Cheers! Welcome to the Nepalese village where everybody knows how to distill

By Geoff Childs, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

Imagine a place where every home has paraphernalia for distilling spirits, where there is a toast for nearly any occasion, and where your taxes – paid in grain, not cash – are deposited straight into a communal still.

Welcome to Nubri.

A valley in northern Nepal, Nubri is home to roughly 3,000 Tibetan Buddhist highlanders. Over the course of three decades, I have spent a lot of time in Nubri studying the interplay of demographic trends and social change. Often that has been in the company…

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