Bardiya forests as a stage for wildlife encounters and ambivalent meanings (south-west Nepal)

This presentation, based on 15 months of fieldwork, offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship with forests and wildlife in and around Bardiya National Park, Nepal. I'd like to focus first on the forests of Bardiya, on how it is qualified at the linguistic level, but also in terms of ecosystem and at the level of representations. In a second part, I plan to detail the idea of these forests as "battlefields", with a history of the appropriation of spaces, their administrative division, their ecological stakes and the growing tensions linked in particular to animals. Finally, in the last part, I will present a glimpse of my PhD research on "sudden encounters" between humans and animals in Bardiya, from my methodology to my interpretative avenues.