| Summary: | From the perspective of the Kulung, a population of the Nepalese Himalaya, this article presents the actions of spirits upon men and the presumed motives behind them, as well as men’s reactions to them and their anticipated effects. From this emerges an implicit metaphysics of desire in which desires are conceived as conditioning the actions of spirits. These spiritual desires influence the energy economy cycle that links the Kulung to spirits and is driven by a search for vitality; some spirits favour this vitality while others thwart it. The actions of spirits upon human life, and the reactions they entail, also have the effect of engendering in men modes of action that are part of a dynamic that oscillates between the restraint and the acknowledgement of desires.
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