its enriching empirical scope and methodological and theoretical depth make a fine addition to the literature on conservation discourse (chapters 2 and 3), rural development (chapter 5), and postcolonial and South Asian studies (chapters 1 and 4). The impact of climate and environmental changes on the snow leopard, its natural prey, or the Western Himalayan region remains outside the scope of this book, however, with its sensitive approach, it succeeds in elegantly presenting the snow leopard as a symbol of political power and regional belonging.
Muhammad A. Kavesh
University of Toronto, Toronto