Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Fri 17 Jul 2009 10:35 AM PDT
THE MYTH OF SHANGRI-LA: TIBET, TRAVEL WRITING AND THE WESTERN CREATION OF SACRED LANDSCAPE
By Peter Bishop
Chapter 1: An Imaginative Geography
New myths spring up beneath each step we take.(L. Aragon [1980])
A Global Mosaic
In one sense, natural landscape does not exist. We inescapably shape the world, even if only with our minds and not our hands. Where we shape the world, we create places. 'To be human', writes Relph, 'is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be human is to have and to know your place.' It has been said that to be without a relationship to a place is to be in spiritual exile. [1] Humans seem to need such special, even sacred, places. The space under the stairs, or in the corner of a room, so essential in childhood, is echoed again and again in sacred groves, caves, churches and temples. [2] Here, it is hoped, it is possible to form a closer connection with some unseen power: lofty and divine, or hidden in the depths of individual memory or of collective memoria. [3] Often these special places are purely personal, idiosyncratic and random, but most cultures also have their officially sanctioned sacred sites. Europe, for example, was once covered with such places, each linked by ancient routes of pilgrimage. [4]
In addition to both the informal respect bestowed by individuals upon their own special places and the collective worship of sites recognized by an entire culture is the grander, but more elusive, fascination with faraway places. With these places the fabulous and the empirical merge indiscriminately; sometimes embracing vast regions -- Cathay, Tartary, the Orient, the Indies -- sometimes much more specific -- the mountains of the Moon, the source of the Nile, Arcadia. [5] As the old European pilgrim routes fell into disuse and an age of exploration was initiated, these faraway places became increasingly mobilized by a Europe that was seeking a new global orientation and identity. A succession of empirically surveyed geographical places, although still fabulously imagined, evoked the hopes and fears of generations from the seventeenth century onwards. [6] At the same time, in Europe itself, pilgrimage was superseded by travel as a leisure activity for aristocrats and the rising middle classes. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the era of mass travel began, although long-range journeys for leisure, sport or science still remained the prerogative of Europe's upper classes. [7]
Some authors have insisted that there was a decline in the sense of sacred place as European culture moved into the industrial era of the nineteenth century, [8] but such a conclusion ignores the changes occurring both in the experience of the sacred and in the notion of place. From the Alpine peaks to the Arctic, from Tahiti to Tangier, European imagination spanned the globe. Europeans were constantly taking bearings from these remote places. This global involvement revolutionized European conceptions of the world: as a physical, social, political, spiritual and aesthetic reality.
These 'faraway' places frequently came to exert a mysterious fascination. I would argue that they were truly sacred places, but in modern guise. [9] Whereas sacred places in traditional cultures seem to have been created ex nihilo, to have existed always, these new places can be seen in a process of creation, fulfillment and decline. In them we can trace how a geographical location becomes transformed into a sacred place. They offer a unique opportunity to follow the relationship between cultural imagination, physical landscape and the sense of the sacred. They are windows into the changing spiritual aspirations, the soul, of modern Europe. [10] Tibet was one such place. It began almost as a mere rumour in the mid eighteenth century, but a hundred years later it had evolved into one of the last great sacred places of Victorian Romanticism. Its significance still reverberates strongly through European fantasies to this day. This is therefore a study of the encounter between Tibet and Western fantasy-making as revealed in the stories told by travelers and explorers: a study in the creation of a sacred place.
Travel Writing and the Exploration of Tibet
There have been several excellent studies of Tibetan exploration, but without exception they are straightforward narrative histories. [11] In addition, some reference to the story of exploration is frequently included in more general studies of Tibetan culture, as well as in historical accounts of Western political intervention in Central Asia. [12] Whilst performing the invaluable role of documenting Western involvement in the region, these accounts are singularly lacking in a number of crucial areas. The context within which these journeys were made is either ignored or limited to that of imperial politics, and even then only to the most strategic levels. The full psychosocial context of Tibetan travel has not received its due attention. This has resulted in a failure to situate travel accounts against the background of Western culture, and hence to assess the inner meaning that Tibet has held for the West. Also, in these studies, the travel accounts have usually been analysed on a simplistically literal basis, valued only in terms of their apparent factual truth, their contribution to a supposedly evolving empirical knowledge about Tibet. No attempt has been made to understand the genre of travel writing and how it can be interpreted.
This is, upon reflection, an astonishing omission. It assumes that travel writing is unequivocal in its meaning. All too often it is conceived to be either a poor cousin of scientific observation, or else to fall short of the creativeness of 'pure' fiction. Travel writing has its own history, its own stylistic schisms and struggles. [13] As a genre it is something of a complex hybrid and has been connected with autobiographies, eye-witness accounts and travelogues. It has been called a sub-species of memoir, a form of romance (quest, picaresque or pastoral), a vehicle for essays (ethical or scientific) or a variant of the comic novel. [14]
Travel writing can be seen as the art of the collage: newspaper clippings, public notices, letters, official documents, diary extracts, essays on current affairs, on art, on architecture, comic dialogues and homilies, are somehow clustered together to form a coherent and satisfying whole. The internal coherence of these assorted collages of essays, sermons, and so on, relies extensively on the image of geography and landscape, but this coherence can encourage too literal a reading of travel accounts.
The gross physicality, the geographical locatability, of travel books should not blind us to their fictional nature. Travel writing is not concerned only with the discovery of places but also with their creation. This is the case no matter how much effort is devoted to being as true as possible to the 'empirical' material. Frequently the travel account masks a totally fictional and imagined journey. Norman Douglas for example, actually admitted inventing characters. Whole passages of Robert Byron's accounts bear scant correlation to what actually took place, and it has been said that Evelyn Waugh seemed to behave as if 'descriptive passages do justice rather to potentialities than to facts.' [15]
Robert Byron, the well-known travel writer of the 1920s and thirties, attempted to justify travel as a way of gaining knowledge, and it is this concern which is central to any debate about travel literature in its cultural context. Knowledge produced by this form of activity is akin to the bricolage. [16] The travel writer then becomes the bricoleur, the odd-job person, who creates a body of knowledge from the materials at hand -- a process that is primarily orientated around the senses. Byron, in fact, wrote that 'the traveling species' is involved in a quest for 'an organic harmony between all matter and all activity ...' [17] Above all, travel accounts are involved in the production of imaginative knowledges. They are an important aspect of a culture's myth-making, yet this perspective is frequently overlooked.
The density of the text, and hence its claim to empirical truth, arises from a number of elements, each of which contributes towards the coherence of a travel account. Geography, locatable places and map coordinates can be verified, their empirical reality bestows authenticity on other aspects of the discourse. [18] But such a concrete actuality can obscure a poetic, or psychological, role in the creation of the text. [19] The use of photographs also encourages a literal reading. Certainly, the place of photographs in travel accounts is highly problematic, it is difficult to understand how they are selected and why they are included. Frequently they appear incidental and seem to be chosen at random or merely on the basis of personal whim. Defying any obvious logical connection, all too often they are merely 'postcards' which say: 'I have actually been here, at such and such place. This proves it.' Like the random use of foreign words, photographs impart a certain density and authenticity. Dates, in particular, give an apparent rigour and factuality to travel texts. Fussell writes that 'travel is thus an adventure in time as well as distance'. [20]
Maps, with routes carefully marked, combine both landscape and time. Routes are the temporal and spatial threads around which the bricolage is organized. No matter how wide the digression, no matter how disparate the topics, the route provides a datum to which he can, and must return. Once the route is left, we could say that the travel account is over. A travel account, unlike purely geographical descriptions or guidebooks, is organized as a narrative. Narrative, it has been observed, 'mystifies our understanding by providing a false sense of coherence.' [21] In fact, travel accounts pose some interesting questions for any theory of narrative: they present a constant interplay between two levels. The objective, tangible world of physical geography and chronological time consistently slides over, and breaks into, subjective personal experiences and digressions. Most travel accounts consist of small islands of personal narrative afloat on an ocean of dates and geography. These well-structured stories are often threaded together into a sequence which is entirely dependent on the idea of route. The image of the route emerges as the key to their apparent coherence and authenticity. Even the personal experiences of the traveler are secondary to the coherence and logic of the route; the route gives the traveler the authority to narrate.
The logic of the route must be established by the author if the text is to work as a travel discourse. The route is basically a trace left in geographical space and chronological time, but the imaginative continuity and quality of this trace can vary. The route can be socially structured and sanctioned, as in pilgrimages, or Aboriginal visits to sacred sites along sacred routes, or carnivals and street processions. When pilgrims begin their journey, they know precisely where they are going. So too, the individual traveler who follows the path of a Marco Polo, or an Alexander the Great, also follows, like the Aboriginal, well-mapped routes and socially recognizable sites. In all these cases the route is known beforehand. It is already mythic, already a narrative before the journey is undertaken. The journey merely activates and actualizes the route and the map. However, there are times when the physical geography becomes symbolic as the actual journey unfolds. The landscape and the route are mythologized as a result or the journey. There is no set route; it is rarely repeatable. For example, Matthiesson's journey into the Himalayas in search of the rare snow leopard became a soulful walk only as it progressed. The further he moved from Western civilization, the deeper he journeyed into the uncharted regions of his psyche and imagination. [22]
The route must be shown to possess a structure, an order of meaning, over and above mere chronological sequence or geographical position. Often this is achieved by means which are quite transparent. As we have seen, either the route is the trace of a collective idea such as a path for trading, or pilgrimage, or it is based on the traveler's subjective desire -- for example, to climb a particular peak, see a specific view. However, the most sublime art of all is to make the elements of the route -- the physical geography and chronological sequence -- appear to tell their own story. We then find that the authenticity of geography and dates is reinforced by the authenticity of narrative, and by the privileged access to truth accorded to it in our contemporary culture.
Finally, the use of the first-person account of experience gives the strength of testimony to the discourse. Autobiographies and diaries also carry this authenticity. Hillman forcefully argues that such a confessional mode supports the idea of a 'unified experiencing subject' confronting a chaotic and fragmented world. He emphasizes that in a literal, personalistic confession there is a loss of connection to the anima mundi, to the aesthetics of soul in the world. Foucault, moving along a parallel trajectory, has pointed to the way the confessional mode in literature, derived substantially from the church confessional, has reinforced the ideology of an autonomously creative author. He writes: 'Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth.' [23] Travel accounts are often a form of secularized pilgrimage. Travel and experiential narrative are a powerful combination. The claims to truth of such a narrative depend, however, upon the authority of the narrator. Hayden White argues that the 'very right to narrate' hinges upon this. [24] In travel accounts it is the physical act of journeying along a specific route which bestows such authority.
In Laurence Sterne's important eighteenth-century work, A Sentimental Journey, travel was combined with a radical sensitivity towards subjective states. This combination of outer physical geography and the inner world of private subjective experience seems at first to be an anomaly, but they have an ancient association. Victor Turner has commented that in the ritual of pilgrimage, personal experience becomes public. [25] For travel the reverse is also true: physical geography and public space become personalized. [26]
To a certain extent every travel account presents the image of several planes of discourse, sliding across one another, conflicting, contradicting, reinforcing and interrupting one another. Historical, geographical and personal experience all have their own modes of coherence and authenticity. Frequently personal narrative may appear to be eliminated whilst, for example, certain social, archaeological or botanical observations are made, but I would suggest that in the travel account such narrative is never nullified, only temporarily subdued.
Travel can function as a metaphor for inner experiences. Similarly, geography can provide maps for the description of consciousness. Each place, frontier or natural feature then becomes filled with symbolic resonance. [27] This seems to be the crucial aspect of travel accounts as a form of knowledge: not that geography (and so on) authenticate personal experience, but quite the reverse. The travel account creates a symbolic landscape filled with subjective meanings: even the descriptions of the weather can provide precise impressions of mood. It would also be wrong to assume that the creation of landscape is solely the work of an isolated individual. As Lowenthal comments, 'Every image and idea about the world is compounded ... of personal experience, learning, imagination, and memory.' [28]
Any study that refers to travel writing as a primary source needs to separate out these various levels of discourse and to note how they influence each other. For example, one must distinguish between the various nationalities and their specific imaginal relationship to Tibet. Britain, France, Italy, Russia, the USA, Germany and Austria all have a long tradition of Tibetan, Himalayan and Central Asian exploration, but whereas the British and Russians were involved in aggressive imperial expansion, the other countries were not. Political concerns were not, therefore, an explicit part of their accounts. For the British in the Himalayas, the room available for imaginative play was structured by the realities of administration, territorial defence, and executive power. But for explorers from other countries, without any explicit colonial presence in the region, a different set of constraints operated and revealed themselves at work in their accounts of travel and exploration.
Nevertheless, there was also a certain consensus among European and American travelers to Tibet, the Himalayas and Central Asia, despite national and personal differences. As we shall see, travelers were frequently familiar with each other's accounts, many of which were soon translated into English. In a very real sense, then, any travel account that had been translated into English immediately became part of the general stock of experiences and aspirations upon which British travelers drew and which therefore became their own. This internationalism was assisted by the similarities in class and gender among explorers and travelers, no matter what their nationality. They were invariably from upper-middle-class or aristocratic backgrounds, and they perhaps had more attitudes and values in common than their diverse national backgrounds would at first suggest. This international communality was particularly strong during the golden age of Tibetan exploration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Reading Travel Accounts
It is frequently through extreme geographical differences that a culture reflects upon, and tells stories about, itself. The gradual emergence of the image of Christian Europe, for example, depended extensively on the development of fantasies about an Islamic Orient. Fantasies of Tartary, of the East, of the West, and of Asia acquired a coherent shape only quite recently. They were formed within the context of Europe's struggle for self-definition and image. Tibet was part of the oppositional fantasy between East and West, between Occident and Orient.
This study is therefore not a narrative history of the exploration of Tibet; it is primarily concerned with how Tibet was directly experienced and imagined by Westerners, particularly the British, over a period of nearly 200 years. Travel texts are of particular value to such a study for they lie at the intersection of individual fantasy-making and social constraint. More regulated than, say, dreams, but one of the most personal documents, they are a unique record of a culture's imaginative life. I will argue that Tibet's fringe of its everyday concerns has been directly responsible for the consistently rich fantasies evoked by that country. In a sense, Tibet's peripheral place gave permission for many Europeans and Americans to use it as an imaginative escape, as a sort of time out, a relaxation from rigid rational censorship. Time and again Tibet was endowed with all the qualities of a dream, a collective hallucination. As with dreams, issues that are central to everyday life emerge symbolically in a striking, unashamed naivety.
Travel writing is often more candid than conscious autobiography, often less defensive than observations made closer to home. As life at the centre of Europe's empires became more organized, their values more protected, accounts of life at the distant periphery seemed to become more revealing. Here European fascination with geographical Otherness could be readily indulged. As Yi-Fu Tuan notes, 'Peripheral location is a geographical emblem of anti-structure.' [29] For example, many nineteenth-century travel writers presented the Orient as a certain type of experience. [30] It was a place of pilgrimage, a spectacle, a totally homogeneous and coherent world of exotic customs, of disturbing yet alluring sensuality, combined with horrific bestiality and perverse morality. As Said wryly notes, 'In the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance.' [31] For many, the Orient was a place of loss, of self discovery, of transcendence, of ennui. For Flaubert, for example, it provided a landscape of the macabre, of sadomasochism, of the femme fatale. 'Sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies' were attributed to the 'Orient' by such writers. [32]
As James Hillman points out, there was a close relationship between nineteenth-century European and American images of geographical places, and their conceptual images of the unconscious. For many of the Romantics, for example, the unconscious was 'the inner Africa.' Hillman writes: 'the topological language used by Freud for "the unconscious" as a place below, different, timeless, primordial, libidinal and separated from consciousness recapitulates what white reporters centuries earlier said about West Africa.' [33] Also, seminal figures in the West's so-called 'diicovery' of the unconscious, from Goethe to Carus to Jung, undertook long journeys that were formative for their ideas. There can also be little doubt in the services of natural science, or merely anecdotal -- played in the formation of ideas about the unconscious. In some ways too, as Hillman astutely observes, the myth of the 'discovery' of the unconscious paralleled the myth of the 'discovery' of the world. One cannot presume that one preceded the other or was somehow primary: 'Psychology conveniently imagines white men projected their unconscious onto Africa but projection works two ways; geography's Africa appears as psychology's unconscious.' [34]
The respective images of Otherness, both geographical and psychological, seemed to resonate in step with each other, from the naive worship by early Romantics to a later, more circumspect awareness of its shadows, contradictions and paradoxes, but although so-called inner and outer 'exploration' moved in step, they by no means followed identical trajectories. It would surely be a mistake simplistically to reduce one into the other. Nevertheless, we shall see that as the geographers, explorers and imperial surveyors charted the geographical regions of Tibet, they were at the same time establishing the contours of an imaginal landscape. Similarly, they were plotting not just the physical routes into Tibet, but also the psychological routes between Europe and aspects of its unconscious.
I am proposing, then, that we entirely reverse the usual reading of travel texts. Rather than being solely concerned with where the travelers and explorers were going, I want to examine from where they were coming. Two centuries of travel writing on Tibet tell as much, if not more, about Western fantasies than they do about a literal Tibet. Travel accounts can be read as extroverted dreams, and it is to studies in the language of dreams that we can turn for methodological guidance: from Freud's work come ideas of condensation and displacement in symbol formation; from Jung's psychology we find the method of amplification, of reflecting individual imagery against the wider background of cultural symbolism; Hillman and archetypal psychology insist that the utmost respect and attention be given to the fullness and depth of images, with due regard for their aesthetics, paradoxes and ambivalences. [35]
Whilst psychological studies of exploration and travel have been made before, these have almost invariably been with the aim of understanding the mentality of the individuals concerned. [36] Such accounts generally follow one of two directions: they are concerned either with the explorer-traveler's motivation, or with the experience of a particular place. [37] However, another kind of approach attempts to understand the cultural significance of landscapes, in terms of both their creation and their appreciation. [38] This study is closer to the latter approach than to any concern about individual psychology.
The Contours of Sacred Place
Places are produced by a dialogue between cultural fantasy-making and geographical landscape. The 'mountains seemed ... surprised to see us', exclaimed the nineteenth-century French explorer Grenard, as he made his torturous way across the bleak vastness of northern Tibet. [39] For many of these travelers, the landscape was alive: It evoked the depth-imagination. Places can be considered to have a genius loci that expresses something beyond the needs and aspirations of individuals, or even of an entire culture. [40] Particularly close attention is therefore given to the images evoked in the encounter between the imagination of travelers from Europe and America and the geographical places of Tibet.
Approaches to the idea of sacred landscape have emphasized a number of concerns:
1. The mythic, or archetypal dimension has been stressed by Eliade, Jung, Hillman, Casey and Layard. [41]
2. The phenomenology, perception and experience of landscape and place have been investigated by Relph, Bachelard, Yi-Fu Tuan, Lowenthal and Heidegger, amongst others. [42]
3. The social context of sacred landscape and of the perceptions of landscape have been studied by many of the authors cited above. In addition, many valuable theoretical conclusions have been drawn from extensive studies of Australian Aboriginal sacred sites and sacred journeys. [43]
Yi-Fu Tuan has coined terms such as 'geopiety' and 'topophilia' to describe the intense relationship between humans and such specific geographical entities as woods, streams, hills, or more general places such as home, Motherland or Fatherland -- even the whole earth itself. [44] Heidegger conceived a place to be where mortals, gods, earth and sky are gathered and where we mortals could 'dwell poetically on earth'. [45] Aristotle connected place with the image of a vessel. This should not be thought of as a mere passive container, but rather in terms of places providing their own boundaries, because they evoke a fascination -- they are always affairs of the heart. [46] Tibet became a landscape to which the soulful imaginings of many Westerners were drawn; one which has sustained a deep fascination over the centuries.
Sacred space has been defined in terms of its separation from the profane world, by the limited access accorded to it, by a sense of dread or fascination, by intimations of order and power combined with ambiguity and paradox. Sacred places also seem to be located at the periphery of the social world. As we shall see, so far as the West is concerned, Tibet easily fits such a description.
A sacred place, or temenos, always has a defined boundary and a centre. At its perimeter lies the threshold. This, writes Eliade, 'is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds - -and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible'. [47] Rituals accompany the crossing of the threshold, guardians protect the passageway. [48] At the centre of the sacred place is the axis mundi, the world axis, the link between heaven, earth and the Underworld. Such places give orientation and establish order. They allow access to imaginal depth and meaningfulness whilst holding chaos at bay. Sacred places provide an essential continuity with the past, with the Ancients of one's cultural tradition. [49] Whilst grounding the present in memory, they also provide an orientation for the future, give it meaning.
Sacred places are sites of paradoxical power -- of destruction, and also of renewal. They can induce a sense of both serenity and terror. Such places are terrible, yet also fascinating. Contemporary use of the term 'sacred place', frequently lacks such paradox, too often sacred places are imagined merely as benign places for healing and contemplation. [50] But as we shall see in the case of Tibet, once paradox has been too easily resolved, contradiction replaced by harmony, ambiguity by certainty; once fear and darkness have yielded to unequivocal hope, then the sacred place has become a utopia. A whole new set of fantasies is then mobilized. [51]
Notions of sacred space and travel come together in the phenomenon of pilgrimage. Like travel accounts, pilgrimage has its landscapes, its sacred places, its sacred routes and its literature of guidebooks and individual accounts, often written in a confessional style. [52] Victor Turner has emphasized the peripheral yet important nature of pilgrimage: geographically, culturally and imaginatively. [53] I want to argue for a wider definition of pilgrimage, or of sacred journey, which will encompass exploration and travel. As with the more conventional pilgrimage, travel and exploration can also convey a public sense of the sacred. Through the ceremony of travel the individual can be involved in a collective celebration, production and maintenance of the sacred and of the mythic. It is from such a perspective that Tibet can be seen as one of the modern sacred sites of western pilgrimage.
This study argues that places, such as the one Tibet became, provide a society's imaginings with a vital coherence. It seeks to show how such a landscape is produced, established and reproduced both within a historical period and also over a long span of time. In the case of Tibet and the British imagination, for example, three imaginative contexts were of primary importance, although they were not always harmoniously related:
1. The imagination of imperialism, particularly in India, exerted its influence throughout the formative years of Britain's involvement with Tibet. Imperial rivalry, global geopolitics, a sense of imperial destiny, the consolidation of the empire through exploring, mapping and surveying, in addition to concerns of trade, were uppermost in the imperial imagination.
2. The geographical imagination found one of its fullest developments in the nineteenth century and dominated Britain's relationship with Tibet. Especially important were the changing attitudes towards wilderness landscapes, as well as to exploration and travel. Under the heading of exploration can be included adventurers and mountaineers, as well as scholars in geography, archaeology, ethnology, and the physical and natural sciences. This period saw the birth and consolidation of many intellectual disciplines in their modern form -- geography, archaeology, anthropology, and comparative religion. But in the nineteenth century many explorers, by inclination or necessity were active in a variety of overlapping concerns rather than being narrow specialists.
3. Ideas about personal experience were also undergoing profound changes. Especially important were the decline of Christianity's spiritual hegemony in Europe, the rise of interest in Eastern and traditional religions, and the development of theosophy, existentialism and psychoanalysis. In particular, the mystical imagination has formed a continuous thread in Britain's relationship with Tibet. Indeed, it seems that missionary activity in Tibet assumed a low profile in the popular imagination, perhaps because of the consistent respect shown for Buddhism.
Each of these imaginative paradigms had its own specific tradition and history, but each was also part of a larger social-historical milieu. Hence the various landscapes of Tibet were sketched not in isolation by the individual travelers but, for example, against a background of British Victorian attitudes towards religion, 'primitive' cultures, the 'East', social class, sexuality, aesthetics, and even travel itself.
This is therefore a unique study of a complete tradition of travel writing in its psychosocial context. But as we shall see, so compelling was this place, with its strange yet profound religion, its harsh yet benign theocracy, its splendid and archaic civilization, its impossible landscapes of mountains and deserts, its rugged yet amiable people, its frustrating and tormenting isolation, its position atop the highest mountains on the globe, that it touched and questioned virtually every area of Western endeavor.
Power and the Production of Places
Foucault argues that power and knowledge are inseparable. We are, he writes, 'subjected to the production of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth'. [54] The 'truth' about a place such as Tibet, therefore, was not discovered, but produced as a result of specific social and imaginative relationships. Tibet was always in the process of being created, always adjusting its contours in step with the changing requirements of the European fantasies. But places are not only the result of such complex social processes; they also help to organize them and give them coherence.
Edward Said's seminal study, Orientalism, is directly concerned with the creation, maintenance and reproduction of such a place, in this case the 'Orient'. He argues that the Orient was, and is, a fundamental place in the landscape of Western imagination. Said sees imaginative geography as crucial to the organization of knowledge: 'Geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient. All the latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography.' [55] These places -- the Mediterranean, the Arctic, or the Orient -- are like islands which provide a coherence for the Western fantasy of itself. [56] As Said remarks, 'these geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.' [57] In the case of the 'Orient', this mythological reality became so closed, so dense and literal, that a whole scholarly discipline arose around it -- Orientalism. Said astutely comments that such learned pursuits promote more of a 'refinement' of 'Western ignorance' than 'some body of positive Western knowledge which increases in size and accuracy.' [58] Following Foucault, we could say that these discourses are concerned with the expression and organization of doubt as much as anything else. [59]
Some insight into the relationship between knowledge and imaginative geography can be also gained from Gladwin's study of navigation among Pacific islanders. He was puzzled by their mapping of imaginary islands. [60] The navigators were highly pragmatic people, and these precisely coordinated and meticulously plotted imaginary islands at first seemed an anomaly to Gladwin, yet he discovered that these islands were essential for the coherence of the navigational maps and techniques. The Orient, the Mediterranean, Tibet, the source of the Nile, Greece, and so on, were similarly both factual and yet also imaginary. They could be located precisely, geographically, on a map, yet at the same time were imbued with additional symbolic meaning. They provided an internal coherence for the structure of Europe's mythological foundation and sensibility. [61] They were impossible but necessary.
Through the practical repetition of discourses, including those of travel, a surface is produced on which an imaginary place appears, replete with people, customs, landscape, weather, food, clothing, history, and so on. [62] Said has extensively detailed this production process for the 'Orient'. Traders, explorers, adventurers and missionaries were among the first to travel and to return laden with stories. These laid the foundations and began to shape the contours of these distant places. They also established the routes -- both imaginary and geographical -- by which such places could be approached. It will be seen, in the case of Tibet, that the travelers' fantasies varied according to whether they approached by way of Afghanistan (adventure, mountain climbing), India (British Raj, colonial rivalry with Russia), China (Tibeto-Chinese rivalry), or Mongolia (Silk Route, archaeology). Subsequently, anthropologists and other specialist 'travelers' also came to tell their stories. James Boon, for example, writing about the practice of anthropology, points to the 'ritually repetitive confrontations with the Other which we call field work'. He documents the way Bali, as a place, emerged from out of this 'ritual repetition'. [63] Each era reconstructs the contours of these imaginary worlds, but on surfaces already laid down.
The nineteenth-century and twentieth-century travel accounts already had a stage replete with the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, and dozens of other characters, scenes and plots.' [64] In addition, any subsequent discourse about the 'Orient' had to 'pass through the learned grids and codes provided by the Orientalists'. [65] Said argues that the contours and culture of this vast imaginary landscape became self-validating. Orientalists referred to other Orientalists for verification. In much the same way, we shall see travelers in Tibet refer to each other's accounts for confirmation.
The British discovery and exploration of Tibet occurred in the shadow of the Royal Geographical Society's hegemony. This institution established early in the nineteenth century, exerted its control by means of funding, coordinating, training and publishing; its extensive network of connections among the leaders of British imperialism; its pioneering role in geography and its leadership in geographical education. Above all, the Royal Geographical Society's aims and practices dovetailed with the needs of nineteenth-century imperialism: they both conformed with, and confirmed, prevailing geopolitical values. [66] Yet the society's control was never absolute. The struggle against its hegemony was to be a fundamental characteristic of Tibetan travel literature, although rarely was such a challenge direct or overt. Also, the constraints imposed by the Royal Geographical Society's hegemony were more often conducive to the production of knowledge than to its restriction. One could argue that control is most often effective when it encourages investigation in a certain direction rather than preventing it altogether. [67] Through these various constraints -- theoretical, ideological, empirical, imaginative and political -- vessels are created which actually assist and support specific imaginative production. Said, for example, points to a 'linguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient, and so on'. [68]
European and American fantasies about Tibet were never a vague abstraction, never just a set of images carried around in the heads of individual travelers. They were always tangible, always embodied in distinct practices, ranging from accepted styles of prose and landscape description to how expeditions were organized and equipped. The imagination was embodied in the relationship between explorer-travelers and their non-European guides, companions, escorts, servants. Institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal society, the Alpine Club and the Survey of India simultaneously encoded, concentrated and legitimized fantasies. Above all, they had the power to establish these imaginative practices as truth and to impose this upon what Said has dramatically called the 'silent Other'. [69]
The Psychosocial Context
Quite clearly, the evolution of Tibet as a sacred landscape occurred within a complex psychosocial context. Numerous discourses intersected in Tibet, or wove themselves around its creation. This study must therefore follow the trails left by botanists, geologists, linguists, missionaries, students of comparative religion, Buddhists, Buddhologists and Tibetologists, anthropologists and archaeologists, aesthetes of both landscape and art, mountaineers, journalists, surveyors, soldiers, diplomats, photographers, mystics, traders, professional travelers, adventurers and poets, as they made their way into Tibet or around its formidable perimeter. These individuals lived and worked during a period of unprecedented global expansion by the Western powers, of unrestrained urbanization and industrialization; at a time when revolutions were occurring throughout the full range of social and physical sciences, as well as in the political and social life of Western societies.
The creation of Tibet, between 1773 and 1959, coincided almost exactly with the rise and fall of European, and particularly British, imperial aspirations. Tibet was witness to a massive reorganization of global time, space and identity. Old empires collapsed as the modern era was ushered in. The new geopolitical order was legitimized by a complete realignment both of memory and of expectations. In their role of story-tellers, travelers and explorers played a crucial role in this process. By studying these accounts we are allowed privileged access to the imagination, both unconscious and conscious, of the ruling and upper-middle classes of Britain and other Western nations.
We shall see that during most of this long period travel accounts were usually conservative protests against modernism, the masses, and the changing world order. But they also played a crucial part in the creation of a thoroughly new Weltanschauung -- with respect to traditional cultures, the peoples and geography of the world, nature and science and, above all, personal meaning. New myths emerged, old ones became revitalized -- the Wise Men of the East, an Arcadia hidden in a remote secluded valley, the mastery of death, the search for the Self, the vitality of the frontier.
Five eras in the unfolding of the West's imaginative relationship with Tibet have been selected. Although these are not completely arbitrary, there could just as easily have been six or seven. Nevertheless, each of these eras offers a view of a particular Tibet, complete within itself yet also in process, replete with tensions and contradictions. This is therefore a study not of one, but of five 'Tibets': of their individual genesis, development and decline. Each 'Tibet' was very much an integral part of its era -- hence the necessity of as full an understanding as possible of the psychosocial context. But as we shall see, the transformation from one imaginative 'Tibet' to the next was not solely dependent upon the vicissitudes of its cultural context. This movement had its own internal logic, its own relative independence. Also, despite the satisfying coherence of each of these individual imaginative 'Tibets' we shall see that there was also an overall shape to the fantasies about Tibet which spanned nearly two hundred years.
The boundaries of each era have been selected, first, in terms of some significant event in the history of Western involvement with Tibet; and secondly in terms of some core, or root-metaphor that gave the era its apparent cohesion. Sometimes the beginning and end of such an era are quite definite and are dictated by unquestionable events -- this was true of the first 'Tibet' to be imaginatively created in modern times. In 1773 British troops clashed with the Bhutanese, thus evoking a direct response from Tibet. In1774 George Bogle became the first modern non-ecclesiastic westerner to enter Tibet and leave a written account. The close of that optimistic era is similarly beyond dispute. In 1792 Tibet barred its frontiers to Westerners in the aftermath of a series of Gurkha invasions from Nepal for which Britain was held partly responsible. Most of Tibet then remained sealed off from Western curiosity for over a hundred years. It was this single fact alone that initiated the 'next' era.
Excluded from Tibet itself, Westerners, particularly the British, began a systematic exploration of the surrounding Himalayas. Hence Tibet began to acquire a shape. Its boundary began to be mapped. A few intrepid individuals made solitary journeys into the country even reaching Lhasa itself, so reminding the West of that hidden, unknown land beyond the mountains; but most of all, Westerners were fascinated with the Himalayas. This era was also dominated by a revolution in landscape aesthetics in Europe and America: mountain Romanticism was in its first full flowering. Yet this era did not lack pertinent historical events concerning Tibet, and it came to a definite conclusion in around 1842. The British attempt to establish hegemony in the Himalayas, and thus to ensure a stable, well-controlled northern frontier for India, received a series of major setbacks between 1841 and 1842. The Sikhs had already conquered Ladakh in 1834, and in 1841 they invaded Western Tibet. Britain had recently had an army annihilated in Afghanistan, and its somewhat laissez-faire approach to imperialism seemed inadequate to cope with the situation.
The next period, between 1842 and 1875, was marked less by external events than by a single-mindedness of purpose. Systematic and scientific exploration was the ideal of the day, with Darwin's famous work hovering inescapably over the whole era. The Himalayas were mapped and their place in the British imagination was assured. A new landscape aesthetic was emerging under the careful tutelage of Ruskin. Behind its well-protected and well-defined frontiers, Tibet came to symbolize something very special. Both its religion and its position, 'on top of the World', began to exert a fascination with Western travelers. As an ancestral source of the Aryan race, these lofty regions were quietly beginning to evoke deep longings.
1875, the beginning of the next era, bears no relation to any significant historical event -- it is merely the gateway to the closing quarter of the nineteenth century. During this time the tradition of Tibetan exploration finally acquired its own internal dynamic and entered its golden age, which culminated in the British armed expedition to Lhasa in 1904. Then it seemed that a decisive breakthrough had occurred: that the 'forbidden City' had finally been reached, and Tibet now lay open at last to Western curiosity. But this fin de siecle Tibet was merely one of a series and not, as was hoped, the final resolution of an enigma. A travel restriction once more descended, and in some ways the country became even more isolated than before.
The final period of this study begins with an event far from Tibet yet so monumental for the West as to overshadow all else: the First World War. It ends, however, with an event that was intensely specific to Tibet: the final exile of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and the apparent destruction of traditional Tibetan religious culture in its homeland.
Any contextual study that attempts to do justice to the complexities of an era can quite easily become lost among the historical details of politics, social analysis, aesthetics, geographical understanding, military strategy, missionary work, botanical investigations, and so on. Clearly we must remember our primary objective and stay as close as possible to the phenomenology of the imagination, to the Western sense of the sacred with regard to Tibet. In addition, this is a study of the imagination in process, and careful attention has to be directed at the subtle transformations of fantasy.
An Imaginative Analysis
James Hillman has clearly articulated the concerns of such an imaginative analysis. 'Depth psychology', he writes, 'has applied its method to the study of alchemy, myth, religious dogma and ritual, scientific theory, primitive behavior, cosmologies, psychiatric ideas -- all in terms of the archetypal fantasy therein expressed.' [70] An archetypal reading of these Tibetan travel texts therefore seeks to uncover the deep structure of the imagination and to plot its transformations. [71] Hillman writes:
We can extend depth psychology from persons to things, places and ideas as manifestations of imagination. The same imagination, the same soul, that presented itself in fifteenth and sixteenth century alchemy showed itself in the extraverted psychology of the explorers seeking gold, the journey across the perilous seas, the seven cities, the impossible passage, the fountain of youth, the black man and the lost Atlantis -- the world as metaphor. [72]
From such a perspective the imaginative relationship to the world is clearly primary and not, as it is from another viewpoint, a subjective confusion and contamination of empirical understanding. [73] An imaginal reading also emancipates us from a progressive and evolutionary evaluation of the European and American understanding of Tibet. Again Hillman writes: 'No first and last, better and worse, progression and regression. Instead, soul history as a series of images, superimposed'. [74] Transformation should not be reduced solely to development.
The use of a wide range of theoretical perspectives in a study such as this raises important methodological questions. Some critical reflection on the relationship between them is certainly necessary as regards the main theorists, but I believe we must distinguish clearly between an archetypal-psychological analysis and, say a philosophical one. The former is less concerned with logical or epistemological differences between, for example, Jung's ideas and Eliade's, or Hillman's and Foucault's, than with their archetypal and metaphorical relationships. A theoretical consistency becomes less important than an imaginal one. Also, in an imaginal analysis the relationship between theory and text is crucial: how shall we place the theories in relation to the prima materia, to the other, primary, texts?
Jung himself inspired such an attitude by insisting that the crucial differences between his own ideas and those of Freud and Adler were differences of personal metaphor or imaginal orientation. He saw theories as tools, to be used according to the demands of the material. [75] Similarly, when Hillman criticizes Foucault's ideas, for example, it is not because of their logical incompatibility with his own, nor due to some internal inconsistency in Foucault's arguments, but in terms of their overall relationship to the image. In this regard he accuses Foucault of 'anarchic nihilism' -- of reducing psychopathology, and hence image-making, to mere linguistic and social convention. Foucault's insights and radical deconstructionalism, whilst paralleling some of the de-literalizing ideas of archetypal psychology, must therefore be used cautiously when it comes to making moves in image-work. Finally, as Holt insists in his study 'Jung and Marx', the aim is not to achieve a theoretical reconciliation but to open up a field of ideas that has both the width and the capacity to endure contradictions. [76]
I would suggest that an imaginal analysis must bear in mind the dominant root-metaphors of any theory that it uses to craft the imaginal material. A polytheistic approach does not exclude any perspective on the grounds of theoretical incompatibility, but instead tries to relate theories through their common grounding in imaginal reality. Eliade's ideas, for instance, are clearly based on oppositional thinking, insisting upon an almost unequivocal polarization between the sacred and the profane. His distinctions are fixed and sharply defined rather than fluid and in process. Also, Eliade presents the struggle to attain otherworldliness as the most valued orientation of Homo religiosus. Perhaps we can see the archetype of the hero at work in these striking oppositions and bold, almost desperate, struggles to attain some sacred Other; or that of the senex in his insistence upon clearly defined boundaries and rigid demarcations between classes of experience. [77] Similar archetypal perspectives appear in his portrayal of sacred Otherness as a timeless unity. As we shall see, Western fantasies of Tibet reveal images of the sacred in the process of creation: images that have a complex and contradictory multiplicity even with an occasional, overall, imaginal coherence. Tibet was an imaginal place whose boundaries -- both in space and time -- and defining internal characteristics were continually in flux, ever changing. These images reveal a sacred domain that was never sharply delineated from the profane world -- one where the sacred and profane interpenetrated, confirmed and contested each other.
The archetypal dominants in Foucault's work move between an almost Dionysian dismantling of concretized and totalizing images and Apollonian distancing from the material, with a corresponding attention to rational clarity. Foucault's work also reveals, at times, a delight in a Hermetic or trickster-like word-play. However, Said's analysis of 'Orientalism', whilst owing much to Foucault's theoretical ideas and perspective, fails to echo his root-metaphors on an imaginal level. Instead Said's work is marked by puer-earnestness, an attempt to gather up history in the services of a political cause in the present. Any anima-inspired lingering delight in the mysterious intimacy of the past is speedily bypassed as he hurries to reach the present in order to construct his grand theory. [78]
Listening in such a way to the root-metaphors of these theories relieves them of their literalness and allows space for the material, the textural images, to speak pluralistically. Our analysis itself then becomes a matter of image-work, a crafting of images. The theories do not then, as it were, stand above the primary material, claiming a privileged position; instead they too take their place as imaginal texts alongside the travel accounts and other historical documents. There is a mutual reciprocity between these various classes of text as they reveal, contextualize, marshal and organize the disparate wealth of imagery evoked in the encounter between the West and Tibet.
An Archaeology of Shangri-La
This study therefore presents an archetypal reading of an imaginal 'Tibet': not as an abstraction, but as a sensual reality: not as a series of disembodied ideas, but as a complex world of images -- shapes, colours, textures. An archaeology of the imagination is concerned with uncovering the past foundations of present fantasies. In it, memory is not just a pre-condition for the present but a part of its essential structure. The past is not absent but is ever-present beneath the apparent surfaces of daily life. One of the final and most complete embodiments of Tibet as a sacred place in the Western imagination was the utopia of Shangri-La described in Hilton's famous 1933 novel Lost Horizon. [79] In a very real sense, then, this study is an archaeology of Shangri-La.
An imaginative archaeology uncovers personalities and characters of earlier eras -- the Dalai Lama, the Potala, Lhasa, the unceasing wind, the vast Tibetan plateau, the colors and the light, the yeti, the lamas and of course, the explorers, both known and unknown. The creation of these successive Tibets was not a process of remorseless continuity. Embellishments, or streams of fantasy which did not pass into the next era but instead came to a dead end, are as vital to the understanding of imaginative processes as those dominant themes which spanned the entire period of nearly two hundred years. British troops firing at giant rhubarb plants in the mistaken belief that they were Tibetan soldiers, or the inexplicable fascination Western travelers had for the variety of hats worn at Lhasa, cannot be simply left out of the study just because they seem tangential to the main story.
The Ceremony of Travel
The individual intentions of travelers and explorers, or governments and institutions, are often less interesting than the way they went about things, or how things eventually went about their own way. So, for example, each era had its own ceremony of travel. The travel atmosphere of each was replete with its own fantasies -- tropical landscapes, love and romance, nervous frontiers, horrible places. [80] These fantasies spoke through hotels, rest-houses, mountainside bivouacs, travel guides, postcards, photographs and, above all, what was actually taken on the journey. The renowned Russian Prejevalsky, for example, set out across Siberia in 1879 with twenty three camels laden with two and a half hundredweight of sugar, forty pounds of dried fruit, a crate of brandy and a crate of sherry. His party was armed with a formidable arsenal of rifles, revolvers, a hundredweight of powder, 9,000 rounds of ammunition and four hundredweight of lead shot. His 'gifts for the natives' included tinted pictures of Russian actresses. An additional gift was some wild strawberry jam which Prejavalsky had bottled personally for the Dalai Lama. He boasted that if necessary he would bribe or shoot his way to Lhasa. [81]
The most notable non-Europeans to enter Tibet were the 'pundits'. These were Indians trained in survey work, who carried compasses fixed to the top of their walking staves, notes hidden inside their prayer wheels, and used beads on the rosary to count their paces and hence to measure the vast distances. [82] In 1935 Peter Fleming and Tina Maillart traveled 3,500 miles from Peking to Kashmir, brushing around the back of Tibet. The journey took seven months. Their supplies speak eloquently. Apart from old clothes, a few books (including Macaulay's History of England), two compasses and two portable typewriters, they carried: two pounds of marmalade, four tins of cocoa, six bottles of brandy, one bottle of Worcester sauce, one pound of coffee, three small packets of chocolate, some soap, a good deal of tobacco, a small store of knives, beads, toys, etc., by way of presents, and a random assortment of medicines. [83] Their only weapon was a second-hand .22 rook rifle to shoot food en route. Such lists are endless, yet each in its own way is a vignette of fantasies, hopes, fears and expectations. This study will listen carefully to such things as well as to ideas.
The Selection of Texts
We can locate with some precision those moments, when as an indication of a changing sensibility, a new and fundamental image appears. Sometimes it may only flicker briefly and then soon fade. Other images are more fertile: we can trace their establishment and the subtle contours of their evolution. Sometimes a long-ignored image will reappear many years after apparently hibernating, out of sight, underground. A changing imaginative context will have given it a new meaning and a restored relevance. We can also distinguish between seed-images and contextual-images. The former are characterized by a unique specificity, whereas the latter attempt to embrace and encompass. Seed-images, for example would include those that refer to a specific mountain, such as Everest. Contextual-images, on the other hand, would embrace the social attitude towards mountains in general.
It is often possible to identify key, or primary, texts in relation to these images. For example, Volume 4 of Ruskin's Modern Painters or Darwin's Origin of Species generated images that created whole imaginative contexts. The Himalayan Journals of botanist-explorer Joseph Hooker, the future director of Kew Gardens (1855), on the other hand, were formative in creating the imaginative contours of the eastern Himalayas: they fulfilled a more limited but no less important function than, say, Darwin's work. Other texts neither shaped a whole context nor seeded the region with definitive and fertile imagery. They were nevertheless crucial in echoing many of the major concerns, as well as embellishing more minor issues. Between them these more secondary texts created the overall 'tone' of the place, its atmosphere and its density.
Each chapter therefore draws upon a limited number of primary texts, some of which are contextual, whilst others are specific to Himalayan and Tibetan exploration. In the first chapters, selection of travel texts is not a real problem, but as Tibetan travel became more established, a bewildering range of accounts became available. Some, like Hooker's Himalayan Journals, Freshfield's mountaineering epic Around Kanchenjunga, or the French priest M. Huc's Travels in Tartary, Tibet and China, were acknowledged classics in their day, and so select themselves. These apart, I have chosen a range of texts that is representative of the remarkable spectrum of perspectives held by Western travelers, yet also faithful to the balance of the era's fantasies. Accounts of travel and exploration tend to be clustered in distinct, but overlapping groups. All these textual groups have their own very unique traditions. They share both style and purpose. These clusterings of texts were sometimes indicative of established and powerful interest groups such as the Royal Geographical Society, or the Royal Society.
We are therefore caught in a dilemma. If texts are selected merely to be as representative as possible of the range of travelers, then the relative value of each text in terms of the era's fantasy-making could be grossly distorted. Landon's monumental, and official, study of the British 'invasion' of 1904, Lhasa, was clearly far more formative for the British imagination than Millington's witty volume To Lhassa at Last, produced as a result of the same expedition. Yet precisely because it was humorous, a rarity in early Tibetan travel accounts, Millington's slim work is of inestimable value. If we give weight only to texts that were deemed important at the time, we are in danger of merely reproducing the official story. This may or may not represent the actual state of the era's Tibetan fantasies. For example, Bogle's diary, the first secular account of Tibet in modern times, was not published until about a hundred years after it was written. Clearly it played little or no part in forming the fantasies of Bogle's time, but it has a great claim to acknowledgement as a crucial expression of its era. In many ways it is of more value than Turner's famous account, written and published only a few years after Bogle's journey, for it is less polished, less 'prepared' for publication. [84]
Publication, distribution and recognition of travel accounts are profoundly affected by vested interests, be they a matter of institutional values or of simple economics -- will they be popular and sell? The less well-known texts therefore have a value in helping us to glance behind the official story. Often they show revealing views from the edge of the dominant paradigm: sometimes contradicting it, sometimes reinforcing it. Also, even within a single travel text there may be a variety of viewings: some mainstream, others idiosyncratic.
Before travelers even arrived at the Tibetan border, their imaginations had been prepared. The actual encounter with the empirical place then merely activated their fantasies, either confirming or contesting them. As Bachelard writes: 'Before becoming a conscious sight, every landscape is an oneiric experience.' [85]
Showing or Telling?
A distinction has frequently been made between those accounts which show and those which tell. [86] It would be relatively straightforward to tell the story of the Western encounter with Tibet, the experiences of the explorers, their discoveries, the meaning of their fantasies. But this is not intended to be just a study of the imagination, but in the imagination. I therefore want to show as well as to tell. As much as possible I want the images to 'speak for themselves' and not be reduced to abstractions. For instance, a study of landscape painting could scarcely be feasible without profuse illustrative examples, and central to this account is the study of landscape imagery -- word-paintings, as they were called in the nineteenth century. But I prefer to use these descriptive passages not just as illustrations for a conceptual argument but as part of the construction of the argument
Attachment:
