CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Sabin Ninglekhu Apocalypse as a Sensorium: Interrogating Indigenous and Ethno-Capitalist State Subjectivities amidst Laisse-Faire Science and Market Recalcitrance in the Himalayas
Foregrounding Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “everyday” as a site for transformative action, this project locates subjectivities—both Indigenous and ethno-capitalist state—within the everyday as a critical political praxis. It focuses on ongoing anti-hydropower and anti-cable car resistance led by the Indigenous Yakthung community in the far-eastern Himalayan region of Nepal, bordering Sikkim (India) and Tibet (China). In this context, the everyday offers three key revelations:
The impending arrival of the apocalypse—manifested through lived experiences of floods, landslides, and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs);
The "resilience" of ethno-capitalist state subjectivity—normalizing the erasure of the Indigenous world and worldviews via militarized power and unethical scientific procedures that expedite the arrival of the apocalypse;
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The arrival of the post-apocalypse—of a "future-past" anchored in the Mundhum (the Yakthung oral-philosophical tradition and performative ritual). As the resistance’s lifeline, the Mundhum venerates nature as the core of Yakthung civilization and the pathway to utopia, leading a local historian to announce, “There would be no movement without the Mundhum.”
Against this backdrop, the project proposes transdisciplinary action-research of, and for, the movement centered on Mukkumlung, a sacred ancestral mountain, and the Tamor river basin, a Yakthung civilizational landscape—both refashioned as investment sites for infrastructure projects. It approaches these sites with a normative question: “What is to be done?”, both philosophically and as a matter of everyday praxis. Ultimately, the project mobilizes these three revelations to harness Indigenous subjectivities—enacted through collective action—as a transboundary, revolutionary "future-past" for confronting the "apocalypse" as a sensorium in the here and now.