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From a Trickle to a Torrent: Education, Migration, and Social Change in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal. By Geoff Childs and Namgyal Choedup. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xv, 230 pp. ISBN: 9780520299528 (paper).
Geoff Childs and Namgyal Choedup's From a Trickle to a Torrent examines a contemporary trend widely observed across the Himalayas: the outmigration of youth for education. Through stories and statistics, this monograph provides an unparalleled account of migration and social change, as well as an elucidating and accessible deep-dive into the complicated questions of how, where, and why people move away from their homes. Building on decades of observation and hard-earned social capital, the authors are well-placed to answer these complex and confounding questions.
From a Trickle to a Torrent focuses on the central Himalayan region of Nubri, in Nepal's Gorkha District, which borders China's Tibet Autonomous Region. It draws upon data collected not only in the mountains but also in Kathmandu and the variety of urban entrepôts to which Nubri villagers have migrated. Childs began conducting anthropological fieldwork in Nubri in the early 1990s, while Choedup was born in these valleys and was educated both in Nepal and abroad. This study draws upon data accumulated from multiple research projects dating from their earliest fieldwork to the present.
The book is a masterful primer on how to combine multiple data types (textual, ethnographic, and demographic) across multiple time periods. The authors leverage the toolkit of anthropological demography to robustly analyze the magnitude and impacts of Nubri's education migration, which is restructuring household composition and expanding children's choices beyond the bounds of what people take biology to be as well as received cultural norms. The authors’ data on infant mortality and contraceptive use, as well as the timing, direction, and magnitude of education migration, is unparalleled among Himalayan scholars and deserves to be studied closely. The longitudinal data, compiled over three decades, are then contextualized with ethnographic and archival...