Pluriversal Terrain: Rethinking More‐Than‐Human Borders in the Himalaya

ABSTRACT

In the Himalaya, border‐making, as a key territorial practice, is entangled with terrain, necessitating a more‐than‐human understanding of borders. The Himalayan terrain actively shapes geopolitical borderlands, while also being understood within certain Indigenous ontologies as the abode of deities whose power is revered and invoked through everyday practices, indicating the coexistence of multiple ontologies. To understand more‐than‐human borders in the Himalaya, terrain should be conceptualised through pluriversal perspectives, which foregrounds how its agency is enacted through the power relations between multiple ontologies. Existing studies of more‐than‐human borders have emphasised the materiality of terrain in shaping bordering processes, yet often remain limited in accounting for these ontological relations and their associated power dynamics. Drawing on insights from more‐than‐human geography, Indigenous geography and Himalayan studies, this article proposes ‘pluriversal terrain’ as a conceptual framework to examine how terrain's agency is enacted through the coexistence of multiple ontologies in border‐making processes. I argue that, in the context of the Himalaya, terrain mediates bordering processes not merely as a material and spatio‐temporal condition of territorial claims and governance but as an ontologically embedded assemblage through which borders are negotiated across different forms of world‐making. In doing so, the article proposes to rethink borders beyond nature/society dualism and Eurocentric universalist assumptions, highlighting how terrain, as a mediating force, reconfigures how borders are enacted, experienced and contested.