From goats to Gold Stars: trajectories of consumption, bureaucracy and territory in the Nepal-China borderlands

Post-colonial legacies of frontier making and border conflicts make the Himalayas a critical place for the study of territorial politics and the governance of space. Following recent calls to address how historical territorial structures shape contemporary experiences across the region, I aim to advance insights about the socio-cultural and political-economic implications of transforming colonial frontiers into post-colonial borders. In this paper, I historicise and assess how new scales of consumption articulate new spatialities of border regimes with respect to the Himalayan frontier in general, and more specifically in the case of distinct bureaucratic systems across sensitive borderland spaces between Nepal and China. To do this, I utilise a material-territorial analytic to demonstrate that modern trade patterns generate new government institutions. In turn, I argue that the administrative effects of everyday consumption practices show how the state operates and takes new shape in historically peripheral frontier and border regions.