Forthcoming Release of Tension by Dr Nikita Kaur Simpson

CAMHRA is pleased to announce that Dr Nikita Kaur Simpson’s book, Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas, will be released on 17 March 2026 as part of Duke University Press’ Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnographyseries.

To mark the upcoming publication, the Introduction chapter is now available as a preview, offering readers an early look at the themes and ethnographic approach of the book.

About the Book

Tension explores how rapid development in the Western Himalayas affects the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people through the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.”

Tension appears in many forms, including Kamzori, the bodily weakness experienced by elderly women; “future tension,” the accumulating anxieties carried by young girls; and Opara, a form of black magic believed to afflict families.

Drawing on long‑term ethnographic fieldwork, the book traces how Gaddi communities link these states of distress to broader structural transformations, including land dispossession as well as caste, class, tribal and gender inequalities growing alongside modernity and prosperity.

Simpson shows how “tension” becomes an everyday diagnostic tool for understanding the cultural, economic and environmental changes reshaping intimate life. Through this, the book proposes a powerful idea: that inequality is often lived and recognised through who is made to feel, carry and absorb distress.

Praise

“This beautifully written book offers a glimpse into how ordinary people in the Indian Himalaya experience economic, social, and political upheaval as an intensification of tension in the domain of everyday life. Simpson’s loving attention to the texture of intimate relationships, the waning and waxing intensity of atmospheric affects, and the multiplicity of somatic orientations to tension is ethnography at its finest.”­­ – Radhika Govindrajan, author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas

“This is ethnography at its finest, showcasing compelling theoretical arguments rooted in the thought and experiences of individuals whose lives Simpson explores in loving detail. The book is a major contribution to medical anthropology, South Asian studies and the study of aging, exemplifying what nuanced attention to materiality, relation, atmosphere, and affect can achieve.” – Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things

Author

Dr Nikita Simpson

Reader in Anthropology & Co-Director of CAMHRA