Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024
Project Website | Symposium Report | Exhibition Review | Book Chapter | YouTube Channel | Publisher's Website
Other Everests is a new interdisciplinary network that takes as its starting point the centenary of the post-war British Everest campaigns of 1921-1924. It will bring together international scholars, archivists, curators, learned and professional societies and the UK mountaineering community to critically assess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and to re-evaluate the symbolic, political and cultural status of Everest in the contemporary world.
Project Website | Symposium Report | Exhibition Review | Book Chapter | YouTube Channel | Publisher's Website
Other Everests is a new interdisciplinary network that takes as its starting point the centenary of the post-war British Everest campaigns of 1921-1924. It will bring together international scholars, archivists, curators, learned and professional societies and the UK mountaineering community to critically assess the legacy of the Everest expeditions and to re-evaluate the symbolic, political and cultural status of Everest in the contemporary world.
Chapter 5: ‘Far Away Frontiers and Spiritual Sanctuaries: Occidental Escapism in the High Himalaya,’ by Tim Chamberlain, in Paul Gilchrist, Peter Hansen & Jonathan Westaway, Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds (Manchester University Press, 2024)
Tim Chamberlain examines the strong allure which the Himalaya has long exerted upon Western adventurers, both in fiction and in real life. Drawing upon contemporary interest in the early British expeditions to climb Everest, Chamberlain’s chapter shows how two novels blurred the line between imagination and authenticity, playing upon themes of escape and adventure, while in response travelogues fed back into Western notions concerning the remoteness of the Himalaya. He demonstrates how the networks of mobility for indigenous guides who supported Western travellers spanned the huge extent of the Himalayan massif. What was portrayed as a distant and inaccessible region for Westerners was in fact an interconnected landscape which was already well-known and consciously mapped out by the polities who lived there. This network of knowledgeable and experienced indigenes was essential for such travellers who wished to fulfil their aspirations ‘to step off the map’ and ‘escape modern civilisation’ in their search for a notionally ‘unexplored’ Shangri-La, thereby creating an abiding leitmotif for Himalayan exploration in the Western imagination.
Tim Chamberlain examines the strong allure which the Himalaya has long exerted upon Western adventurers, both in fiction and in real life. Drawing upon contemporary interest in the early British expeditions to climb Everest, Chamberlain’s chapter shows how two novels blurred the line between imagination and authenticity, playing upon themes of escape and adventure, while in response travelogues fed back into Western notions concerning the remoteness of the Himalaya. He demonstrates how the networks of mobility for indigenous guides who supported Western travellers spanned the huge extent of the Himalayan massif. What was portrayed as a distant and inaccessible region for Westerners was in fact an interconnected landscape which was already well-known and consciously mapped out by the polities who lived there. This network of knowledgeable and experienced indigenes was essential for such travellers who wished to fulfil their aspirations ‘to step off the map’ and ‘escape modern civilisation’ in their search for a notionally ‘unexplored’ Shangri-La, thereby creating an abiding leitmotif for Himalayan exploration in the Western imagination.
