Yarsagumba

This is the fourth in a four-part series of vignettes from the rural Nepalese village of Tarang. You can find the previous three entries here, here, and here. Even if you’ve read them, it’s worth revisiting the pages, as I’ve updated them with great photos of Tarang taken in 1968 by anthropologist James Fisher! This […]

Standoff in the Mud

This stretch of terrain between two branches of a river in Mongolia offers an excellent site for a standoff. Whether you want a social encounter, a combat encounter, or one that can shift between the two, this site’s combination of difficult terrain and exceptionally long sight lines promises to create a tense situation. Mongolia’s Gorkhi-Terelj […]

New Crop, New Jealousies: A Mystery

Back in February of 2018, I wrote about Tarang, a remote village of farmers and traders in the Nepalese Himalayas that serves as a ‘hinge’ between its Nepali Hindu neighbors to the south and its Tibetan Buddhist neighbors to the north. Back in 1968, Tarang was undergoing many changes, one of which was the introduction […]

Local Elections as Adventures

Back in February of 2018, I wrote about Tarang, a remote village of farmers and traders in the Nepalese Himalayas that serves as a ‘hinge’ between its Nepali Hindu neighbors to the south and its Tibetan Buddhist neighbors to the north. Back in 1968, Tarang was undergoing many changes, one of which was the recent […]

Origin Stories & The Lake of Milk

The inhabitants of the remote Nepalese village of Tarang tell an interesting story about how their village came to be. Tarang is a hamlet of a few hundred souls clinging to the mountainside in the out-of-the-way Tichurong valley in the Himalayas (check it out at these coordinates: 28°52’47.3″N 82°58’52.0”E). Tarang’s origin myth is a great […]