Horses Like Lightning ─ A Story of Passage Through the Himalayas

A tender account – by turns cultural exploration and memoir – of a young woman’s first hand experience of change and continuity in one of the world’s most remote regions, through the lens of the horse

and ‘horse culture’...

At just 19, Sienna Craig made her first venture to Mustang, an ethnically Tibetan area of Nepal, in the rainshadow of the Himalayas. As an equestrian and a budding anthropologist, she sought not only to understand what it was like to rely on horses to navigate through the windswept valleys and plains of High Asia, but also to grasp how horses lent meaning – through myth, ritual, and metaphor – to the lives of the Mustangi people. Through living and working with local Tibetan doctors, veterinarians, and other horse experts, as well as the deep friendships she formed, Sienna began to understand the region’s history, as well as how life in Mustang was being transformed in the face of tremendous social, political, and economic shifts. She also endeavored to learn about herself, and her life’s course, through her year in Mustang – a place that has come to feel, for all its foreignness,

like home.

Sienna Craig was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1973. She is the author of a children's book, Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story and A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet. She earned her PhD in anthropology from Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. She lives in Vermont with her husband Ken and her daughter Aida.
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