Anna L. Tsing has stated that: ‘Cultures are continuously coproduced in the interactions I call “friction”: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (2005: 4). She added: ‘As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that a heterogeneous image and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (5; see also Miyasaki Porro 2010). As this book demonstrates vibrantly, in the highlands straddling the borderlines across the trans-Himalayan region, transformative pressures and frictions are reshaping on a daily basis, in known as much as in unpredictable fashion, the livelihoods of thousands of ethnic minority communities. The lives of over 150 million people are impacted directly and many more indirectly.

All these pressures are closely linked to the agrarian transition (Mohanty 2016; Kelly 2011), incorporating great market integration, and a drive toward modernity (Taylor 1999). The frictions the agrarian transition causes and exposes across the highlands simultaneously destabilize, reformat, and mobilize responses regarding the locally rooted livelihoods of communities, their worldviews, and their alternative takes on modernity (Gaonkar 2001). People in this vast borderland on the fringes of multiple nations are constantly addressing conflicting social, political, and environmental conditions and imperatives while consistently refining their creative adaptation to change and their expertise of the ecological systems they inhabit. Far from being victims of these processes and of ecological determinism, they construct and uphold complex livelihoods and activate their agency to negotiate state policies and market normalization. In Tsing's words (2005: 5): ‘Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural forms, and agency.’