Rendering Houses in Ladakh

"Sophie Day presents houses as critical actors which provide the grounds for citizenship in Ladakh, North India. She explores the life stories of a handful of houses, most of them Buddhist, as they sculpt - or render - their inhabitants. Through collaboration with Ladakhi colleagues - together looking over images and objects, walking plots of land, inspecting old buildings, new developments and emptying villages - Day produces storyboards that combine image and text to show how houses have been imagined, built, repurposed, and dismantled since the 1980s. These Ladakhis were pastoralists, nuns, traders and smallholders forty years ago, but now depend largely on the Indian state and tourism for their livelihood. One consequence is the partitioning of houses among families, which evoke earlier partitions involving momentous territorial settlements between postcolonial India, Pakistan, and China in the 20th century. Partitioning legacies continue to trouble national, regional, and domestic house plots today. Day's exploration of the intricate relations of personhood between domestic houses and their members provides insight into the anthropology of a region for specialists and non-specialists alike"--