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Paper short abstract

Gilgit Baltistan is a contested mountain region where climate change and governance reshape claims to land and belonging. Drawing on preliminary ethnography, this paper traces how indigenous practices, women’s labour, and digital media reshape relations among people, territory, and authority.

Paper long abstract

Gilgit Baltistan (GB) is a contested mountain region at the intersection of the Himalaya, Hindukush, and Karakoram ranges and home to the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar regions. Administered by Pakistan and bordering Afghanistan, China, and India, the region is frequently portrayed as a scenic periphery. Yet GB has long been shaped by struggles over land, resources, and political recognition. Recently, these struggles have been intensified by climate change, felt here at nearly twice the rate of lower elevations.

Based on initial findings from an ongoing field study, the paper explores how local communities engage these transformations through practices that combine indigenous knowledge with non-indigenous political and digital tools. I document efforts to sustain husbandry techniques, maintain irrigation infrastructures, and replace chemical inputs with locally sourced alternatives. Women’s labour sustains these practices, linking households, land, and systems of governance.

I also examine how digital media are used to document environmental change, challenge dominant representations of the region, and engage with people beyond nationalist frameworks. Rather than treating these practices as opposition, our analysis traces how they rework relations between the state, environment, and community in everyday life. These practices express attachments to land and articulate claims that do not rely on formal political recognition alone. The paper contributes to anthropological discussions on indigeneity in mountain territories by tracing how environmental problems are experienced, negotiated, and addressed in a contested region.