Tucked away in an obscure fold of the Himalayas in northwest Nepal, two weeks' walk from the nearest transportation, the village of Tarangpur is as culturally complicated as it is remote. Unlike tribals elsewhere in South Asia, the Magars of Tarangpur live not only on the fringes of Hindu society but also on the fringes of Buddhist society. Marginal to both these traditions, and trilingual, the Magars have over the centuries become a cultural, linguistic, and economic hinge between the Tibetan north and the Nepali south. Largely self-sufficient, they produce a grain surplus from the steep, rocky slopes they cultivate. But it is the ways that Tarangpur is not economically and culturally self-sufficient which are most compellingly analyzed by James F. Fisher in his book, Trans-Himalayan Traders. Basing his study on extensive fieldwork and painstaking archival research, Fisher utilizes a transactional perspective to illuminate the complex interrelationships among ethnicity, ecology, and economic and cultural change. He shows that Tarangpurians are acutely aware of the world beyond their valley, and through two distinct transactions circuits they exchange their way out of isolation. Deft practitioners of impression management, they form a cultural buffer between two opposing (Hindu and Buddhist) poles; salt and rice pass between these cultural frontiers, but ideas stop in the middle, where they are absorbed in a variety of ways. Brokers of goods but blockers of ideas, they and their trading activities have brought about a distinctly economic integration among adjacent, symbiotic, and ecologically contrasting zones. Fisher demonstrates that culture change has followed shifts in the exchange cycles over the last forty years....
