Logan Emlet

Transformations in trans-Himalayan exchange networks over the last 60 years have radically reshaped the region’s foodways, implicating how various kinds of value – use/exchange/truth/moral – are made, erased, and circulate within and between households, urban and rural spaces, and (inter)national communities. Logan’s research is inspired by indigenous, feminist, and (post)colonial studies and attends to food history and politics in western Nepal. In his work, he seeks to trace various ways that people navigate scarcity and abundance, history, precarity, and aspiration in and through diverse forms of agropastoral and culinary labor. He’s committed to exploring how material processes, discursive practices, and social relations involved in the production, consumption, and exchange of food shape singular and shared political economic and ecological contests. He aims to situate lifeways across non-postcolonial Himalayan borderlands in relation to global racial capitalism and to tell and teach some of these histories in ways that buttress indigenous environmental governance.

Though his work is centered in Dolpo, a region in NW Nepal, the pandemic prevented travel and has caused Logan to pivot to archival research regarding 1) the historical redistribution of ideas of scarcity and abundance in Dolpopa landscapes, 2) distinct ‘modes of precarity’ enacted in different agricultural practices, and 3) the ways in which pandemic responses re-instantiate, reject, and reformulate historical food system dynamics, implicating the materiality and the meaningfulness of local agri- and food culture