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Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest appreciation to those who have spent countless hours in conversation about a region of the world that few might have shown more than a passing curiosity, as well as those who found the time to answer my many questions as this volume took shape. Over the last several years, Saurav Bhandary has opened my eyes to a dynamic world caught between the tragedy of an earthquake and the resilience of a nation to recover. During our time in China, many years ago, Valerie Chang gifted me my first of many textiles from her travels to Tibet and, in doing so, awakened my interest in the arts of the Himalayas and in particular the beauty of work by the often-overlooked women weavers across Tibet, who continue a centuries-old tradition. Rohini Chowdhury, Victor Fan, Gendün Gyatso, Michael Hutt, Séagh Kehoe, and Fan Popo have more recently opened my eyes to the beauty of the many liter- ary traditions, ancient and modern, that continue to thrive across the region and shape our understanding of the various cultures. Todd Lewis and Leonard van der Kuipj deserve special recognition for their many years of work, especially with their summer seminars with the National Endowment for the Humanities, to introduce and promote Himalayan studies to the secondary and tertiary curriculum. They have created resources aplenty for any who are curious to explore the region from the safety of their armchairs. Masumi Matsumoto, Karma Tenzin, and Michael McInturff alerted me to a rich history of mountaineering, glacial hydrology, and the issues of gender in the climb- ing world, as well as to a dynamic culture of ecotourism now spreading across the region. Mark W. Post, Harold F. Shiffman, George van Driem, and the dedicated lan- guage faculties of the Rangjung Yeshe Institute and Kathmandu University allowed me, without exception, to ask specific—if often misinformed or awkwardly articulated—questions of linguistic usage while framing my inquiries within larger concerns for semantics and sociolinguistics. And Sohail Rabbani, Paul Romjue, and the collective membership of San Francisco–based TRIKONE have for at least four decades been willing to address any concerns I have expressed about those lives lived by so many people in the area. I would be remiss if I failed to express my heartfelt appreciation to Kaitlin Ciarmiello, senior acquisitions editor at ABC-CLIO, who has shown me unwaver- ing support over the last several years during this writing. I could have asked for no better guide. She patiently awaited my mastery of the theoretical machinery that informs the volume, and she allowed me to work with other contributors as we collectively found a voice for presenting a nuanced and compelling image of