Abstract :
[en] Working on the relations between humans and non-humans in the buffer zone of Bardiya National Park in the southwest of the country for over three years now, I would very much like to present some aspects of my research at the Sudurpaschim University international conference in December. Established between the years 1988 and 1989, Bardiya National Park hosts very little anthropological work (Krauskopff, 1987), (Normose, 2002), (Bhatt, 2006), it is more, via the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC), the object of research from the natural sciences (Jnawali, 1989), (Baral & Heinen, 2007), or developmental (Bhattarai & Fischer, 2014), (Leystra, 2019), (Leclerq et al., 2019). The PhD I am currently pursuing in political and social sciences between Paris in France and Liège in Belgium is based on a first field study of three months in 2019 as part of a master's degree in anthropology and a first thesis fieldwork of six months from August 2021 to the end of January 2022. It aims to understand how humans adapt psycho-corporeally to the proximity of the Park's animals. I am working with participant observation, semi-directive interviews with the professions most in contact with the animals of the Park, direct and indirect observations of encounters, etc. In the context of these conferences, I would like to present an article (Vouiller, 2022) recently published in Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS) Kathmandu, which deals with the profession of guiding in Bardiya National Park, highlighting these 2019 data with those of 2021-2022. While I presented the guide profession as being in the 'in-between', between a more traditional and a more modern society, a clever adaptation, I would like to accentuate the role of social networks, the process of ''heroisation'' that takes place, but also the importance of the senses and the reading of signs in the practice of the profession, notably via the concept of Umwelt (Uexküll, 1965) or via the work of Eduardo Kohn (2017) on the anthropology of the sensible. This presentation will be based on a total of more than twenty interviews and about ten excursions into the forest, in or around the Bardiya National Park.
