Settling the terror of your mind with the deities: About fear, anxiety, inherent chaos and self-doubt in hind kush-himalaya expeditions and associated research

Abstract

The Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) area is not your average holiday location; it still lacks the big commercial tourist buses and hotel franchises as well as pretty ocean party beaches with high waves for surfing. But it still can feature some ‘dudes’, mostly from abroad; many of them are naïve in the sense that they do not really know, prepare for, or truly can handle and grasp the deep culture and spiritual connection of the region with ‘Mother Earth’ (see for instance Chopel 2014; Karmay and Watt 2007; Knott 2016). That’s because the real issues in HKH are not even the very high and overwhelming mountains - the roof of the world - surrounded by a vast foreland, hinterland and breathtaking water systems of relevance to global mankind (walking and operating in such a landscape remains to be a gratifying experience; Ohmori 1994; Bonington 2016). Instead it is the associated embedded and complex human culture that it creates and attracted, and which is so ‘foreign’ to us westerners; we are always in a learning situation there (Herzog 1997; Messner 1998; Bonington 2016). HKH has over 150 languages and dialects spoken in its landscapes and remote valleys (Whelpton 2005). Many distinct religions are found there (Lama 2012). Outsiders, like westerners, are somewhat tolerated there, dealt with and treated like certain ‘deities’ (a certain type of outside god) that are better left untouched, ignored but treated with some respect. And thus the locals remain indifferent to them; this makes for a peculiar and convenient blend of uttermost ignorance and helpfulness. Nowadays this is spiced up with flavors of globalization (see Baumgartner 2015 for international mountaineering tourism start-up companies). However, the outsiders are not really part of the intimate fabric and deep culture of the wider mountain landscape and its native inhabitants. It’s unlikely though that without guidance and pointers outsiders will fully see and understand the depth of the local fabric (e.g. Lama 2012).