Touring the consumption of the Other: Imaginaries of authenticity in the Himalayas and beyond

Introduction

Shangri-La seems to be caught between being a utopia and a brand name, between being a tourist destination and the goal of spiritual pilgrimage, between a museum or a theme park and a political and spiritual summons. (Bishop, 2000: 15)

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to civilization? (Freud, 1961: 38)

The argument here proceeds from the recognition that touring – be it in the form of tourism, pilgrimage or ethnography – begins at home. This is already implied in the etymology of ‘tour’, derived from the Latin tornare and the Greek tornos and meaning to circle or move around a central point or axis, usually the place called home. Yet ‘home’ is a contested concept in a global age in which ‘dwelling in mobilities’ (Clifford, 1997) and being on the move have become central features of many contemporary societies (Appadurai, 1996; Bauman, 1998; Bielsa et al., 2014; Cohen et al., 2015; Cresswell, 2006; Forsey, 2015; Urry, 2007). Home for the highly mobile is taken here, then, to refer not so much a specific place, as a socio-political and economic configuration, a set of conditions that facilitate mobile life. It is from this power-concentrated positionality that Western travellers venture outwards in search of places and states imagined to be more authentic than those at home.

If contemporary touring, like consumption more generally, is exercised from within the cultural logic of late capitalism, this raises the question, ‘To what degree is stepping out actually possible for these globally mobile subjects?’ Neo-Marxian and critical psychoanalytic perspectives contend that tourist consumers remain locked into modern imaginaries that prohibit true access to the cultural Other. What is more, global tourism as an extension of neoliberal globalisation has been argued to manifest an unconscious resolve to subsume multiple ‘minor realities’ into a Western-centric monoreality (Bruner, 1991; Hage, 2012; MacCannell, 2011; Urry, 2002). Paradoxically then, tourism and the quest for authenticity are seen as destroying the very object it desires – the Other. To be sure, this is a powerful line of reasoning and one that applies to tourism in the Himalayas and other peripheral destinations. Yet, the search for authenticity also reveals a critically reflexive meta-commentary on Western modernity and consumer culture. Encounters with remote Himalayan environments and less consumerist cultures showed Western travellers that other ways of living and consuming are possible.

After a brief overview of the research informing this analysis, the first section discusses the Himalayas as a place symbolising modern ideals of authenticity, spirituality and wild nature. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations, second, it is shown how travellers desire transformative experiences in places and with people perceived as authentic. While the search for authenticity is in part driven by nostalgic attitudes and a desire for inner-transformation, it is often also a search for social distinction that manifests a strong consumerist imperative. Authenticity is presented here as a moral concept emerging from the ‘subjective turn’ in modern Western culture and the Romantic ethos that underpins contemporary consumer culture (Campbell, 1987; Sassatelli, 2007; Taylor, 2007). The third section examines some of the specific experiences and performances that ‘authenticate’ Himalayan landscapes, cultures and travellers who experience or consume them. Special attention will be paid throughout to geographical imaginaries of the Himalayas as a boundary zone located beyond the malaises of modernity. The article will finish with some critical reflections on touring consumption and the quest for authenticity.

Research background and context

The findings and interpretations presented here are based on a mobile, multi-sited ethnography carried out by the author in the first half of 2011, in the Himalayan region. Focusing primarily on travellers from Western societies, interviews and participant observation were conducted in between a number of sites, including the Kathmandu Valley and Pokhara in Nepal and Dharamsala, Darjeeling and Sikkim in northeast India. Interviews and conversations often took place in guesthouses, cafes and restaurants, and along well-established hiking routes in the Annapurna Mountain Sanctuary in central Nepal and the Gocha-La trek to the base of Kanchenjunga Mountain in Sikkim. The author also accompanied travellers on shorter walks and hikes and on bus, train and shared jeeps rides in the region.

Semi-structured interviews with former or anticipated Himalayan travellers were also conducted in Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand, to gain insights into past and future travel experiences. Email communication was maintained with these and other participants throughout the research, which as a result continued to evolve beyond the fieldwork period. Fieldwork data and interviews were triangulated with semiotic and discourse analysis of films, guidebooks, travel websites and literature related to the Himalayas. All interviews were conducted in English, although in numerous cases European travellers who spoke English to varying degrees as a second language were encountered, raising certain hermeneutic issues regarding both linguistic and cultural translation. While in a sense unavoidable, the author sought to clarify meanings by asking follow-up questions during interviews and in post facto emails.

The research, which as a whole formed a doctoral thesis, aimed to explore the intersections of tourism and pilgrimage in the Himalayas, with a particular focus on contemporary religiosity. Because the participants typically overwhelmed the categories of tourists or pilgrims as ‘ideal types’ (Olsen, 2010), reflecting instead more general mobile lifestyles (Cohen, 2011; Cohen et al., 2015; Elliott and Urry, 2010), I refer to them simply as ‘travellers’. The other reason for this is ‘travelling’, how they commonly described what they were doing in Nepal, India and elsewhere. Moreover, the notion of being a ‘traveller’ and travelling the world, as will be shown, is also closely related to the search for authenticity.

Authentic nature-culture: The Himalayas as a symbolic landscape

Travellers in Nepal and Northern India often expressed a set of projections and contrasting attitudes that were typically critical of Western culture and life at home, while often demonstrating positive, yet uncritical appraisal for people and places perceived as exotic, non-modern and natural. Set against the world of disenchanted modernity, the Himalayas have long been represented as a sacred landscape and a spiritual utopia (Bishop, 1989; Klieger, 1992; Kolås, 2004; Mercille, 2005; Schell, 2000; Singh, 2004, 2005). Such representations emanate from the literal and symbolic geography of the region, particularly its peripheral location from major urban centres and also the fact that it is home to the highest mountains on earth.

Mountains have been places of religious significance and pilgrimage for many cultures around the world (Cooper, 1997; Eliade, 1996). Frequently lying in remote areas and requiring long journeys from the profane life of villages or towns, mountains have been represented in mythologies as the sacred domains of gods and spirits. As Tuan (2001) observes, across cultures peripheral geographic locations – especially mountains – often symbolise anti-structure and timelessness: ‘In Taoist lore, timeless paradises are located myriad miles from any known human settlement’, while ‘[t]he European mind also envisions atemporal Isles of the Blest, Edens, and Utopias in remote and inaccessible places’ (p. 122). Coinciding with media images that portray the region as a place of mystery and enchantment, in interviews with travellers, there was a tendency to refer to the Himalayas as ‘another world’.

This perception of Other-worldliness pertains not only to the Himalayas but to India and Asia more generally and other non-Western societies and remote areas around the globe (Picard and Giovine, 2014; Stasch, 2014). This modern, geographical imaginary reflects a longstanding set of oppositions found in the discourse of the ‘West and the rest’, orient and occident (Said, 1978) and an imagined ‘Great Divide’ separating moderns and non-moderns (Latour, 1993). Drawing on Barthes’ notion of cultural mythologies, Salazar (2012) observes how tourist imaginaries are often structured in ways that ‘represent the world in paradigmatically linked binominals’ such as nature–culture, here–there and authentic–inauthentic (p. 864). Such imaginaries were observed in the motivations, expectations and experiences of contemporary travellers who visit the Himalayas. For these actors, who were predominantly from university-educated, middle-class backgrounds, the Himalayas symbolised a place of sublime nature and spiritual enlightenment. It is no coincidence that this is how the region and India, more generally, are represented in films. Travellers often cited films that informed their images, such as Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Kundun (1997), The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and Eat, Pray, Love (2010), as well as in travel literature, guidebooks and websites such as Lonely Planet (Howard, 2012).

Analysing the connections between films and frontier tourism, Frost (2010) demonstrates how travelling to remote wilderness areas is often based on an implicit promise. The promise is that through such travels, the visitor will have profound life-changing experiences by encountering people and places imagined to be standing outside of modernity. Himalayan travel held just such a promise, making it similar to other frontier destinations such as Machu Picchu (Arellano, 2004), the Australian outback (Frost, 2010; Narayanan and Macbeth, 2009) and Antarctica (Picard and Zuev, 2014). Represented in popular media and marketed by the tourism industry as being pure and untouched, such places function as symbolic, therapeutic landscapes (Hoyez, 2007). This nostalgic attitude expresses what Bruner (1991) calls the ‘master narrative’ of tourism, in which ‘civilized persons go on tour to experience the primitive, the exotic, the erotic, and the Other, in order to recover their origin, an original state seen as pure and as yet not polluted by European civilization’ (p. 240). One Himalayan traveller who expressed such anti-modern sentiments was in fact the very first person I met upon my arrival in Kathmandu.

‘Roads destroy everything!’

My encounter with Max took place in the dim, candlelit restaurant located on the first floor of the Hotel Vajra in Kathmandu. As I waited for my dhal bat (lentil curry, a Himalayan staple) to arrive, a lone, grey-haired man who appeared to be in his mid-60 s sat down at the table next to mine. Despite his age, he appeared healthy and vigorous, with a strong and serious expression offset slightly by mischievous look in his bright blue eyes. Tapping his foot to the traditional Indian music playing, he appeared perfectly at ease, as if he was a regular not only to the restaurant but to this part of the world. We made some light conversation and I asked whether he was travelling alone. He said indeed he was and would be leaving the following morning. Judging by his sturdy hiking boots, I guessed he was going trekking and asked where he was headed.

‘I’ll be catching a ride north from Kathmandu. The drive will take about eight hours. From there, it’s a ten day hike to the village I’m going to. You see, I’m an anthropologist’, he explained in a thick German accent. Max ordered steamed momos (dumplings) and a large bottle of Hummingbird Ale. Waiting for our meals to arrive, he explained how he had been doing research in Nepal for the past 45 years. He spoke nostalgically of how ‘magical’ Kathmandu was in the early days before electricity, cars and roads, none of which had arrived to the former kingdom until the early 1960s:

Kathmandu was magical then. No electricity, the whole city lit by candles and lanterns at night. Not a single car, well except for the king – he had the only car in Nepal – but no roads. It was truly amazing. Of course it’s all changed now. This is your first trip, right? Unfortunately you will never know how it was.

What I heard from Max was part of the same discourse of nostalgia and authenticity I was to hear throughout my fieldwork in Nepal and Northern India. This was consistent with media representations and the binomial imaginary that celebrates remote places such as the Himalayas as being in a natural, unchanged state. Nostalgia for an idealised, natural and authentic past thus expresses a meta-critique of modernity (Frow, 1991; MacCannell, 1976; Turner, 1987), which for Max was symbolised by modern infrastructure such as electricity, roads and automobiles. The common feature of these modern technologies is that they facilitate connectivity and allow for the increased and accelerated movement of people, objects, information and energy (Dalakoglou and Harvey, 2012; Hannam et al., 2006; Virilio, 2006). Paradoxically then, it is the same technological conditions that make Himalayan travel and global mobility (including Max’s) possible that contribute to the loss of their alleged authenticity.

Asking Max what exactly he researches in Nepal, he explained that he ‘works on’ several hill tribes, although it was unclear in what aspects. What he did emphasise was the remoteness of the villages he goes to and how they could only be reached on foot. He then spoke of the emptying out of the villages as increasing numbers of rural Nepalese migrated either to ‘this terrible, overcrowded capital’ (Kathmandu) or else sought dubious opportunities abroad, usually in the Middle East or Malaysia. In these places, he explained, they are typically conned and exploited, and eventually return to Nepal worse off than when they left. ‘Emigration is the single biggest issue facing Nepal in the next thirty years’, declared Max. Eventually he asked about my plans and the nature of my research. I explained how I was interested in the intersections of pilgrimage and tourism in the Himalayas and what such travel might say about contemporary society. After Kathmandu, I said I was heading to Pokhara, a popular base for trekking, yoga and meditation retreats, and later to Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim in India. Max listened quietly and intently. Squinting his sharp blue eyes, he appeared to be turning my words over deeply in his mind. After finishing my explanation, he paused for a moment, staring into the flame of the candle on the table, before looking me directly in the eyes. ‘May I make a suggestion?’ he asked solemnly:

Don’t go to Pokhara. You will find absolutely nothing there. The tradition is lost and the people don’t know who they are. They have lost their identity, their collective identity. They sold it long ago. Go there if you want to eat chowmein and swim in the lake! [volume rises and bangs his hand on the table] But don’t expect to find anything interesting!

‘So, where is Shangri La?’ I asked ironically. ‘Ha! There is no Shangri La, at least not anymore. But you can get close if you go as far from the roads as possible’, he replied, continuing,

You should go to the high jungle of West Nepal. There are peoples there that few, if any, westerners have ever seen. They still have their tradition, for now anyway. They play very interesting ritual music on unique instruments. You should go to west Nepal. There you can find something interesting.

Authentic by proxy: Social distinction and the consumption of global mobility

As anyone who has travelled knows, there is a common tendency among travellers to share stories and compare experiences. In India and Nepal, I observed how these stories often revolved around not only how much one had travelled but how far off the beaten track one had been. Although the Himalayan region may seem an adventurous destination, from the level of tourist infrastructure and visitor numbers, it is clearly not the frontier destination it once was. While there was a sense of communitas (Turner, 1973) among Himalayan travellers as quasi-pilgrims, especially during multi-day treks and volunteer work they sometimes participated in, they often engaged in games of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984).

Distinction in this case was based not solely on the number of countries visited, but how geographically and culturally distant they were and how intimately they had been experienced. On the rooftop terrace of a guesthouse in Darjeeling with a magnificent view of Kangchenjunga, the earth’s third highest mountain, I joined a conversation with four other travellers. A young French Canadian woman named Jenna vividly described her many adventures in places like Iran, Burma and Azerbaijan. She told us how she had been adopted by a family in a remote village in Pakistan while travelling on her own in the war torn country. She explained how moved she was by the family’s hospitality, how they treated her like a daughter and ‘didn’t even ask for any money’. The others tried to interject with tales of their own adventures, but Jenna continually asserted her ‘authentic traveller’ status with better stories.

If as Zhu (2012: 1500) argues, authenticity is neither subjective or objective but performative, this makes it social and relational. The experience of being immersed in places that carry an aura of authenticity (Rickly-Boyd, 2012) – whether in terms of nature or culture, or as in the case of the Himalayas a fusion of both – facilitates a dual process of ‘authentication’ (Cohen and Cohen, 2012). Through intimate and prolonged encounters with Otherness, a subjective sense of existential authenticity becomes activated in travellers such as Jenna. The process is analogous to what early anthropologist James Frazer (2009 [1922]) called the ‘law of contagion’, the idea that a magical bond is established when people come into contact with objects of particular cultural significance.

By travelling to places that carry strong symbolic value in Western culture, such as the Himalayas, we can say that authenticity as a form of social distinction is gained by ‘proxy’ (Bourdieu, 2008: 50). Here, the uneven social distribution of global mobility allows for the transfer of economic capital into status-signalling cultural capital. Yet because an excess of touring options leads to an inflation of the market, distinguishing oneself as an ‘authentic traveller’ as opposed to a ‘mere tourist’ has become more difficult in the 21st century. The search for authenticity is thus taking travellers to ever greater lengths in a globalising world with fewer and fewer places ‘where no roads go’. Along with the cultural capital generated from visiting such imagined authentic places, a value is also placed on the practical knowledge and abilities required to reach and navigate them.

Like other global travellers, Jenna demonstrated she was confident and competent enough to travel the world on her own; she presented herself as a cosmopolitan citizen who calls the whole world a ‘global abode’ (Germann Molz, 2005, 2008). By deciding for herself where to go and how to live, her mobile, individualised life reflects two values that are central to consumer culture – choice and change. Charles Taylor (2007) has gone so far as to call the cultural history of the West since the 1960s the ‘age of authenticity’ (pp. 473–504), in which the chief value is above all the freedom to choose for oneself. Authenticity, writes Taylor (1991), ‘is itself an idea of freedom; it involves finding the design of my life myself, against the demands of external conformity’ (pp. 67–68). It is in the context of the modern subjective turn from traditional supra-self orders to individual choice that both the age of authenticity and consumerism emerge (Heelas et al., 1996; Taylor, 1989). These cultural developments also signal the beginning of what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) call ‘institutional individualization’, the modern, secular imperative to lead a life of one’s own.

In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Campbell (1987) makes a compelling case for the elective affinities between consumer capitalism and a romantic self that longs for authenticity and differentiation. Like romanticism, consumption is driven by daydreams and fantasies related to questions of identity. And yet, because the production of consumption generates continuous ‘losses in meaning’, consumer desires remain ever unsatisfied. As Bauman (2007) observes, ‘The life of a consumer, the consuming life, is not about acquiring and possessing. It is instead, first and foremost, about being on the move’ (p. 98). Both the age of authenticity and consumerism centre on a restless individualism and the value of choice in an ever-changing market of consumable objects and experiences. They are also rooted in a modern social imaginary in which acquiring and building up a customised lifestyle through such things are meant to facilitate happiness, self-improvement and social distinction (Featherstone, 1987).

According to anti-consumerist rhetoric, the paradox of consumerism is that rather than satisfy desires, it typically leads to disappointment, frustration and new desires (Baudrillard, 1997; Bell, 1978; Featherstone, 1990; Humphery, 2010; Sassatelli, 2007). Bauman reflects on the ‘grazing behaviour’ inherent in what he calls the ‘tourist syndrome’ he sees characterising life in liquid modernity (in Franklin, 2003). As consumers, tourists seek experiences ‘unlike the experiences they lived through before, unlike everything else they knew; untried tastes, un-experienced sensations. But sensations are un-experienced and tastes only untried only once’ (p. 208). This reflects Urry’s (2002) observation that tourists are essentially consumers of sensations (especially the visual), as well as Illouz’s (2009) thesis that the body, emotions and imagination are all thoroughly mobilised and implicated by the volatile desires and experiences of consumption. The seduction of difference (Picard and Giovine, 2014) in tourist consumption is thus as bodily and affective as it is cognitive and discursive.

Modern nostalgia and the relational politics of travel

As my fieldwork and other empirical research demonstrate, the imaginary of the Great Divide continues to be held by many travellers from Western countries and remains a dominant theme in the discourse of authenticity. Potter (2010) summarises the basic, authentic–inauthentic dichotomy as follows:

Modern society is alienating, while primitive societies promise a return to our lost unity and natural wholeness, where we can avoid the status competition, and raw commercialization of society and embed ourselves in a true community based on simple, non-exploitative relationships. In this view, the search for lost authenticity is essentially an exercise in retrieval, as we harken back to our pre-modern past. (p. 63)

Max is not the only anthropologist to critically observe immense transformations as Nepal opened for tourist business. Sherry Ortner (2001) describes dramatic changes to the Solu Khumbu region surrounding Mount Everest in Eastern Nepal, where she returned to over the course of 40+ years of fieldwork. Like Max, Ortner (2001) recalls how in the early 1960s she only encountered a handful of foreigners, whereas by the 1970s she wrote in her fieldnotes, ‘There were a million tourists. Both the trail and Lukla itself were awful, essentially polluted with tourists’ (p. 199). This sounded like something the Lévi-Straus of Tristes Tropiques or Max, my dinner companion, might say. Ortner (2006) is well aware of the irony of her statement, however, for this is the same anthropologist who describes authenticity as ‘another problematic term, insofar as it seems to presume a naïve belief in cultural purity, in untouched cultures whose histories are uncontaminated by those of their neighbours or of the West’ (p. 45).

However critical of modernity anthropologists or world travellers may be, it is interesting how they generally do not see themselves as playing an active role in it. Or if they do, they do not let it get in the way of their individual desires. For instance, I interviewed a middle-aged New Zealander named Bo, a natural healer who was making a first trip to Nepal. Through a website, she had booked a multi-day trek in the Annapurna Mountain Sanctuary above Pokhara, where she would also stay an extra week to do yoga and relax. As much as Himalayan vistas and physical challenge of high-altitude trekking, Bo looked forward to intimate experiences with the local people whom she would be staying with in ‘teahouses’ along the way. Curious about my ‘academic’ opinion, as most travellers I spoke with were, she asked what I thought of such pursuits. I gently suggested that tourism is somewhat paradoxical in that visiting such places may result, for better or worse, in changing them. The irony was not lost on Bo: ‘I see that’, she said, ‘by going there we contribute to the destruction. But I really want to meet those people and see how they live while there is still the chance … before these places disappear’. Asking what she meant by ‘these places’, she replied,

You know, places where people live really differently, places where people still have deep spiritual connections to the environment. I think we have lost this, which is really sad, but it’s good to know there are at least people somewhere that still live this way.

As Reader (2013) notes, far from being passive, pilgrims (or in this case, travellers) are often ‘dynamic agents in the shaping of pilgrimages, seeking to do this in ways that benefit their own interests and enhance their own status’ (p. 116). In this sense, travellers are not simply consumers but also producers who actively participate in the interrelated process Ritzer (2014) terms ‘prosumption’. Travellers ‘prosume’ by participating in the shaping of mobile infrastructures and influencing the types of entertainment, activities, comforts and commodities available at travel sites (Reader, 2013). Dharamsala offers a fine example of a site of prosumption, as do other Himalayan hill stations such as Shimla, Darjeeling and Ladakh, and other traveller enclaves such as Pokhara and the Thamel and Boudhanath districts of Kathmandu. And yet, while espresso and Wi-Fi were noticeably in demand in these places, travellers at the same time sought authentic experiences. Travel performances in the Himalayas, combining tourism, pilgrimage and lifestyle mobilities, may be described as a form of ‘complex leisure’ (Kjølsrød, 2009).

Touring the consumption of the Other

In Kathmandu, I encountered a French traveller named Victor at Swayambhunath, known in tourist guidebooks as the Monkey Temple. Having climbed an endless set of stairs, I bought a bottle of water and wandered around the large hilltop complex made up of small shrines, courtyards crisscrossed by colourful prayer flags, all of which centred around a great stupa. The visitors at Swayambhunath were an eclectic group: Buddhist monks in maroon robes, lay devotees reciting prayers and lighting incense in front of Hindu and Buddhist divinities, and foreigners from a range of countries. Many were in organised tour groups, meandering around the temple complex, taking pictures and surveying the views of the Kathmandu Valley and the looming Himalayas. I soon met Victor, who looked to be in his 30 s. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and gazing out over Kathmandu, his tanned, unshaven face marked a look of utter satisfaction.

‘Having a good trip?’ I asked. Turning to me, he smiled, looked back across the valley and said, ‘I love Nepal. This is my first trip, but it definitely won’t be my last’. Asking what he liked so much, he replied,

The nature, the mountains, it’s so beautiful, so powerful … and the people, they are amazing. The way they live, I mean, it’s just amazing! They live very spiritual lives. Not like in a religious way, though. They just live simply, with nature, surrounded by giant mountains. It’s incredible!

Heidegger celebrates simple, pre-modern technology because it facilitates a ‘fundamental attunement’ (Grundstimmung) necessary for human beings to dwell ‘authentically’. The calculating, distancing effect of modern technology, on the other hand, leads to an inauthentic existence in which subjects become ‘forgetful of being’ (Heidegger, 1977). By growing their own food, collecting water from glacial streams and making candles to light their modest dwellings, Himalayan villagers were perceived by visitors from highly technologised societies to be living in a more originary, authentic relation to nature. Attuned to the natural cycles of their high-altitude environments, the largely self-sufficient villagers could hardly afford to be forgetful of being. For Western travellers, encountering less technologically mediated forms of life often took on spiritual dimensions. Asking Victor about his impression that Himalayan villagers live ‘very spiritual lives’, he explained,

Their way of life is so pure, it’s so connected to the environment. In a way, they live very simply, but at the same time, their life is so deep … this is what I mean by spiritual. I mean, they’re Buddhist or Hindu or whatever, but it’s the way they live that is spiritual. Here is a different world. At home in France, it’s all fast paced, globalisation, money, stress … over here, it’s more spiritual, you know. In the villages in the mountains, they have very little, but actually they have everything. They don’t need all the extra stuff. They’re happier without it. They’re more free.

Concluding remarks

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (1999) summarises the same binominal conception of authenticity I found running through the discourse of Himalayan travel:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Despite choice and ‘self-determining freedom’ being core values of consumer culture, interestingly, it is those who consume less (and thus must produce more), who have less choice who are perceived as freer and more authentic. Travellers such as Max, Victor and John alluded to romantic ideals of unalienated labour by praising the villagers who lived and worked directly for their subsistence in harmonious, non-exploitative relationships with nature and one another. Even more than the religious traditions the Himalayan region is known for, it was in the everyday practices of growing their own food, collecting water and making candles that led travellers to deem these people more spiritual and authentic human beings.

The irony of the search for authenticity, as noted by neo-Marxian authors like MacCannell, Bruner, Urry and others, is that like a savannah fire, it consumes and destroys the very object it searches for. Contrary to the popular belief in the pedagogical value of tourism, it is argued that in touristic encounters it is the natives who are transformed more than tourists. Because tourists perceptions are structured by the symbolic systems of Western culture, they allegedly never gain access to the reality of the toured place and remain locked in the imaginary. Unknown to them, tourists are said to be driven by an imperialist nostalgia for what the West has previously destroyed and finds lacking in itself. Tourism, according to this critical perspective, represents nothing less than capitalist modernity’s will to dominate and reproduce itself on a planetary scale (MacCannell, 2011).

For all its merit, this totalising vision fails to see the phenomenon from other angles. While tourism must be approached critically, meaningful encounters with foreign lifeworlds also allow many Western travellers to reflect critically on the deficiencies of their own societies, especially consumerism. Returning to this article’s departure point, this is all to say that the whole phenomenon of travel – be it tourism, pilgrimage or ethnography – begins at home. The search for authenticity illustrates a relational politics between the ‘West and the rest’, as well as the West’s attempt to reconcile its own destructive tendencies and fractured identity. As we have seen in the interviews presented here, many travellers were highly critical of Western culture and idealised people of the Himalayan region and other non-Western societies. People in these places were seen not only as ‘exotic others’ but also as ‘superior others’ – superior by virtue of leading less consumerist, more sustainable and spiritually richer lives. This eco-utopian imaginary reveals a metacultural critique of late modern life that keeps open the possibility of understanding reality as multiple, and thus opens spaces for living and consuming differently. Hopeful as this sounds, the search for authenticity has also been shown to be a search for social distinction and the conspicuous consumption of uneven and ultimately unsustainable global mobility. It is from this dialectical tensionality that the quest for authenticity will continue.