Against a Peacock Sky

“For two years, anthropologist Monica Connell lived in Talphi village in the remote Jumla district of Nepal, ten days’ walk from a motorable road. Life is shaped by the rhythm of the seasons – the monsoon, the rice planting, the annual trek of the sheep south for winter, the trip to trade grain for salt at the Tibetan border – sand the routines of gathering pine needles, husbandry, and the weekly replastering of mud floors are punctuated by religious festivals, a boar hunt, a wedding, the calamity of a bull’s death …

Accepted slowly as a friend and participant, yet remaining always an outsider, Monica Connell describes with detachment, affection and acute observation a way of life few outsiders can ever glimpse.”