Images of the Mountains: Touristic Consumption and Gendered Representations of Landscape and Heritage in Gilgit-Baltistan

Abstract

Touristic advertisements, development reports and government sources in Pakistan readily use the natural beauty of Gilgit-Baltistan, above all lavish shots of mountain peaks, to promote the country’s hospitality and global appeal. Since the public sphere is full of promotional material for this region, local people have also started posing in front of newly discovered sights for photos. While men often upload these on Facebook and WhatsApp, young women do also take part in outings and photo shoots, but behind a digital veil that does not allow them to advertize their photos so openly. Through visual examples from media both on- and offline, I will show how consumption and engagement with social media feed back into people’s (self-)perception of their natural and cultural environment. Popular representations of the region’s landscape even serve as a form of self-othering: looking at Gilgit-Baltistan’s assets through the eyes of outsiders allows many young people to appreciate things they previously ignored or took for granted, even seeing them as obstacles to development. Moreover, by actively contributing to public discourse, locals reclaim the represented and disseminated imagination of their homeland.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks the interdisciplinary team of CONTOURS researchers for their stimulating intellectual exchange.

Notes

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSadjRblyM&list=PLIYLve6wKoM2Nt4mmtEevakbFGxzYvydy&index=7

2 https://paleyphoto.photoshelter.com/gallery/Where-Modernity-Meets-Tradition-Pakistans-Karakoram-mountains/G0000iS_fAXha5ZQ/0/, selection also published in National Geographic, 2016: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/gojali-pakistan-islam

3 https://tourism.gov.pk

4 Available at https://visitgilgitbaltistan.gov.pk/DiscoverGB

5 A blog entry on the tourist website has recently been “corrected” to state that the exact location of Hilton’s Shangri-La is open to speculation: https://visitgilgitbaltistan.gov.pk/blog/105

6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0fQJnRvF4k

7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB6-dmX8wSU & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGyKajf9wBM

8 See the example of a report about Gilgit-Baltistan’s shamans on Pakistani TV that has gathered almost 25,000 hits since 2012 but might turn out to become dangerous for the portrayed persons when branded as kafir (infidel) through the clip’s wide circulation on the internet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDT3OpNSJ5A

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges support from the ERA.Net Rus Plus program under award number RUS_ST2019-055 and from the Academy of Finland Grant number 3444717 for the consortium CONTOURS: Conservation, Tourism, Remoteness. Older data was collected on the DFG project SO 435/3-1.

Notes on contributors

Anna-Maria Walter

ANNA-MARIA WALTER has worked on the anthropology of emotions, gender relations and mobile phones in the high mountains of Gilgit, northern Pakistan. Her book Intimate Connections has just been published by Rutgers. After completing a Ph.D. at LMU Munich, where she also held a lectureship, Anna-Maria is now a postdoctoral researcher at Oulu University, Finland, working in an interdisciplinary EU–Russian collaboration on sustainable tourism and remoteness. In her current research, she focuses on perceptions of mountainous landscapes in the Himalayas and the Alps, the socio-ecological dimensions of Alpine ski touring, and digital anthropology. A recent paper, in American Ethnologist, deals with conceptions of the self through social media use. E-mail: [email protected]