(Anti-)fragile lives: enhancing adaptation through storytelling in the Eastern Himalayas

This paper challenges the social scientific focus on what it means to be 'resilient' and instead proposes that anthropologists turn attention to what it means to be 'antifragile' (Taleb 2012), a concept which emphasises the creative and regenerative response of living entities to stress and disorder. Based on longterm ethnographic fieldwork with the Nyishi tribe in the Eastern Himalayas, this paper explores oral accounts by Nyishi hunters and cultivators of the tragedies and social-ecological crises of their ancestors. The paper argues that the local effects of such oral narratives not only challenge Taleb's critique of narrative forms of understanding as "dangerous", but also suggest that narrative may in fact uphold optionality in trial-and-error learning at the centre of Taleb's portrait of what it means to be antifragile.