Tag: culture

  • Existential Apple Juice

    A section from my soon-to-be-turned-in research paper. A little slice of life in Kagbeni and some more thoughts on authenticity.  Next post will be on a new theme, I promise.


                In academic discourse on tourism and authenticity, we often mistakenly assume that either tourists or local peoples can authoritatively define what is authentic.  In reality, authenticity, of experience as much as objects, is a transient and ever-changing concept, different for everyone.  True authenticity depends on one’s state of mind and openness to experience.  It can be contained in a single apple, a single moment, or a single-minded willingness to engage authentically.
                Less than a week into my stay at the Red House Lodge, I already had a Nepali name (Kalpana), a host of familiar faces in town, and essentially a Nepali family.  One morning, upon returning “home” from a walk, Tenzin’s daughter and employees called to me from the picnic table on the flat roof where they were shredding apples to make juice.  “Kalpana! Bosnus, Kalpana.” They made space for me and I sat down on the edge of the table, trying to avoid the sticky bits of apple scattered about.  I insisted on helping, as by then they must have expected, picking up a hand-held metal grater (the kind I had only used to grate cheese), and joined my effort to theirs. 
    For more than an hour we worked in semi-silence, speaking to ask for more apples (apple, dinnus) or pass a bowl of browning mush to Ammis, who would squeeze it in handfuls to separate liquid from solid.  The only other sounds came from the rasping of small, green apples against metal, the occasional cry of hawks circling the crumbling medieval fort across the alley, and the drip drip drip of fresh-squeezed apple juice trickling into a plastic bucket.  It being an unusually still morning, the prayer flags adorning nearly every rooftop remained quiet and the strong Mustangi sun heated the air.  I changed into a T-shirt, the first and last time that my arms would see the sun in Mustang.  We paused sometimes to sample from the abundance of produce spilling from the deep wicker basket next to us, punctuating the music of shredding apples with the crunch of teeth on fruit.
    Apples of every variety grow well in the region around Kagbeni.  Marpha (elevation 2670 meters), a four hour walk south of Kagbeni, boasts the moniker “apple capital of Mustang,” but I preferred the tart crispness of the apples heaped around the picnic table that morning, harvested from Tenzin’s orchard in Pangling, just across the Kali Gandaki River less than an hour from the Red House Lodge.  Though the climate and altitude of Lower Mustang are ideal for the cultivation of apples, it is only in the last few decades that an apple economy has developed there.  Landowners have converted much of their farmland or unused property into orchards, and nearly every restaurant and guest house carries out its own small-scale apple juice-, cider-, and brandy-making operations.  Small bags of dried apples and bottles of apple brandy satisfy the demand of Nepali and foreign tourists alike for edible souvenirs.
    My skin warm and my hands coated with sticky brown apple remains, I smiled contentedly at the easy companionship of that moment, which transcended linguistic and cultural barriers.  Shoulder-to-shoulder with my Nepali didi (sister), I grated apple after apple, as quickly and as diligently as the rest, working towards the simple common goal of juice.  Moments like these cannot be manufactured, I remember thinking.  In their beauty, simplicity and spontaneity, such instances of connection and, yes, authenticity, are precious in their inimitability.  Isn’t that the conundrum of the tourism industry, which makes its millions by selling “real” experiences. 
    Some research on tourism today is employing the Heideggerian concept of existential authenticity to solve that riddle.  According to Heidegger’s philosophy, inherent meaning and connection exist, and it is these qualities that make experience possible.  In terms of tourism, when one approaches the world with “existential authenticity […], a state of Being in which one is true to oneself,” a unique experience of the world, understood from an individual perspective, becomes possible, and the tourist may experience that inherent meaning.  In these terms, authenticity is not a fixed, objective quality, but rather a state of mind, rendering it nearly impossible to package and market.  Taking the Maori’s staged cultural demonstrations as an example (which emerged as a response to non-Maoris producing cultural shows for tourists), “staging pseudo-events for tourists can, in fact, be expressions of host authenticity in deciding how to present themselves to others.”[1]  Whether a tourist witnessing this show finds it authentic is not the question here; the tourist who is attuned to his or her “existential self” will experience it authentically regardless.
    At six o’clock, the night before apple juice-making day, I ate dinner with the group of Ukranian trekkers in the rooftop dining room.  Candlelight cast faces and food into a dynamic interplay of shadow and warm glow, and we lingered over glasses of Tenzin’s mother’s homemade cider.  My dinner companions struck me at first as naïve and impressionable— every monastery, every person they met, and every interaction with local people awed or inspired them, it seemed.  They attempted to quiz their Nepali guide about himself through several layers of translation (from Russian to English to Nepali and back), saying, “we have been in Nepal trekking two weeks, but we don’t know any real Nepalis.”  Predictably, the attempt at conversation faltered, yet the more I reflect on this group of trekkers, the more I appreciate their unusual and sustained efforts at making connections.  Revisiting that evening through a Heideggerian lens, I wonder if their willingness to engage with everyone and everything they encountered and the sincerity of their desire to experience Nepal, uninformed and naïve though it may have been, might not have resulted in a truly authentic experience.
    The philosophy behind existential authenticity may appear hopelessly complex, but its implications for tourism study and marketing are straightforward yet rich in possibility.  If we admit that there is no objective authentic culture, that neither outsiders nor locals can make such a judgment, and we focus instead on individual authentic experience, existing mainstays of tourism marketing may prove misguided.  The shopkeeper who insists that, “this bracelet is really Tibetan. Really” might realize that her neighbor who converses and connects with customers does more business.  The tour guide offering to show his group the “real Mustang,” and its most meaningful cultural treasures, might lose out to the one who allows visitors to determine for themselves what is meaningful and seek for themselves authentic engagement with a foreign culture.
    Apple juice perhaps can be bottled, mass-marketed, and sold at a profit (though I believe it tastes best in small batches), but the existential authenticity contained in a moment of shredding apples at a warm picnic table cannot.  Experiences like those are invaluable, fleeting and individual; at best, a guide or tour might provide support for those tourists who wish to attain them.

    [1]Steiner, Carol J. and Reisinger, Yvette. “Understanding Existential Authenticity.” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 33, No. 2. Pp. 299-318.

  • Around Kagbeni

    Now that I’ve left, I thought I’d share a few pictures from my time in Kagbeni…

    View from the old fort, 16th century, across the street from the Red House Lodge where I stayed.

    View of Kagbeni from above. Photo credit Tasha Kimmet.

    Protector grandfather standing guard at the old gate to the village, now somewhere in the middle of town.

    At the top of the Golden Hill– finally made it!!

    Baby dzo (yak-cow)- my favorites.

    Library at the Kag Chode Monastery.

    Yac Donald’s Restaurant. A little bit of America in Mustang… I’m lovin’ it?

    Traveling convenience store.

    My Nepali didi-ji. You don’t need to share a language to be sisters.

    Apple juice-making day!

    Making friends with monks. Typical day in Kagbeni.

    Apple juice and family time.

    That’s all for now. See you on the other side of 40 pages of writing!

    ~

  • I Drank Yak Blood


     I drank yak blood. Really. Yesterday, after eight years of not eating red meat. The flavor had a quality surprisingly similar to raw milk, a bit salty and, of course, metallic.  It was still warm. I won’t go into details about the chewy bit that I couldn’t finish. 
    I stood at the top of a stone wall with two other Americans and a small crowd of children to watch the slaughter of three yaks from above.  The kids, none older than eight or nine, passed around fruit candies, shouted at us in shrill voices (the general belief being that if they spoke louder we would understand) and clambered onto rooftops and ledges to acquire prime seats for the show.  A woman sat behind us scraping creamy cheese off a flat stone, occasionally whacking me with a stick for blocking her sun.
    I had decided that watching this event, commonplace to life in Mustang but wholly absent from my prior experience, was something I should do.  The longer I sat above the courtyard, watching the men turn bodies into carcasses, their hands turning from brown to deep red, the more comfortable I became.  Maybe desensitized is a better word.  I have long rejected the part of my own nature that is programmed to hunt, kill and eat meat.  Now, as before, I have no desire to order a steak, but I found it valuable to acknowledge that side of myself, and humanity at large, in such a manner.
    When Tenzin, the owner of the Red House Lodge, beckoned to me, I made my way down the stairs on autopilot, having already committed myself several nights ago to trying yak blood.  “It will make you strong,” he had insisted, just as raksi(local alcohol), buckwheat, and nearly every other local product are said to do.  “You will try it, I think so.” And in the bravado of a moment I agreed.  I wasn’t about to back out later, and besides, what better way to go back to eating meat? 
    I passed through the doorway into the arena.  Tenzin’s mother and another woman were already at work in the corner turning intestines and other innards into sausages.  Someone handed me a mug with rivulets of brilliant red liquid running down the sides. I drank, but could not finish.  On my way down to the river to wash out the remainder, I slipped on the muddy steps and almost fell.  The men in the courtyard laughed and joked that I was drunk from the blood.  I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or the shot of nutrients, but I did feel jittery for quite some time after.
    That night before dinner, over cups of raksi, Tenzin and his friend lamented that they had not taken any pictures (sorry to disappoint) of me with blood smeared on my nose and teased me about falling down.  I felt I had proved my mettle to them and joined some secret boys’ club, at least temporarily.  There is nothing savage or bizarre about the process I witnessed.  Animals are butchered every day, everywhere; that is a part of life.  There is nothing disgusting or barbaric about the tradition I took part in; it made sense in its place, surrounded by others doing the same thing, with gusto.  Still, having proved myself to both the locals and to myself, it is unlikely I will choose to repeat the experience.  I am, however, glad that I did it.
    ~

  • Fair & Lovely


    [Also published at www.yourvox.org]
     When drugstores sell creams to lighten your skin, and your vagina, and women buy these things by the thousands, something is wrong.
     “Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.”
    ― Laurie Penny, Meat Market
                “Oh, your skin is so beautiful. So white!” said my Nepali friend, Sariya, placing an exaggerated emphasis on almost every word.  I looked at her, speechless.  I and many of my peers have repeatedly been the object of envy and admiration here in Nepal, simply by virtue of our fairness.  In a typical gesture, wizened Tibetan women will brush their cheeks with the backs of their fingers, exclaiming “nying jepo!” (beautiful, Tib.) or smiling to express their approval.  Ironically, thousands of Americans flood beaches and tanning salons in the hopes of attaining the same flawless caramel-colored tone that Sariya laments.  In Nepal, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, we see the standards of beauty reversed.  Fair, clear, white, light—these are the terms of beauty, and of class.
                We can trace the obsession with fairness back many centuries before colonialism and British Imperialism in this region.  Vedic culture, which originated in Northern and Northwestern India, eventually spread through the subcontinent, bringing with it a lighter-skinned Brahminic class and the foundations of a caste system that exists to this day.  According to the creation myth found in the Rigveda (the oldest of the sacred Vedic texts at the core of what we now call Hinduism, but which one Tamang taxi driver aptly termed Brahminism), the primordial man was sacrificed so that the gods could populate the earth.  They dismembered him, and from his head they created the Brahmins, the priests and scholars; from his arms they formed the nobles and warriors; from his legs the merchants and traders were made, and from his feet the servants.
                In the intervening centuries, caste (far more complex than the four sections of the primordial man’s body) and race have become somewhat convoluted.  “Aryan” Brahmins from the Notrth, imposing their religious and social order on Southern, darker-skinned peoples, have often followed racial and cultural prejudice in assigning caste designations.  The European preoccupation with fair-skinned beauty that arrived with the East India Company and subsequent British colonialism in the seventeenth century only served to reinforce existing structures of race and power.  One might argue that whiteness, as a defining attribute of the new ruling class, acquired even greater value than before.  In Nepal, the history of the caste system is even more complicated, but the resulting standards of beauty are similar.  Here, in preparation for a wedding, beauty salons will coat the bride’s face with layers of lightening make-up to accomplish a garish (or beautiful, depending on your perspective) final product.
                With many Indians and Southeast Asians placing such a premium on fairness, it should come as no surprise that they would take to easy and “safe” skin-lightening options.  In 1975, Fair & Lovely launched their newly developed “fairness enhancing” formula, and finally “Indian women found hope in a tube.”  On Fair & Lovely’s website, the company’s entire illustrious history, from “The Early Years” to the present day is narrated.  The 1980s and 1990s, for instance, saw shifting paradigms “as women started to take charge of their love life.” Fair & Lovely, of course, “supported her every step of the way by giving her a never before fair and beautiful look.”  Analysts expect that fairness products will become a $10 billion industry by 2015.
                Today, Fair & Lovely hardly stands alone; Garnier, Dove, Vaseline, and many other brands offer their own “skin-lightening,” “anti-tan” and “fairness enhancing” products.  Now men, too, can achieve the fair look they always desired, but were too embarrassed to seek out—a legitimately revolutionary development in the Asian beauty market, and hugely profitable.  And now, thanks to Eva Beauty, women’s labia can be as fair and beautiful as their faces.  Fair & Lovely claims that their formula, based on the lightening effects of Niacinamide, or Vitamin B3, is complete safe.  At the very least, bleach does not appear on the ingredients lists of these products, as it purportedly does in some (unsubstantiated).  However, uneven application of skin-lightening creams and lotions results in blotchy, chronically dry and unhealthy skin.  As young women form a large portion of the consumer base—12 to 14-year-olds made up 13% of the market in 2008, according to one survey—customers will suffer these effects from an unfortunately early age.
                Since 2003, the Fair & Lovely Foundation has offered scholarships to girls, working towards economic and social female empowerment. Their entire marketing strategy and self-representation centers around this rhetoric of helping women realize their dreams.  Reading through these advertising materials and information about the foundation, I found that I had to confront my own prejudices, which were affecting my analysis of the skin-lightening phenomenon.  This is not the first time I have had the experience of being coveted for my skin color, but it never fails to make me uncomfortable, and angry.  Why do these fairness products seem so bizarre to me, while America’s tanning obsession dos not? It is probably because I am more accustomed to the latter, but also because skin does become darker in nature, while the reverse is almost never true.  Compared to women in America who undergo plastic surgery to make their sexual organs more symmetrical, is Eva Beauty really so shocking?  No more shocking, no more disturbing, but Eva Beauty is symptomatic of an entire set of social issues; these issues of caste, inequality, and the subjugation of women to impossible standards of beauty are, in my opinion, extremely problematic.  Fair & Lovely has a foundation aimed at empowering women; have I judged it too harshly?  Fair & Lovely may “support” women to achieve their dreams, but it does so by selling their beauty back to them, after reinforcing the status quo and teaching girls to believe that fair is lovely and light is superior.  I stand by my initial reaction: the skin-lightening industry is damaging; marketing capitalizes on deeply engrained social values and strengthens the association of fairness with success, rather than challenging it.
    ~

  • When Cultural Sensitivity is Overrated and Mosquitoes Should Be Killed

    “Never step over people or tables. Don’t put books on the floor. Never point your feet at someone.” While we sat on cushions around the edges of the room, our Tibetan instructors listed for us the dos and don’ts of their culture.  “Don’t kill bugs; in Buddhism, you should show respect for all sentient beings.”  Girls should never reveal shoulders, knees or cleavage. Men and women shouldn’t touch. Never wear clothing inside out.  Presentation and cleanliness are very important to Tibetans. If you don’t follow these cultural guidelines, “you might make your families feel uncomfortable or offended.”

    My first night with my Tibetan homestay family, my homestay father zealously attacked several bu, bugs, crawling along the wall.  My second night, my homestay sister entered the room wearing pajama shorts and an inside-out T-shirt.  Day three, my homestay father wandered around with no shirt on, and day four my homestay mother wore her chuba (traditional Tibetan dress) with no shirt underneath it, revealing both cleavage and shoulders.  Their attitude, casual at all times, did not indicate any concern for the aforementioned cultural norms.

     I observed these incongruities with amusement.  My family’s behavior, so perfectly opposite from what my teachers had led me to expect, illustrates the limitations of cultural sensitivity.  In the documentary film, “Dalai Lama Renaissance,” the Dalai Lama said, “Sometimes I really find difficult dialogue with mosquito and my pain.  First mosquito come, sometimes I give blood, the second come, then the third, then difficult.”  If even the Dalai Lama feels the urge to kill mosquitoes, then we should hardly be surprised that my homestay father, an average lay Buddhist, might do the same.  The tendency to show an exaggerated amount of respect towards cultural practices not our own, to bow and scrape, even, to what we[1]don’t understand is in my opinion a little bit silly.

    Undoubtedly, our teachers’ advice proved relevant for many of my peers, but I wonder if the flood of instructions ultimately serves anyone well.  “You will make mistakes,” they concluded, “but don’t worry—Tibetans love to laugh, and they don’t hold grudges!” If breaking the rules will result in laughter, are we better off forgetting them? No; they still teach us a lot about another culture.  Nonetheless, as we worry about political correctness, cultural sensitivity and respect, I think we would be well served to not take any of it too seriously.

    The view from my roof in Bouddha!
    [1] By we I mean self-aware Americans, SIT students, anthropologists, etc…