A Himalayan triptych: narratives of traders, pilgrims and resistance in a landscape of movements

ABSTRACT

For centuries, if not millennia, the north–south valley systems of Nepal’s Himalayas have acted as a capillary network for communication, exchange, veneration, discriminating cultural difference and measuring out (early-)state power. One valley, in particular, the Kali Gandaki in Mustang, is a palimpsest overlaid with complex socialized and politicized movement. Drawing on the work of those affiliated with post-phenomenological thinking and using a mix of archaeological, archival and ethnographic data, this article disentangles and narrates five travels that emanate from this linear trail: the pilgrim, the salt trader, the resistance fighter, the explorer and the trekker. We start with the Buddhist pilgrim visiting the 2000-year-old Muktinath temple complex, for whom the route is a spiritual path. With each new vista unfolds a landscape of miracles and magic, the dusty road itself a medium for acquisition in the mysterious economy of merit. We then turn to the caravan traders who have plied their wares between gusty mountain passes and lowland jungle, exchanging Tibetan salt for Indian grains in a tradition of centuries. For them the trail is an exercise in risk management: when to move to fix the best price, navigating precipitous tracks, calculating how many animals to sell or to keep. Later this trade route would become a frontier zone when, in 1950, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet. In the decades that followed, a Tibetan guerilla-fighting unit led by a former monk, Bapa Yeshe, mounted assaults from Mustang over the border into Tibet before ultimately being abandoned by their American Central Intelligence Agency supporters. Theirs was a receding trail, looking out over a dissolving field of cultural memories, their movement a heaving final resistance against a red tide of Mao’s intruders. Then there are the explorers – or nomadic cultural collectors – for whom the Annapurnas are a cornucopia of novelty. Each dusty step for them is further penetration into a landscape of alterity from which pieces of the other can be added to the collector’s satchel. Finally, we come to present-day trekkers, who dream of pristine nature and for whom the trail leads to escape, clarity of mind, the past or the edge of security. As they retrace the same routes and pathways to which of these historical narratives, if any, do they bear witness?

KEYWORDS:

• Nepal
• the Himalayas
• movement
• pilgrimage
• resistance
• pastoralism
• explorers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hayley Saul is a Lecturer at Western Sydney University (Australia) and Director of the Himalayan Exploration and Archaeological Research Team (HEART) research group. Her research explores the heritage and archaeology of the Himalayas, and the interface of these disciplines with development agendas. HEART operates in community partnership with Nepalese communities as well as the charity – NGO Community Action Nepal, with whom Hayley is a heritage consultant, building an archaeology/heritage ‘arm’ to the charity, to operationalize the results of HEART and bring about positive benefits to rural Nepalese communities. Following her Ph.D. at the University of York, she undertook Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded postdoctoral research with the Early Pottery in East Asia Project and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow on the Japanese Archaeo-Ceramic Residue Research Strategy (JARRS) project, to investigate cuisine and foodways in prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups in Denmark, northern Germany and Japan throughout the Holocene. In 2013–2014, she undertook a Fixed Term Lectureship in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, UK.

Emma Waterton is an Associate Professor in the geographies of heritage and DECRA Fellow based at the Western Sydney University. Before joining Western Sydney University in 2010, she was an RCUK Academic Fellow at Keele University. Her research explores the interface between heritage, identity, memory and affect. Her current project, ‘Photos of the Past’, is a three-year examination of all four concepts at a range of Australian heritage tourism sites, including Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, Sovereign Hill, the Blue Mountains National Park and Kakadu National Park. She is author of over 90 articles, books and chapters, including the monographs Politics, policy and the discourses of heritage in Britain (2010, Palgrave Macmillan), Heritage, communities and archaeology (with Laurajane Smith; 2009, Duckworth) and The semiotics of heritage tourism (with Steve Watson; 2014, Channel View Publications). She holds a BA from the University of Queensland, and an MA and Ph.D. from the University of York.

Notes

1. The UN has estimated that 35% of rural households have at least one family member who is a migrant worker, and remittances make up 23% of Nepal’s GDP, a figure that has almost certainly increased since the 2015 earthquakes (see http://un.org.np/oneun/undaf/migrant_workers).