Paper short abstract

In Lahaul, Western Himalayas, mountains shape the valley’s cultural discourse, and the landscape is regarded as kin. In their worldview, ritual performances and oral traditions are living conversations with the land, sustaining ways of dwelling, memory, and cosmological intimacy across generations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the relationship between ritual performance, oral tradition, and landscape in Lahaul, a high-altitude region of the Western Himalayas. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the winter months and local festivals such as Kuns and Gotsi, it explores expressive forms such as Sugli and Ghure as situated practices through which people engage with, remember, and inhabit their environment. Rather than approaching landscape as a static setting for cultural activity, the paper argues that it is actively constituted through ritual movement, storytelling, seasonal rhythms, and everyday forms of labor.

Focusing on experiences of winter confinement, communal gatherings, and ritual mobility, the study demonstrates how cultural performances participate in the ongoing production of sacred geography. Sacredness, in this context, does not reside solely in designated ritual sites or religious institutions; rather, it emerges through recurrent engagements with mountains, pathways, settlements, and the ecological rhythms that shape life in the region. Through song, lament, narrative, and ritual enactment, communities continually renew their connections to place, transforming landscape into a lived archive of memory, social relations, and cultural meaning.

By bringing together perspectives from cultural geography and performance studies, the paper conceptualizes sacred landscapes as processual and relational formations produced through embodied practice. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on memory, mobility, and the lived production of space in Himalayan societies, highlighting how expressive traditions function as modes of dwelling through which landscapes are remembered, inhabited, and continually brought into being.