11 The cultural effects of trekking We wait on a path in the Hinku Valley as another weather-battered group creaks

Box 8.11 The cultural effects of trekking We wait on a path in the Hinku Valley as another weather-battered group creaks

towards us from Mera, one of Nepal’s 20,000 feet trekking mountains. Their strained, peeling faces contrast with their porters’ clear complexions and bored expressions. One scabby Lancastrian in hi-tech gear gasps through wind-cracked lips, ‘It’s amazing. But now I’m shattered; I’m emotionally and physically drained.’

13111 Twenty over-burdened, under-clad porters rush past, anxious that nothing should interrupt their journey home to the comfort of a wood fire. It is just as well they hurried away, as they might not have cared for the parting words of one of our number . . . ‘They have to learn,’ he said ‘They can’t keep chopping down trees.’

His remarks epitomised one of the chief ambiguities in what has come to be known as ‘sustainable tourism’. (Gordon-Walker, 1993)

After he [Sir Edmund Hillary] had climbed and succeeded, he was so grateful to the Sherpas because without them he couldn’t have done it. He wanted to do some- thing . . . and decided that what these people needed were schools. After the school had been built, as elsewhere in Nepal, governmental authorities took over. They wanted to use the schools to homogenise the country’s diverse ethnic communities. So they’re using the Hillary schools to teach the Sherpa children Hindu ways and Nepali, and English and Mathematics as well, so that they can serve the tourists and bring tourist currency to the country.

In these schools they teach nothing about the Sherpa–Tibetan culture – and nothing about their own 1,200 year old written language, which is classical Tibetan, of course. Most of the Sherpa children growing up in Kathmandu . . . do not learn

a word of Sherpa. If you get off the aeroplane at Lukla, . . . you are met by a whole group of youngsters who speak ‘Hillary School English’ to serve you. Over the years they have been completely incorporated into the tourist economy. Most of the younger inhabitants of this area don’t know how to run their farm any more.

(Kvalöy, 1993) Younger Sherpa men, of all Nepalis, are the most ‘hip’. They dress in expensive

jeans, tracksuits, baseball caps. They have Walkmans, tend to speak good English and smoke designer cigarettes. The women, however, have on the whole kept up the traditional – and hard – way of life . . .

Western influence, which followed expeditions to Everest . . . has greatly affected the Sherpas’ way of life. Schools, hospitals and clinics, postal services, air trans- port and radio communication changed a semi-nomadic life to one much more dependent on tourism, trekking and expeditions.

(Klatchko, 1991)

246 • ‘Hosts’ and destinations

impacts of trekkers upon local populations. On the basis of his observations of trekking in Thailand (1974 and 1989), Erik Cohen modified the idea of staged authenticity iden- tified by MacCannell (1973, 1976) into the idea of communicative staging (see Box 3.7). Central to this debate has been the way in which local populations adapt to tourism. The last example cited in Box 8.11 particularly reflects the notion of transculturation in its description of those manifestations of First World influence which have been ‘selected’ for use by the younger Sherpa men.

One advantage of the concept of transculturation is that it allows us to explore possi- bilities that lie beyond the often repeated, even slavish, charge that tourism distorts, disrupts and bastardises Third World cultures. In some instances this is, of course, exactly what happens, especially where the power of the tourism industry is intense, as described in the next few pages. Indeed, these problems are also common features of trekking, as illustrated in the UK Tourism Concern’s campaign entitled Trekking wrongs: porters’ rights (2002a). But it is a view that debars us from considering how the visited actually adapt and borrow from cultural practices and in turn modify their own cultural practices or ways of making a living, even in circumstances where their power is differentially distributed.

Tribal peoples and zooification

Survival International, an INGO which supports indigenous groups, has in recent years adopted the term ‘tribal peoples’, reflecting their representation of people who live by tribal norms, customs and practices rather than those of mainstream society. The term indigenous groups includes tribal peoples, while the term tribal peoples excludes members of indigenous groups who live by the norms and practices of mainstream society. In the tourism industry not all host communities are tribal peoples but tribal peoples which have had contact with the ‘civilisation’ of the First World are potential host communities. This chapter has already cited a number of examples of tribal peoples and their interaction with the tourist industry: the Maya, the Choco and Kuna, the Sherpas, and the Maasai. This section highlights one particular point about their expe- rience as ‘hosts’ in the tourism industry: namely, their treatment as objects to be viewed,

a process which ‘forces Indigenous Peoples to become showcases and “human museum exhibits”’ (World Council of Churches, 2002) and which might be called the ‘zooifi- cation’ of tribal peoples.