AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Reviews
Digital Himalaya and the Collaborative Publishing
Experience
Georgina Drew
Digital Himalaya, an online repository of ethnographic and
scholarly materials focusing on India, Nepal, Bhutan, and the
Tibetan Plateau, was partly inspired by an anomaly in an-
thropological scholarship. Anthropologist and linguist (Yale
and Cambridge) Mark Turin describes how in the 1990s he
and his colleagues observed that
even though anthropologists [and funders] were becoming ever
more concerned about cultural endangerment . . . very few social
scientists were working to ensure that anthropological collections
from previous generations were maintained, refreshed and made
accessible, both to the research community and to the descen-
dants of the people from whom the materials were collected.
[Turin 2011a:40]
Turin and his colleagues determined that the answer was
to create an outlet that would preserve and make digitally
available anthropological materials on the Himalaya so as to
enhance the data’s social relevance, utility, and collaborative
potential.
In so doing, the project navigates ethical dilemmas—the
dissemination of potentially sensitive cultural information
and the replication of previously published works—that in-
creasingly confront anthropologists as archives move online
and our work is made accessible to a much wider audience.
The project began in 2000 when Alan Macfarlane, Sarah
Harrison, Sara Shneiderman, and Turin launched Digital Hi-
malaya to expand the reach of the multimedia ethnographic
works from the 1930s onward that they had been collecting
and to which they had access through university archives and
holdings. The website puts into the public domain resources
authorized for (re)distribution that otherwise might have
been destroyed or relegated to obscurity while at the same
time providing an open-source platform for content that can
be referenced by the people whose customs, livelihoods, and
ancestors are documented. Servers at Yale and Cambridge
house the online collection, which received early support
from the Anthropologists’ Fund for Urgent Anthropological
Research, the University of Virginia, Cornell University,
and the United States Department of Education.
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 4, pp. 680–685, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01519.x
Digital Himalaya has hosted nearly half a million page
visits to date, and it attracts between 150 to 300 visitors per
day (Turin 2011a:45). The top five countries from which
users hail (in order of frequency) include Nepal, the United
States, India, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. The
archival maps are the most often accessed by the website’s
users, while the journal collections, census information, rare
books, ethnographic films, and field notes follow in order
of popularity. The website also features news about recent
additions, publications that discuss the Digital Himalaya pro-
cess, and relevant resources. Compared to other websites,
however, the interface is somewhat limited. The search func-
tion for the site is constrained, and one must often toggle
through a long string of links or employ an outside search
engine to access specific materials in the collections. Absent,
too, are the comment boxes and image-tagging functions that
are now common to other online platforms and that would
allow users to add relevant information that enriches the
archives without the need for intermediaries. The project
would need a new grant or endowment to overhaul the
interface, but it currently operates with modest donations
from website users, scholars, and even the project directors.
To offset the costs of maintaining the URL, a multilingual
Amazon product search bar is posted on the website that
provides a small commission when users make purchases.
Since the project’s conception, the core team involved
has been highly attentive to the ethics and potential repercus-
sions of disseminating sensitive cultural information. They
took precautions to gauge the project’s impact early on by
sharing a sample of historical documents and films with Hi-
malayan residents before putting the bulk of the information
online. To their relief, the people who viewed the materials
were delighted to discover, and to have available for their
own reference and use, historically rich content about them-
selves and their ancestors that helped to deepen understand-
ings of their past (Shneiderman 2003; Turin 2011b:456).
Now that the materials are online, the project directors
receive regular e-mails from website users who write to
express thanks, ask for additional resources on particular
topics, and volunteer information that enhances the quality
c 2012 by the American Anthropological

of the associated content. Relatives, for instance, write to
share the names and stories of those featured in particular
files. Others have pointed out inconsistencies in some of
the ethnographic materials, such as the splicing of scenes
in a 1962 film by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf that ap-
pears to document coherent events when in fact it juxtaposes
divergent cultural practices from distinct locations (Shnei-
derman 2003). In other instances, the ethnographic films on
Digital Himalaya have been used to verify the longue durée
of practices such as the gato ritual among the Gurung that
appears to have retained consistency from a 1957 clip to
footage shot in 1990.1
FIGURE 1. The Carter Holton Film Collection. 1930–1948. http://
www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/films/holton/2
FIGURE 2. Wanchu Nagas. 1962. Christoph von Fürer-Haimen-
dorf http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/naga/
Because of the high volume of people volunteering
content and augmenting the information associated with
the data, Digital Himalaya has grown from a static portal
for the salvaging, archiving, and disseminating of ethno-
graphic collections to a dynamic online platform with some
40GB of archival materials to which people from schol-
arly backgrounds and “source communities” regularly con-
tribute (Turin 2011a:45). These efforts have transformed
Public Anthropology 681
the project into a collaborative digital-publishing endeavor.
Archives like Digital Himalaya are now “sites of interac-
tion and energy, connection, and outreach” rather than the
musty filing cabinets of old where documents went to die
(Turin 2011b:451).
Digital Himalaya follows copyright law by reproducing
works that are authorized by their current owners (libraries,
publishers, etc.). However, the online dissemination of these
materials raises some complicated questions. Authors, for
instance, may have released ownership of an article to a
journal decades ago with a desire to address a small aca-
demic audience. Or they may have donated field notes to
an archive with the idea that access would be restricted.
Individual scholars who object to having their work widely
disseminated have the right to request a retraction or to pub-
lish an addendum. Beyond that, Digital Himalaya effectively
brings to past academic efforts the same online accessibility
and digital permanence to which contemporary scholarship
is subject. Although this may prove a point of embarrass-
ment if an author’s stance has changed or if information now
exists to discredit earlier works, it is a necessary tradeoff for
a public anthropology committed to exchange, engagement,
and accountability (McGranahan 2006:255–256).
By making available a range of materials that capture
the development of scholarship over time, Digital Himalaya
helps to show not only the history of a region and its people
but also the inner workings of the ethnographic process,
including its lessons and missteps. Its efforts in resource
sharing and collaborative publishing serve as a model for
future endeavors to keep anthropological materials, from
working papers to unedited video clips and field notes, in
the public domain.
Georgina Drew, India China Institute, The New School, New York,
NY 10011; drewg@newschool.edu
NOTES
1. http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/haimendorf/
haimendorffilm02.php
2. Figures 1 and 2 included as general examples of Digital Himalaya
materials available.
REFERENCES CITED
McGranahan, Carole
2006 Introduction: Public Anthropology. India Review 5(3–4):
255–267.
Shneiderman, Sara
2003 Digital Himalaya. IIAS Newsletter 31(July):23.
Turin, Mark
2011a Salvaging the Records of Salvage Ethnography: The Story
of the Digital Himalaya Project. Book 2.0 1(1):39–46.
2011b Born Archival: The Ebb and Flow of Digital Docu-
ments from the Field. History and Anthropology 22(4):
445–460.
682 American Anthropologist • Vol. 114, No. 4 • December 2012
PUKAR and the Human Right to Research
Manissa McCleave Maharawal
The word pukar in Hindi means “to call,” but it is a partic-
ular type of calling—it is to call out, or to call for help or
attention. PUKAR is also an acronym for Partners for Urban
Knowledge, Action, and Research, a charitable trust organi-
zation in Mumbai founded in 2006 by Arjun Appadurai and
Carol A. Breckenridge. PUKAR is “an independent research
collective and an urban knowledge production center” that
provides a platform for cross-disciplinary and community-
based research on issues related to urbanization and glob-
alization. In this context, it seems that PUKAR is still “a
call out” but a call out for research and knowledge that is
produced in places, and by people, whose lives are affected
by urbanization and globalization.
Scrolling through the homepage of PUKAR’s sleek-
looking website, its main purpose and projects are not im-
mediately made clear. However, a bit of digging beyond
the main page reveals that PUKAR centers on three main
research themes: “Urbanism, Spatial Utopia and Conflict-
ing Realities,” “Healthy Cities, Wealthy Cities,” and “Urban
Youth and Knowledge Production.” Three current projects
align with these themes: “Mythologies of Mumbai,” “Ex-
ploring Social and Physical Determinants of Urban Health,”
and its “Youth Fellowship Project.” PUKAR’s methods are
equally varied and include mapping, ethnography, and sur-
veys. Across these diverse themes, projects, and methods
runs the unifying insistence that research of this type should
not be confined to professional elites or academia but, rather,
should be part of the lives of everyday people.
The flagship project of PUKAR is its “Youth Fellowship
Project.” This project aims to challenge the ways in which
research and knowledge are traditionally produced by en-
couraging youth in Mumbai to explore their neighborhoods
and to transform the quality of life in these neighborhoods.
Every year, the project selects a group of 300 fellows, who
are broken into groups of 10 or 12. Each group has a mentor
who assists them, over the course of a year, in conducting
research on a question of members’ choice that is based in
their lived experience. Throughout the year, the youth fel-
lows learn how to formulate and carry out a research project
as well as specific social-science research techniques. The
2010–11 fellows explored a broad array of themes such as
“education, culture, sexuality, gender, health, media, envi-
ronment, livelihood and politics and governance.” Some of
the research projects that emerged included “Water Prob-
lems in Govandi” (under politics and governance), “Orphan
Boys: Career Aspirations” (“education”), and “Life of Drop-
Out Girls” and “Brick-Kiln Women Worker’s Problems”
(.gender). Unfortunately, on the PUKAR website, none of
the links to download any of the reports from the 2010–11
fellowships were working.
Perhaps the lack of actual project reports is emblem-
atic of one of PUKAR’s primary goals: to think of research
as a “process oriented learning journey rather than an end
product oriented goal.” Here, research is not only about gen-
erating new knowledge but also about the ways that research
affects the researcher himself or herself and how the process
of research and the fellowship it engenders “empowers the
youth to become an agent of change in the city but also
changes the youth within.” The “impact” of these research
projects is then less related to the actual research itself and
more intertwined with impact of the process of research
on youth who had formerly not thought of themselves as
“researchers.”
The “Youth Fellow Stories” section of the PUKAR
website features video statements from youth who have
been part of the project. Here the fellows detail the ways
that they have benefitted individually from the year, list-
ing greater independence and self-confidence; a better abil-
ity to work with teams; and improved writing, English,
and computer skills; as well as increased tolerance to-
ward difference and other communities, PUKAR frames
these “impacts” of the fellowship year as greater upward
mobility as well as a change in the attitudes of the re-
searchers whereby “certain democratic principles of toler-
ance, secularism, participation, equity and justice” are more
present.
Adult researchers are part of PUKAR’s mission as well.
“Mythologies of Mumbai” explores the relationship between
globalization and “entrenched social and economic hierar-
chies” in the neighborhoods of Girangaon and Dharavi. Local
residents who come from traditionally marginalized groups
are the researchers in these projects, making them not only
investigators but also “important stakeholders in the pro-
cess.” Over a five-year period, this project has created a
body of knowledge about these neighborhoods that is being
disseminated through a multimedia approach. To this end,
there is the “Mythologies of Mumbai Blog” that is aimed at
facilitating dialogue between the media, policy makers, and
“concerned citizens” about urban issues in Girangaon and
Dharavi.
“Exploring Social and Physical Determinants of Urban
Health” is a collaboration between PUKAR, the Harvard
School of Public Health, and New York University to iden-
tify and define critical health issues in the Kaula Bandar
neighborhood in eastern Mumbai. This appears to be the
most “formal” research project, with principal investigators
and graduate students from the Harvard School of Public
Health as well as what PUKAR’s website refers to as “bare-
foot researchers” from the community. Completed studies
include those on child immunization, industrial waste, and
environmental health as well as the migration of expecting
mothers. The findings from these projects were presented

at the 2010 and 2011 International Conference on Urban
Health.
PUKAR clearly produces important knowledge and re-
search on people’s lives and conditions in Mumbai while
fulfilling its goal of democratizing and deparochializing the
“right to research.” At the heart of this project is the idea
that “taking part in democratic society requires one to be
informed” (Appadurai 2006), and to be informed requires
the ability to conduct research. This, then, is fundamentally
a project of empowerment: to empower people, and in par-
ticular youth, in Mumbai to research the conditions of their
lives and the lives of those that they know.
As a research institution that aims to include both skilled
and unskilled researchers, PUKAR seems to be effective.
However, questions about exactly who the research ben-
efits, what is done with it, and whether it changes the
material conditions of people’s lives seem less clear. In its
self-description, PUKAR’s website seems to explicitly avoid
using language that frames it as having activist or social jus-
tice goals beyond shifting the terrain of who are considered
legitimate “researchers.”
Living among “Things of Value”: Stephan Schwartzman,
Indigenous Restitution, and Forest (Carbon) Conservation
Sian Sullivan
To review the career of Stephan Schwartzman—
anthropologist and current director of Tropical For-
est Policy for the Environment Defense Fund (EDF;
http://www.edf.org/)—is to step into the vortex of heated
debates that have raged in conservation since the 1980s.
From passionate affirmations of the ways in which forest
dwellers can live relatively benignly in and with forests, to
equally passionate advocacy for enrolling the “carbonated”
and monetized “value” of tropical forests into controversial
global carbon markets, Schwartzman has been close to the
eye of the storm.
Schwartzman received his Ph.D. in anthropology from
the University of Chicago in 1988 for work entitled The
Panará of the Xingú Indigenous Park: The Transformation of a So-
ciety. His research involved the period’s anthropological holy
grail of learning to speak an unwritten indigenous language
(namely, Panará–Southern Kayapo), and it documented the
process whereby the Panará of northern Mato Grosso and
southern Pará in the Brazilian Amazon reconstituted them-
selves as an independent and semiautonomous society after
the trauma of contact. Diminished by incursions into and
reductions of their territory, the pernicious effects of new
disease epidemics, and conflict with Kayapo neighbors, a
greatly reduced population of Panará had been relocated
to Xingú Indigenous Park (Schwartzman 1998). During the
Public Anthropology 683
Given its current successes, one wonders what PUKAR
would look like if, in addition to its focus on individual em-
powerment, it were explicitly working with a social-justice
movement in Mumbai or working to start one. To put this
another way, How could the important work of empow-
ering people to research their own lives around issues of
health, gender, and their neighborhoods also serve to have a
material impact on these very same people by building com-
munity power? Perhaps individual empowerment through
research is only a starting point for the kinds of collective
struggles necessary to fully realize Appadurai’s goal of “the
human right to research” (2006).
Manissa McCleave Maharawal Department of Anthropology,
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY 10016
REFERENCE CITED
Appadurai, Arjun
2006 The Right to Research. Globalisation, Societies and Educa-
tion 4(2):167–177.
1980s, Schwartzman also represented Brazil’s Institute for
Socio-Economic Studies (INESC), served as coordinator of
the U.S.–Brazil Tropical Forest Action Network, and con-
sulted for the Anthropology Resource Center and other
indigenous rights organizations.
Schwartzman joined the EDF in the mid-1980s to
work for “environmental reform of multilateral develop-
ment banks” (Schwartzman 1998:82). This campaign suc-
ceeded in strengthening the language in U.S. legislation
toward curbing megadevelopment projects funded by the
World Bank. He also played a key role in developing the
concept of “extractive reserves” as conservation alternatives
in the Brazilian Amazon, working with the Amazonian Na-
tional Council of Rubber Tappers, and twice bringing the
latter’s iconic (and later murdered) leader, Chico Mendes,
to the United States (Schwartzman 1989). In 1990, he was
part of an American Anthropological Association’s investiga-
tion to determine whether or not the Brazilian government’s
policies to develop the Brazilian Amazon were “genocidal”
for indigenous peoples (Turner et al. 1990). The 1990s saw
intensified work with the Panará and a coalition of NGOs as
they mobilized to reoccupy their territories.
Throughout, Schwartzman has celebrated the positive
roles of indigenous and traditional peoples in defending
large areas of tropical forest from deforestation because
of commercial interest. This position counters protago-
nists of “people-free parks,” who, according to Schwartzman
684 American Anthropologist • Vol. 114, No. 4 • December 2012
and colleagues, frame “forest residents and other rural peo-
ple as the enemies of nature” and significantly undermine
conservation agendas by alienating an important environ-
mental constituency (Schwartzman et al. 2000:1351–1352).
Schwartzman instead emphasizes that forests (such as those
in Brazilian indigenous and extractive reserves) are en-
riched by those who dwell in them, thus embodying both
“tremendous conservation value” and “sustainable develop-
ment” (e.g., Schwartzman et al. 2000:1352–1353, 1355;
Schwartzman 2010:320). In doing so, Schwartzman affirms
that control by forest-dwelling people is critical for the fu-
ture conservation of the Amazon’s biomass and biodiversity
and that social movements also assist conservation by mobi-
lizing “forest-friendly,” small-scale farmers and indigenous
peoples amid the complex, and sometimes violent, Ama-
zon frontier (Schwartzman 1998, 2010:315; Schwartzman
et al. 2010).
Key to Schwartzman’s advocacy is his understanding of
Panará conceptions of “things of value” (Schwartzman 2010).
A life lived well and beautifully is one located where there
is a wealth of such things, being entities considered both
useful and beautiful. For the Panará, the forest is such a
thing, further categorized and graded into fine-tuned com-
binations of soil type, plants, animals, and spirits that denote
historical circumstance, affirm Panará identity, and indicate
appropriate work-ritual (the two being indistinguishable). In
this schema, money, the conventional economistic denoter
of “value,” is not a thing of value. Indeed, it is a desire for
money that produces the “ugly and reprehensible” landscapes
of forests decimated by the production of the things asso-
ciated with its accumulation, including timber, gold, beef,
and electricity (from hydroelectric turbines at dams on the
Xingú River; Schwartzman 2010:310). Schwartzman’s work
on the part of varied forest dwellers, including indigenous
Panará, rubber tappers, and traditional riverine smallhold-
ers, is redolent with appreciation of these alternative value
priorities, and particularly of their positive implications for
democratic sustenance of both ecological and cultural diver-
sity.
At the same time, however, Schwartzman advocates
market mechanisms for forest conservation (e.g., see Bel-
lassen et al. 2008; Bonnie et al. 2000:1763; Nepstad
et al. 2009:1350). In a telephone interview with me on May
16, 2012, he spoke of the need “for market prices to reflect
the value of living forests” so as to deflect their conversion
into products that currently command greater short-term
profits through market exchange. This position echoes a re-
vised emphasis for the EDF, which, since the 1980s, has put
its weight behind market incentives and technoscience (incl.
geoengineering and nanotechnology) for the resolution of
“ecochallenges.” For Schwartzman, it is in direct lineage
with assertions by Chico Mendes in the 1980s that “rubber
tappers should be compensated for their work to maintain
globally valued forests in their extractive reserves.” It also re-
flects a current international position in the Kyoto Protocol
of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) that standing-forest biomass be counted
as carbon units. In turn, priced units of carbon can enter
the global carbon market and incentivize the maintenance of
forest biomass (as saleable carbon). Such schemes form the
basis of the UN REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Defor-
estation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries)
initiative to monetize the carbon stored in forests and create
income streams for local people that are linked with this
“value.”
This is a powerful and pragmatic response to the current
“value invisibility” of living forests in a global capitalist econ-
omy that filters out the nonmarket values of living forests.
But it also seems to be in tension with the different concep-
tions of “things of value” known and practiced by the forest
peoples of Schwartzman’s anthropological work. Iterating
the gestalt of Schwartzman’s career, this again crystallizes
current controversy over conservation solutions that further
enfold forests and forest peoples into the very system that
has engendered their devaluing, displacement, and degrada-
tion. As such, it might be paradoxical to construct conserved
forests as monetized products whose trade will hopefully in-
centivize their conservation in a context where the desire
for money, as documented in Schwartzman’s ethnographic
work with Panará, is considered instead to be the destroyer
of (forest) value.
Controversies aside, Schwartzman’s integrity and per-
sistence in service both to forests and to the subtle forest
knowledge of Amazonian peoples is admirable and instruc-
tive. His work has contributed to a sea change in conservation
thinking that is leading staunch opponents of the inclusion
of social-science analysis in conservation projects to favor
collaboration. Given his literacy with Panará conceptions
of value, combined with an outward-looking pragmatism
regarding the discourses and pressures of the time, it is to
be hoped that he will long continue as a mediator in these
varied understandings of forest significance. This work is
itself a “thing of value,” constituting a trail-blazing example
of public and engaged anthropology.
Sian Sullivan Department of Geography, Environment and Devel-
opment Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, London
WC1H 9EZ, U.K.
REFERENCES CITED
Bellassen, Vanessa, Renaud Crassous, Laura Dietzsch, and Stephan
Schwartzman
2008 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation:
What Contribution from Carbon Markets? Climate Report 14.
http://www.cdcclimat.com/IMG/pdf/14_Etude_Climat_
EN_Deforestation_and_carbon_markets.pdf, accessed May
8, 2012.
Bonnie, Robert, Stephan Schwartzman, Michael Oppenheimer, and
Janine Bloomfield
2000 Counting the Cost of Deforestation. Science 288(5472):
1763–1764.

Nepstad, Daniel, et al. (incl. Stephan Schwartzman)
2009 The End of Deforestation in the Amazon. Science 326:1350–
1351.
Schwartzman, Stephan
1989 Extractive Reserves: The Rubber Tapper’s Strategy for
Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rain Forest. In Fragile Lands
in Latin America: Strategies for Sustainable Development. J.
Browder, ed. Pp. 150–155. Boulder: Westview Press.
1998 The Panará: Indigenous Territory and Environmental Pro-
tection in the Amazon. Yale F&ES Bulletin 98:66–85. http://
environment.research.yale.edu/documents/downloads/0–
9/98schwartzman.pdf, accessed May 8, 2012.
2010a Nature and Culture in Central Brazil: Panará Natural Re-
source Concepts and Tropical Forest Conservation. Journal of
Sustainable Forestry 29(2):302–327.
Public Anthropology 685
Schwartzman, Stephan, Adriana Moreira, and Daniel Nepstad
2000 Rethinking Tropical Forest Conservation: Perils in Parks.
Conservation Biology 14(5):1351–1357.
Schwartzman, Stephan, Ane Alencar, Hilary Zarin, and Ana Paula
Santos
2010 Social Movements and Large-Scale Tropical Forest Pro-
tection on the Amazon Frontier: Conservation from Chaos.
The Journal of Environment and Development 19:274–
299.
Turner, Terence, Bruce Albert, Jason Clay, Alcida Ramos, Stephan
Schwartzman, Anthony Seeger, Claudia Andujar, Manuela
Carneiro da Cunha, and Davi Kopenawa
1990 Report of the Special Commission to Investigate the Sit-
uation of the Brazilian Yanomami. http://www.aaanet.org/
committees/cfhr/rptyano2.htm, accessed May 10, 2012.