Jirel Erotic

The Jirels are a people of one valley. About six thousand strong, they are centered on Jiri and the neighboring Sikri valley in Dolakha District, in the hills of eastern Nepal at roughly 1,900 meters, and nearly everyone who identifies as Jirel traces family back there. Their own origin story places them between two neighbors, the Sherpas higher up and the Sunuwars lower down, with the Jirels said to descend from marriages between the two. Whatever history lies behind the tale, it describes their position well. They farm maize, millet, wheat and potatoes on terraced slopes, keep livestock, and live at mid altitude between the Hindu hill castes below and the Buddhist highlanders above, borrowing from both directions.

The language makes the northern tie plain. Jirel is a Tibetic language, a close relative of Sherpa and a more distant cousin of Lhasa Tibetan, written in Devanagari when it is written at all. Nearly all Jirels also speak Nepali, and many younger people speak it first. Religion is layered the same way. Jirels are Buddhists with their own village lamas, who handle funerals and the Buddhist festivals, but illness, bad luck and trouble with spirits belong to the phombo, shamans who work through nightlong drumming seances and also serve at rites for clan deities. Dashain and Tihar are celebrated too, a sign of how long the Hindu state has been a fact of life here. Society runs on patrilineal clans: you marry a Jirel, but never one from your own clan.

Two outside arrivals reshaped the valley. A Swiss development project set up in Jiri in the late 1950s, bringing a hospital and a livestock farm, and the Swiss-backed road from Lamosangu, finished in the mid 1980s, made the town the starting point for Everest treks until flights to Lukla took most of that traffic away. The second arrival was scientific. Since the 1980s, geneticists have worked with the Jirels on inherited susceptibility to intestinal worm infections, and later on child growth and eye disease. Because the community is small, marries mostly within itself and took part in large numbers, researchers assembled a single extended pedigree of more than two thousand people, among the largest documented in human genetics. A people few outsiders have heard of appears in the citation lists of a great many papers.

The earthquake of May 12, 2015, centered close to Dolakha, wrecked much of Jiri's housing, and rebuilding, alongside labor migration to Kathmandu and abroad, has occupied the years since. Nepal recognizes the Jirels as an indigenous nationality, and community organizations work to keep a small language in daily use.