Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road ... Or A River

 

Colin Thubron

There is something mellifluously melancholy in the tone of Colin Thubron’s travel books. He is a wonderful writer, a genuine poet in prose. Curiously, his writing manages to be both orientated entirely inward, whilst also being outward-looking at the same time. It really is quite remarkable. And it is perhaps this paradox which is what makes his travel books such satisfying reading. As travel writers go, he is perhaps the travel writer’s paragon – the kind of travel writer whom most would-be travel writers might aspire to emulate. Oddly shy and unassuming, and yet open to experiences and interactions. He frequently ends up chatting to all sorts of ordinary and unusual people, tagging along with them, sharing a train compartment, or being invited into their homes and their lives; drifting along, progressing on his way until something or nothing happens. Either way the outcome is equally mesmerising. He does bathos and pathos with aplomb.

 

There are moments of drama too, usually rendered with beautiful understatement, such as when the police turn up and haul him off for questioning, as they frequently seem to do. This is usually because Colin is drawn to the parts of the world which aren’t exactly used to receiving visiting tourists, at least not those of a lone hapless, wandering Englishman-type, such as he appears to be. Naturally they suspect he must be up to no good; some sort of criminal or clandestine activity, possibly spying? – But Colin is wonderfully ‘old school’, as some might say. He tends to eschew modern technology, and he rarely travels with a camera. Only his spidery and illegible handwriting in his notebooks inadvertently lends him a taint of suspicion, but as soon as he begins to translate his scribbled notes for his interrogator, the police quickly come to realise Thubron is indeed a wandering poet, waxing lyrical about landscapes they find mundane but which he sees as sublime.

 

I came to Colin Thubron’s travel books quite late, and I really can’t understand how or why I had not come across him before. It was an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4, back in early 2007, when he was promoting his then recently published book, Shadow of the Silk Road. I was entranced by his evocative descriptions of travelling through landscapes and reflecting upon the history of places which had long held a deep and abiding fascination for me. And it was later on, in the summer of that same year, when I was travelling through China, that I began reading Shadow of the Silk Road for myself. I realised it was kind of oddly serendipitous to begin reading the book there in Xi’an, where the book itself begins; but, unlike Colin, the journey which I was about to undertake would lead in the opposite direction, heading east, overland to Beijing. I had gone there to escort a cohort of terracotta warriors across China and onwards to London for a landmark exhibition at the British Museum, entitled ‘The First Emperor.’ Whereas the Shadow of the Silk Road recounts Thubron’s 7000-mile journey heading west, travelling from China through Central Asia and Afghanistan to the Islamic countries of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean. A route along which he is haunted by the persona of another traveller, talking to him across the vast Steppe-like expanse of time in the bygone centuries-old voice of a Sogdian camel driver travelling with one of the old merchant caravans which used to cross the deserts and the high plateaus of the network of routes which once criss-crossed that region, now collectively and somewhat Romantically known as ‘the Silk Road.’

 

Thubron has often spoken of the solitary traveller as being two people travelling in tandem. There is the person who is actually doing the travelling – clocking the miles, suffering the pains and anxieties, marvelling at the wonders both large and small which befall him along the way; but then there is also the person, the travel writer side of himself, who (in a sense) sits upon his shoulder throughout the journey – noting all the things which will make ‘good copy’ for a travel book, and often consoling him with that fact when he finds himself in situations of adversity, such as when he gets questioned by suspicious police officers. The greatest fear for a travel writer, he has said, is that nothing will happen at all.

 

In reading Thubron’s books the reader experiences the world with him. He has such a wonderfully deft way with words and emotions that while his books are deeply personal documents, they also seem somehow oddly divested from him as their author. When he published To A Mountain in Tibet in 2011, I heard him joke (again on the radio) that people had sometimes complained that he didn’t put more of himself into his books, but that with this one, they might now wish he’d done the opposite, because To A Mountain in Tibet is a deeply personal book. It is a book about a journey he made on foot, a pilgrimage of sorts, making the kora around Mount Kailash – a sacred mountain which is central to the cosmology of several major religions, but at its core it is also a book which deals with the universally felt subject of grief. People often speak of life as being a journey or of time being seen as a road, and travelling – escaping the everyday of our own worlds and all that is familiar to us by going somewhere far away and utterly different in terms of society, culture, language, religion – this kind of travelling can be a way of reflecting upon ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the wider aspect of a globalised world. Travel is thereby seen as a way of breaking down boundaries, crossing borders and bridging divides which might otherwise have remained unseen or worse, wilfully overlooked. In that sense travel is not about seeking escape, but rather of seeking to find something extra. Redefining the self and our home in sympathy as well as in contrast to that which we might simply assume to be ‘other’ is what the real goal of most travellers tends to be. I read To A Mountain in Tibet at a time of similar although slightly different emotional upheaval in my life, and so the book certainly spoke to me on more than one level, as it was perhaps intended to do. It was a reminder to me that both travel and the closely allied activities of reading and writing can be a balm to the soul.

 

Thubron’s latest book, The Amur River: Between Russia and China (2021) is equally sublime. It is certainly one of Thubron’s best travel books, in my opinion. In this book he travels the length of the Amur from its source in Mongolia to the coast, opposite the northern part of Sakhalin Island, where the river emerges between the Sea of Japan and the Okhotsk Sea. It’s an enormous watercourse, undammed and largely unknown in comparison to its more famous cousins, such as the Amazon, the Danube, or the Nile. Along the way he alternates between the river’s northern and southern shores, between Russia and China. The Amur forms a boundary which both divides and connects these two geographically huge nations, each vastly different in culture and outlook, which meet along one section of its banks. The huge disparities in terms of populations and local economies makes the locals on either side of the river uneasy neighbours. As with all of Thubron’s travel books, he seeks out insights into the histories and cultures, both national and local, of the people whom he meets along the way. He relates the snippets of themselves and their lives as they reveal their personal stories to him. He is particularly interested in the original indigenous customs, seeking out the traces of shamans and their animistic beliefs which seem to linger, often half-forgotten, having almost been entirely obliterated by centuries of incomers hailing from the larger surrounding polities and their overwhelming tides of political and religious ideologies, seeking to modernise, revolutionise or capitalise upon an uncompromising land and an unruly watercourse which ultimately always seems to defeat them. 

One gets the sense from reading Thubron that the further he travels along the Amur the more remote it becomes, even from itself. It feels like a place oddly forgotten and removed from the wider world, even though the myriad worlds of its own which it forms along its course all seem somehow larger than life as it is lived in other parts of our modern and globally interconnected world. Reflecting upon this, he quotes one of my favourite writers: “In a poignant passage of Andrei Makine’s ‘Once Upon the River Love’, his protagonist speculates that you could spend your life on the remote Amur and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, or understand the sensual topography of another human body. ‘Love, too, did not easily take root in this austere county …’ (p.261-262)

 

I’ve often wondered about the Amur. Firstly, having come across it in other books I’ve read, particularly about nineteenth-century Russian explorers such as Nikolay Przhevalsky, who explored the Ussuri region, and Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who led the expansion of the Russian Empire to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And secondly, from having glimpsed parts of it or its tributaries when flying across Siberia en route to and from Japan, looking down upon such a vast and expansive frozen landscape with real fascination. Hence, I was very keen to read Thubron’s account of his following this long-flowing riverine thread through a land I’ve only ever glimpsed and imagined from afar. A river so long it has many different names, among which it is: the Onon in Mongolia, the Heilong Jiang in China, and the Amur in Russia. 

Thubron’s journey along the river’s course was not an easy one. In Mongolia he begins his journey on horseback, but not long after he sets out his horse stumbles in the boggy ground and falls upon him which results in a couple of cracked ribs and a broken ankle – and yet Thubron, who is in his eighties, stoically soldiers on, mentally kidding himself that his ankle is merely sprained. The thought of curtailing his trip and returning home to properly convalesce is a far more painful prospect than carrying on. Thubron is a true traveller to his core. And thankfully – as he always does – Thubron shapes a journey around himself which is inimitably his own. Mastering just enough of the languages of the people he travels among before setting out – in this case Russian and Mandarin – in order to converse with them unmediated. He says he takes a year to research and prepare before embarking, and then about a year afterwards to write his journey up. Consequently, his travel books are undoubtedly on a par with, and in some cases more than equal to those who have similarly found fame in defining the genre, writer-travellers such as: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gavin Young, Paul Theroux, Dervla Murphy, et al.

 

I’m not at all surprised that Thubron is drawn to the fictional works of Andrei Makine. He and Makine clearly share a common ground in their fascination for the sublime, for Russian melancholy, and for deeply profound meditations upon the slow passing of time and memory, deftly rendered with the lightest and most masterfully-understated touches of true sympathy. For me Colin Thubron’s writings represent the pinnacle of what I am seeking in a good travel book: a deeply lyrical and contemplative exploration of both place and people, a deft mixing of history, anthropology, landscape, and atmosphere, illuminated through individual insight. The best travel books in my opinion, like a river, wend a slow and unhurried way through our shared world, showing us places far beyond our own doorstep – places which we might never see or experience for ourselves; but done so through carefully considered words, words through which we might see and live vicariously. Travel writing is undoubtedly a craft of its own kind, offering the reader an escape through someone else’s eyes – wherein words can shape mellifluous memories which often remain with us long after we’ve finished our first reading of such books. The Amur River is certainly one to treasure.

 

Somewhere over Russia, near the Sea of Japan - 2004

~

“In the mist of early morning the far shore next day is only a sepia hairline, as though the horizon had rusted away at its edges. The river is formidable now. For over 2,500 miles it has gathered its tributaries from a basin almost the size of Mexico, until its brown flood pours northward through a channel that sometimes reaches three miles across. As our boat shudders upriver in the lightening day, the eastern shore ascends in mountain walls of pine, spruce and birch, where wisps of cloud dangle, as if from steaming jungle. Even as we speed beneath them, Sergei and Alexander go on smoking, cupping the cigarettes in their hands against the headwind, while our beer bottles dwindle alongside a bag of frozen smelts with cartoon faces.” – Colin Thubron, The Amur River (p.247-248)

Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road - The South Bank Show, 1992

Also on 'Waymarks'

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

Person & Place - The Essence of Good Travel Writing

Parallax - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Bullsh*t Anthropology - Reading Graeber & Wengrow

 

For a long time, I’ve thought that anthropologists and archaeologists tend to make a lot of grandiose and sweeping claims regarding the origins of culture and human society which they can’t really substantiate. At last, I’ve found an anthropologist and an archaeologist who seem to agree with me.

 

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY by David Graeber & David Wengrow (Penguin, 2022)

From the summer of 1994 to the summer of 1997, I was a student studying for a BSc in Anthropology at the University of East London (UEL). The Anthropology Department at UEL was staffed by academics who described themselves as Marxists. They maintained that what they were teaching us was ‘radical anthropology.’ One of the tutors was Chris Knight, an anthropologist who had come up with a novel idea for the origins of culture being linked to menstruation: – a theory which he maintained could be proved by meta studies of language and mythology, etc., wherein modern human societies had evolved out of a matriarchal primogenitor; presumably some long forgotten band of proto-communist hominids who had emerged ‘Out of Africa’ in the long dark and distantly remote millennia located at the other end of human prehistory. Folk memories of which, he maintained, still echo down the generations in common culturally-shared tales of myth and folklore. He called his theory the ‘sex strike’ theory, and he set out his elaborate thesis in a hefty scholarly tome, titled, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1991). This was the bible which we undergraduates were all expected to buy, imbibe, absorb, and adhere to, as well as to generally espouse as new radical anthropological-evangelists – especially (it was taken as tacitly read), if we wished to do well in our essays and the final exams, thereby earning our degrees.

 

It was an extremely well-choreographed curriculum, a slick syllabus which was very deftly delivered by a bunch of very clever and adept academics. In the first year we were all generally wowed, bowled over, utterly enthralled and completely taken in. But some students among our cohort began to have their doubts at some point or other during the second year of our studies. In the third year some even began to openly rebel. And, of course, the result was a graduating class neatly differentiated into thirds, two-twos, two-ones, and firsts, with the weightier majority of sceptics grouped at the lower end of this academic scale, and the few fully-paid up acolytes rewarded for their open homages to the guru in the rarefied elite group of first-class honours (a grand total of three out of thirty-or-so graduates, if I recall correctly). I was a lower-middling sceptic, who, having sought to divert and dilute my degree with as many scientific archaeology electives (run by the Environmental Science Department at UEL’s Stratford Campus) as I was permitted to take, somehow emerged at the other end of it all having gained myself a ‘Desmond’ (i.e. – a two-two).

 

Looking back, it was a truly bizarre and intellectually beguiling three years. I remember sitting and rather squeamishly watching what felt like a glacially-paced film screening of two Yanomami Indians with pudding bowl haircuts, somewhere deep in the Amazon, repeatedly bashing each other over the head with long wooden poles. It looked like a much more violent and far less funny version of Monty Python’s fish slapping dance. I remember wondering what I was meant to make of it all. Looking back now, it seems like an apt metaphor for my three years as an anthropology student. However, I no longer dismiss those three years quite as diffidently as I probably did at the time. Undoubtedly, I did learn a lot during my undergraduate degree, and what I learnt is something I’ve reflected upon and probably continued to adapt over the course of the intervening decades.

Karl Marx

 

Certainly, when I returned to university (after some 15 or so ‘gap years’) to study for an MA degree in World History, all that early grounding in Marxist theory meant reading Eric Hobsbawm made a lot more sense than I’d expected it would. During my BSc, I had become very interested in one area of anthropology which UEL termed as ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance.’ And, rather naively, I thought I’d stolen an intellectual march upon my tutors by writing a short dissertation explaining the success of the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia using Gramscian-Marxist theories of hegemony and power. I really enjoyed researching and writing this particular piece, and it seemed all the more ironic to me that I did so while sitting at one of the desks in the old Round Reading Room of the British Library, where Karl Marx himself famously used to sit reading and scribbling.

 

The Round Reading Room, The British Library

But the truth was, much of my undergraduate studies completely befuddled me. I’d really wanted to study for a joint anthropology and archaeology degree at Durham University, but things had gone awry with my A-levels. And so, after running the grim gauntlet of ‘clearing’ (in which I very nearly got into SOAS), I ended up at UEL feeling utterly thwarted. One good thing about UEL though, was that the timetable was very compact. It was usually condensed into just two- or three-days attendance per week. This meant that during my undergraduate years I was able to spend a lot of my time working as a volunteer at the British Museum, and I also spent a month each summer camping on archaeological excavations in the UK, which is where I really wanted to be. Consequently, much of what I was taught at UEL seemed like it was a diversion from what I was properly interested in.

 

That diversion, I realise now, was essentially the theoretical side of things. I mistakenly thought I was solely interested in the ‘material culture’ aspect of our remote past, but the truth is (and always was) that there’s no divorcing the two aspects. Material remains only tell you so much. It’s true that a lot can be revealed from sophisticated scientific analysis: – for example, examining dental enamel from a skeleton can tell you that the person whose grave was excavated at Site X actually grew up and spent most of their life living at Site Y, which is mind-blowing because Site X and Y are thousands of miles apart and there’s nothing else associated with that grave which could have told you this remarkable fact about the physical mobility of both individuals and broader populations at this time. Although, that said, I did find it unconscionably tedious to sit through lecture-after-lecture on the slow multi-millennia-long evolution of emmer wheat, which it seemed as though it was being taught in real time! – But in many ways, listening to outlandish theories about how human culture had evolved out of a system of collective social coercion which was codified in cyclical systems relating to menstruation, sororal solidarity, and the phases of the moon seemed oddly mind-bending in an altogether totally different direction, and a trifle too speculative for some of us even as still wet-behind-the-ear undergraduates. As far as theories go, this one certainly qualified as being firmly ‘out there’ on the fringes. I took very few notes during my third year. Instead, I mostly sat there listening to our lecturers with a somewhat baffled sense of intense concentration, and at the end of each lecture my conclusions always seemed to amount to the same response, which was: “But how can you possibly know that for sure?”

 

It was only much, much later on in life that I came to realise that this is the point of the humanities. Even subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and history, which draw on concrete aspects of science and scientific practices, are essentially nothing more than plausible fictions – ideas, opinions, theories – it’s as simple as that. Though some practitioners in these fields might evangelically espouse their academic revelatory notions as some sort of gnostic gospel truth which we should all revere and adhere to as the ‘be-all, end-all’ answer to the ultimate questions concerning the origins of life, the universe and everything – it’s still only a theory, their theory. It’s simply one theory among many which have gone before, and one which will be followed by many more still to come.

 

It was the cult-like hagiographical obeisance that came with the theory which really turned me off and caused me to tune out, although not drastically enough to make me drop out. I hung on in there. Partly, because it was a circus which, nevertheless, could still entertain even the most sceptical of minds. I clearly remember the closing moment of the final lecture for my BSc, when one of our tutors had wowed us for one last time with such a grand epiphany-like conclusion to their showman-like exposition, explaining some all-encompassing aspect of life rooted in the long lost deep-time of human prehistory, and one of my (by now deeply-jaded) fellow-students raised his hand and asked: “Yeah, that’s all very interesting, but where do the Spice Girls fit into all of that?” --- To which the long-suffering tutor concluded his lecture by telling my fellow student (and former housemate) to “F*ck off!” --- It was certainly a radical and rather definitive ending to three very long but ultimately intellectually-formative years.

 

Consequently, reading the first chapter of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin, 2022) instantly catapulted me back to that 1930s-era lecture hall at UEL’s old Barking campus. Here was a book, at long last, which seemed to be echoing my baffled bemusement. A book which was also asking: “But how can you possibly know that?” – A book which was at last finally holding up a mirror to what (to coin a David Graeber-like phrase) I’d long thought of as being bullsh*t anthropology.

 

Graeber and Wengrow’s book begins by stating that: “Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.” – How fantastically refreshing. A book about everything which starts by stating that we know nothing as a point of fact! – But, of course, there has to be more to it than that. After all, how else could this book be over 700 pages long? – How the heck is it going to make sense of all of this unknowable stuff?

 

Well. This is a very smart book. One which balances both exegesis and exposition. Hence it should be read not so much in search of concrete answers, but perhaps more in quest of cognitive challenges. It walks a surprisingly genial line between hermeneutics and teleology (largely by means of avoiding the use of such words). It’s a real joy to read. An intelligently clear and conversational book. One which encourages us to engage with our own dialectical processes of reasoning: telling us that the answers we seek matter only if we give equal weight to the questions which beget those answers; prompting us to wonder why such questions need asking at all? – In essence, it is all a matter of perspectives. And, of course, awareness. Maintaining an awareness that individual and collective personal, social and cultural biases pervade all levels of critical thinking. In many ways, we are simply blind to our own blind spots. But we can escape this ever-decreasing circle.

 

In order to demonstrate this, the two Davids go back to the supposed rational objectivity of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, looking at their engagement with little-known contemporary world-views as were then held by the relatively recently encountered cultures of the New World. Asking not how the assumed proto-communist equality of our early ancestors was lost, and thereby wondering how inequalities within our societies first arose; but rather, asking why it was (and still is) assumed that we began our social evolution in these egalitarian bands of early hunter-gatherers? – Graeber and Wengrow speculate that perhaps the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity (within distinctly defined limits and constraints) came into being as a response to the interactions of colonial settlers and missionaries with the Amerindian populations they encountered in the New World.

 

It’s a fascinating reversal. And it is also a far cry from what I was taught as an anthropology undergraduate back in the mid-1990s. At that time the theoretical-side of physical anthropology was alive with debates between those who believed the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, advocated by anthropologists such as Chris Stringer and my own tutors at UEL, and those who adhered to the ‘multi-regional evolution’ theory of equally eminent scholars such as Milford Wolpoff, and also Lewis Binford’s ‘new archaeology’, which redefined processual approaches to the study of material culture. Elaine Morgan even came and gave us a special lecture on her ‘aquatic ape’ theory – a lecture which was partly disrupted by some Islamic fundamentalist students, who were regularly causing problems at UEL at that time (… I’ve often wondered in recent years what became of those guys and where they are today). Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), a major scientific recalibration of Darwinian evolution, was a much-venerated text at this time at UEL too. The (then still relatively recent) DNA-sequencing findings regarding so-called ‘mitochondrial Eve’ were helping to bolster the popular image of the African Rift Valley as some sort of Garden of Eden for early humanity. And the eponymous Australopithecus, known as ‘Lucy’, along with the footprints found at Laetoli, were the superstar protagonists of most of our essays.

 

But, despite the very tempting allure of all this anthropological evangelism, I couldn’t help being niggled by my doubts, mostly arising from the sparsity of evidence which was so thinly but definitively staked out over such vast tracts of time – how could so much theoretical weight be borne by the stray findings of a single fragment from an incomplete hominid fossil dating from one distant millennium be made to quantum leap through the aeons and marry with that found in another? – The two Davids phrase it far better than I ever could have done so when I was writing about all this back in 1994-1997: “If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3 million years, there actually was an age in which the lines between (what we today think of as) human and animal were still indistinct; and when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.” (p.89*)

 

It wasn’t so much the theorisation itself which bothered me, but rather the imperative didacticism which went with it. The fact that we were required to nail our (preferably Marxist) colours to the mast and expected to defend them to the death. There was no room for bourgeois ‘middle-roaders’, even though all I wanted to do was keep an ‘open mind’ to all the different possibilities. And I guess around this time, the two Davids – who aren’t that much different in age to me, must have been thinking the same as fellow undergraduates in their respective institutions. As they say: “There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.” (p.90)

 

In many ways, especially when looking at the Palaeolithic, all of this seems so massively remote that it is surely inconsequential to our own lives as modern human beings, isn’t it? – Well, maybe not. There is more than just a philosophical dimension to pondering the deep past. It is also a way of reflecting upon the present. If we haven’t always been the way we are now, what are the possibilities for the future, and who might we yet become? – In this sense, The Dawn of Everything does have another dimension. It seeks to go beyond a straightforward re-write of anthropological thinking. This book does have an agenda: “There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges.” (p.87-88)

 

As already noted, modern thinking is to a large degree rooted in the ethos born out of the Western Enlightenment. It is a distinctly entrenched paradigm which surrounds us like a fog, but anthropology and archaeology can help us to wake up to the fact that not everything everywhere has been the same for all time. There are distinctly different ways of living, of organising and operating as collectively cohesive social animals. An excellent book, in this regard, which I value very highly is David Turnbull’s Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies In The Sociology Of Scientific And Indigenous Knowledge (2000), which really does show in a series of remarkably mind-expanding modes that there are many diverse epistemologies which can be used to understand our shared world, as well as re-orientating our perspectives within it – from the cross-generational collaborative means and methods by which enormous Medieval cathedrals were designed and constructed, to the global navigational systems whose subtleties were honed, adapted and successfully applied over centuries by Pacific islanders, regularly migrating over vast (and seemingly featureless) tracts of open ocean, almost like seafaring nomads. The way of the world forged in the mindset of the Western Enlightenment is far from the only way to collectively know and understand ourselves.

 

Indeed, this was also something we looked at as part of my Anthropology BSc. I remember, during that ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance’ module I mentioned earlier, we studied E.R. Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), which, when it was first assigned to us, I thought qualified as perhaps the most boring sounding book title in the world. But, in truth, it was utterly fascinating. It spoke of the ways in which one society could periodically shift its social system of governance, operating in a kind of double morphology. Echoing the early work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Nambikwara in the Amazon, which Graeber and Wengrow discuss in some detail (in Chapter 3 of The Dawn of Everything), the Kachin of Burma regularly alternated between two organisational systems depending on prevailing factors at different times. As Graeber himself summarises Edmund Leach’s book (on GoodReads): “This is an anthropological classic of the first water – and one of the books that opened my eyes to what anthropology could be. It’s hard to explain how reading about hill tribes in Southeast Asia where powerful people periodically try to create little kingdoms (gumsa) in imitation of the Shan states in the valleys, but where the complexities of their forms of agriculture and marriage systems inevitably lead them to collapse and form democratic republics (gumlao) again – and then the whole cycle starts all over again – but when you read it, you are entranced. Well, okay, I was. It’s books like this that made me want to dedicate my life to anthropology.”

 

Since Leach wrote way back in the 1950s, much more recently this same region has inspired a whole new re-evaluation of so-called ‘anarchic’ states of being which has resulted in a much debated concept, dubbed ‘Zomia’, in which certain societies situated in the highlands of Southeast Asia have seemingly managed to avoid incorporation into the fabric of the modern nation states that surround them without being wholly cut-off from modernity, as is often assumed of remote Amazonian tribes and the like. James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) is the equally entrancing text which has sparked this revival of interest in such matters. It’s exactly these kinds of academic reappraisals which, as the two Davids highlight, is now causing a growing number of people to re-evaluate the long-held assumptions that there was some sort of uniform social and political progress within early human societies, leading from simple egalitarianism to more complex, codified and hierarchical systems; which in turn led to agriculture and urbanisation, then onto conquest and colonisation, etc., eventually resulting in the modern globalised world of capitalist, free trade and free market economies which we know and hold today as supposedly the ‘be all, end all’ perfection of human existence.

 

Essentially, we have lost sight of how societies can and do change in order to adapt according to their shifting ecological and economic circumstances. While I was at UEL I remember reading and writing about two starkly contrasting studies conducted by the same anthropologist. These ethnographies were The Forest People (1961) and The Mountain People (1972) by Colin Turnbull, which respectively describe life among the Mbuti and the Ik, two societies each located in vastly different regions of Africa. The first book presents a vision of a mobile band of pygmies living an idyllic, egalitarian, Garden of Eden-like existence, while the other confronts the reader with a harsh and hellish, Holocaust-like vision of a violently brutal and selfish society, having been pushed to the very brink of social cohesion by dislocation, drought, famine and an oppressive scarcity of resources (the Ik were previously nomadic, but had been forced to become sedentary). Writing an essay on The Mountain People was possibly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But it was an education in itself of how the norms we take for granted only afford us the narrowest of views as to what human life can be – particularly in its potentials for both good and ill. It taught me that an appreciation for difference, and a desire to know (even if it’s impossible to fully understand) another culture is the true gift of studying anthropology, i.e: maintaining an openness to insight.

 
 

Ever since completing those three years and graduating with my Anthropology BSc, I’ve had a long and troubled relationship with my first degree. At the time it seemed like a mistake, and I struggled with the pedagogical constraints through which it had to be negotiated; but ultimately, I don’t regret it. If anything, it has come to exert an ever-greater relevance to the things which I have done subsequently. I know anthropology has shaped and informed my outlook on life in general, and it still very much influences my approach to my continuing PhD studies as an historian. Hence, what once seemed like a bad hand which life’s croupier had dealt me, one that has long lingered with me like a cognitive millstone, now seems to have been a long unappreciated gift – one which only the passing of time has at last finally managed to unmask. As in Turnbull’s The Forest People, seeing the sacred molimo trumpet out of context is merely a prosaic act when contrasted with the importance of visualising what it embodies while hearing it at the appropriately sanctioned moment in its ritualised use. Essentially, behind the different masks of certainty which other people force us to choose between, I believe it is possible to maintain a sense of ‘negative capability’ (as John Keats described it: that is, the ability to balance and live with opposing or contradictory thoughts and ideas). Because this might very well be the only thing which (paradoxically) helps us to stay sane.

 

Looking back, I see two experiences: one at the very end of our undergraduate degree, and the other many years later, which put this conclusion into the most quotidian of contrasts for me – posing a fundamental question which I’ve never really been able to fully answer for myself, hence why the continual relevance of such a prolonged re-evaluation remains a constant in my thinking-life: 

The first was a discussion that some of my fellow students had amongst ourselves after one of our last lectures at the end of our final year. It was a moment marking the culmination of all of us having spent three years steeped in a deep and meaningful appreciation of the rich, broad cultural and political diversity of humanity in all its myriad forms. Someone idly asked all of us what we were going to do once we’d finished our studies that summer. Most spoke of summer jobs and then of their aspirations towards future careers or further education: MAs, MScs, that kind of thing. But one lad, a young Israeli boy, said he was going home to do his National Service. Most of the group openly commiserated with him, but he looked up and quickly rebuffed us, saying: “Oh no, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll get the chance to shoot some Palestinians!” – There was an uneasy silence. No one was sure if he was joking or not.

 

The second happened a couple of decades later, when I was flying home to London from Seoul in South Korea. I was sitting next to a young Korean girl, and naturally enough at some point during the long flight we got talking. She told me she was travelling to the UK to begin studying at university. She quizzed me on what life was like in the UK, what my own experience had been of going to university there, and she asked me what I’d studied. When I told her I’d studied anthropology she said it was a subject which interested her and quizzed me further on what that was all about, so I did my best to summarise it. When I’d finished, she asked me with a dead straight face (the seriousness of which only just stopped me in the nick of time from bursting into laughter): “How do you reconcile all of that with your faith in Jesus Christ?”

 

Sitting back in my seat, traversing the world at 35,000 feet, far above the immense spectrum of everyday lives being lived out collectively and individually beneath the raft of pure white clouds passing below us at a rapid rate of knots in that sealed metal tube with wings, I found myself reflecting once again: how it is all too easy to take the world at face value and not realise that we are all only ever looking into a mirror which simply shows us what we already know and consequently take completely for granted. There’s no seeing the wood for all the trees. No wonder, then, that the world is such a messed-up place!

 

If life tends to confound our expectations, it’s no wonder we are always seeking to find the points upon which we can anchor ourselves. But the true challenge is trying to travel freely by casting those anchors aside. Attempting to see beyond that mirror, to look into other surfaces and perceive how things might be reflected differently there. For me, this book, The Dawn of Everything, is a mirror of one sort or another. I’m not sure if it represents a revelation of something new, or simply a confirmation of all the things I thought I already knew, but which previously I had no way of articulating for myself before reading it. I realise I am still very much stuck in my initial, overly-enamoured phase of admiration for this particular book. And it is a book which I’d highly recommend everybody to read. Sadly, my quasi-review here has barely even scratched the surface of all that it contains, nor have I done sufficient justice to the real aplomb with which this book is crafted. It is truly impressive (I could hardly believe my eyes, but the two authors’ description of the domestication of wheat is genuinely riveting reading!). Had he not passed away in September 2020, David Graeber could well have become for me the anthropological guru par excellence whom I’d managed so assiduously to avoid all these years!

 

And in this regard, I should perhaps end by coming full-circle, to append a somewhat amusing footnote, referring back to Chris Knight: who, despite his professed admiration for David Graeber, has recently taken Graeber to task by rather baldly stating that: “For David and his whole circle, I don’t exist. My book doesn’t exist, it never got written, and it’s irrelevant.”** – Knight seems to think that Graeber doesn’t give enough credence to the findings of ethnographers and consequently totally misreads the most fundamental truths about hunter-gatherer societies. Personally, I think Graeber and Wengrow’s new book does engage with all of the issues which Knight complains about (see Chapters 4 & 6 in particular). And likewise, according to my reading of The Dawn of Everything, I also think the two Davids very effectively expose a lot of the speculative assumptions inherent in ‘bullsh*t anthropology’ (which I’ve complained about at length above) by underlining my contention that speculations are all we really have to work with here. Consequently, as with any theory regarding the origins of human society, there needs to be enough latitude for doubt, even if they too (Graeber and Wengrow, that is) think they’ve managed to figure it all out and have very persuasively managed to argue their own particular case.

 

Ultimately, all churches – whether sacred or secular – are founded upon faith. In the end, the only choice we each have is deciding who we wish to follow. I guess – as with my ever-evolving reflections upon the strange fruits of my Anthropology BSc, fruits both sweet and sour in a world both complex and straightforward – the real test, I suppose, will be to see what I think of this particular book in 30 years’ time. After all, it’ll be fascinating to see where things go from here.

 

*NB – The page numbers I reference above are taken from the page counter of a PDF version of the book (which you can find here on the Internet Archive) which gives no actual page numbers on the text itself.

**Quote taken from an address which Chris Knight made to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Online Communist Forum on 24 January 2021.

~

I have collated a playlist on YouTube of videos by and about David Graeber – including a couple of critiques of Graeber’s work by Chris Knight (as quoted above), and interviews with David Wengrow about ‘The Dawn of Everything.’ Knight has also written a blog post giving his own extensive critique of ‘The Dawn of Everything’ which you can find here: Chris Knight - Wrong About (Almost) Everything (FocaalBlog, 22 December 2021). There's also an interesting article on some of the early critical responses to ‘The Dawn of Everything’ here in The Observer (12 June 2022). Plus a reluctantly disappointed homage, which asks 'What Happened to David Graeber?' by Crispin Sartwell, LARB (20 January 2024).

Trolley Hunters - Banksy

 

 Also on 'Waymarks'

From the Heart of the World - Alan Ereira

Shandley Williams - Totem

Ring of Fire - An Indonesian Odyssey

Peckham Rock - Banksy

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

 

A month or so ago I happened to catch a screening of The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957) on Talking Pictures TV. It’s a movie which I’d never heard of before, but I’m quite a fan of old movies and there are a lot of ‘lost’ or long forgotten gems to be found on this particular UK TV channel. This one naturally piqued my interest because I was intrigued to see how it depicted Tibet and the Himalaya.

Directed by Val Guest, the film is based upon a BBC TV play titled The Creature (1955), written by Nigel Kneale, which Kneale adapted for the famous British horror filmmakers, Hammer. The Abominable Snowman tells the story of Dr John Rollason (played by Peter Cushing), a British scientist, who is staying at a remote monastery high up in the Himalayan mountains, with his wife, Helen (Maureen Connell), and his assistant, Peter Fox (Richard Wattis). They are nearing the end of their expedition. Rollason and Fox are introduced to the viewer via an extended scene in which they talk with the Head ‘Lhama’ of the monastery (Arnold Marle). It is clear that Rollason and his companions are respectful of the Head Lama and they thank him for letting them stay at the monastery while they have gone about their work, collecting plant specimens, and the like. But as the conversation continues and Rollason is left alone with the Lama, the Buddhist cleric begins to talk cryptically to Rollason, hinting at some sort of deeper clairvoyance. The wise old Lama quizzes Rollason about his real motives and intentions in coming to the Himalaya, telling Rollason that he knows Rollason hasn’t yet finished all of his work in the mountains. The Lama says some men are coming and Rollason intends to join them. Rollason tries to deny this, but the Lama craftily manages to tell just enough of his suspicions to Rollason’s wife, who is naturally upset because she is keen for them to leave and return to their normal life, far away from the mountains. It’s also revealed that Rollason was once an expert climber, but that he’s given up the dangerous sport; hence another reason why his wife is both concerned and upset by the Lama’s revelation. But there’s something strange about the way Rollason receives all of this information, because it seems as though he himself is not fully aware of all the facts the Lama has alluded to with such assurance, along with an edge of definite disapproval.

Cushing & Connell

It soon turns out that the Lama is correct. A party of Americans arrives at the monastery. They are on their way up into the mountains, heading far above the snowline in search of the Yeti – the much fabled ‘Abominable Snowman’ of the film’s title. They’ve already conveniently cached their supplies at various staging posts along the way during the summer months, and so everything is set for the intentionally small group of explorers to embark upon the adventure which lies ahead. Against his wife’s wishes, Rollason is persuaded to join the expedition led by brash American, Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker), along with his companion Ed Shelley (Robert Brown). There’s a third member of the party, a young Scottish photographer, named Andrew McNee (Michael Brill), who seems very different from the rest. And, of course, they take with them a local guide, a Sherpa by the name of Kusang (Wolfe Morris), who says he has actually seen the Yeti.

Cushing, Brill, Morris, Brown & Tucker

Rather than pick apart the fanciful plot of the movie, I’m more interested here in penning a few thoughts on the stylised representations of Himalayan mountaineering and exploration as they are depicted in this film. Naturally, it is very much “of its time” (as current euphemistic parlance might describe it). All of the local Tibetans – mainly monks mumbling their sutras in the background, and rowdy porters shouting angrily about their lack of pay, along with a small group of easily disbursed bandits, plus a mystical (and perhaps Svengali-like?) Lama, who talks like a gnomic grandfather of Master Yoda (a familiar figure in the later Star Wars franchise) – are racist caricatures. But then, so too are the Westerners stereotyped in their own peculiar ways. The British are decent, level-headed sorts, who believe in fair play and talk with clipped and flinty British accents. The Americans are brash, selfish and insensitive, ‘gung-ho’ manly-man-types, loud and uncouth. Dr Rollason represents the quintessential disinterested-nobility of pursuing science for its own sake, although he is also susceptible to an innate sense of Romanticism which is naturally implicit in such a quest. McNee turns out to be a character who is similarly flawed, but in a different manner to Rollason. McNee is not up to the quest, but there is something spiritual about him, something which drives him with an equal sense of passion and destiny – he too, like the Lama, seems to have a telepathic connection to the region and to the Yeti in particular. There are quite a few allusions in the film to mystical powers and psychic connections, thought transference, and the like, but interestingly none of these points is too heavily implied or overplayed. We get the sense that the Yetis might be higher beings, not so much a ‘missing link’, but a more of a co-evolutionary lineage, who might somehow be better than humans.

Rollason deplores the two Americans’ commercial greed in their hunt for the Yeti, but the Americans flatter Rollason that having him on-board as a member of their expedition will lend it some scientific credibility, and they persuade him that, ultimately, they are working towards the same ends in the pursuit of knowledge – and, in particular, the desire to understand mankind’s place in the world. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) Rollason is the sole survivor. He returns to the monastery because, as the Lama hinted at the beginning of the story, his fate would be decided by what was most essential within him – that sense of decency innate to his character has seen him through (whereas, by the same token, the misadventures of his companions has brought about their demise). And so, having looked into the face of the Abominable Snowman, Dr Rollason says that there is no such thing as the Yeti in existence. The ending is very ambiguous. Perhaps Rollason has been hypnotised by the Head Lama, or perhaps he has realised that some mysteries in life must remain just that, mysteries.

It is worth bearing in mind that this movie is a melodrama. It is a Hammer horror movie which was primarily intended to shock and thrill, and to excite and entertain its first audiences. As a morality play about the psychology of paranoia, all the movie posters for the film ‘ham up’ those frights, challenging the viewer: “We dare you to watch it alone!” – Claiming it is “More terrifying than The Curse of Frankenstein.” The Yeti is described as the “Demon-Prowler of Mountain Shadows … The Dreaded Man-Beast of Tibet.” – But for all the fanciful elements which are embellished throughout the course of the movie, there are some aspects which are to certain degrees grounded in fact.

The set-dressings in the monastery scenes are reminiscent of genuine Tibetan monasteries, although I don’t recall if in the film the story’s location is explicitly referred to as being Tibet per se (except perhaps for a joking reference to the ‘awfulness of Tibetan tea’). The architecture is similar, with trapezoidal windows; Tibetan butter churns and a mani stone can be seen in the monastery’s courtyard; and there are quite realistic thangka paintings hanging up in the interior rooms, but these are also adorned with strangely stylised Southeast Asian-looking Buddha statues (though more scowling than serene); the monks’ robes are fairly generic, and their religious dances seem pretty perfunctory. As already mentioned, the Chief Lama appears to behave more like an Indian guru-figure, one who perhaps The Beatles might have befriended in the subsequent decade, rather than a genuine Tibetan cleric. And, in many ways, it is hinted that he is a kind of deus ex machina, operating with a pseudo-all-seeing supernatural effect, possibly even guiding events behind the scenes throughout the film. 

The mountain scenery is certainly the most impressive aspect of the movie. While many of the scenes were clearly filmed in the synthetic mock-ups of a studio, these are nevertheless blended into some impressive long sweeping shots of diminutive figures wending their way through realistically wide Himalayan-looking vistas (filmed in the French Pyrenees). On the whole, the characters’ contemporary mountaineering gear looks credibly authentic; and there is even a passing reference to Eric Shipton in the initial dialogue.

In the context of this movie’s times, the hunt for the Yeti was not such a far-fetched idea for a cinematic plot either (although if you tune into certain TV channels today, such as Blaze, you’d be forgiven for thinking that such quests are still widely held to be credible even now!). Sir Edmund Hillary, after his first ascent of Mount Everest (Chomolungma) in 1953, subsequently returned to the Himalaya on just such a scientific quest himself. Consequently, it is worth watching this movie with an eye to the cultural insights it might suggest – not so much about Tibet, Tibetans, or the Himalaya – but rather, about the psychological perceptions, prejudices, and peccadillos of British and American movie audiences, and the piquantly picturesque elements of these pseudo-Himalayan themes which it was thought by the filmmakers would most appeal to movie-goers at the time.

It’s a topic which certainly appeals to me. Having spent so much time studying genuine travel accounts written by Westerners who ventured into this part of the world during the first half of the twentieth century for my PhD thesis, I am keen to continue my studies, looking at the way in which the ostensible realism of this genre was subsequently transmuted and later valorised into such fictional representations. In many ways, it was a genre which began with the making of a movie version of James Hilton’s bestselling novel, Lost Horizon (book 1933, movie 1937), and continues on through later cinematic outings, such as Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child (1986), to Brad Pitt, starring as Heinrich Harrer, in the Hollywood version of Harrer’s memoir, Seven Years in Tibet (book 1952, movie 1997). 

The Himalaya remains a region of perennial fascination for cultural outsiders. Ever since writers such as Alexandra David-Neel and Charles Bell took an interest in interpreting Tibetan Buddhism for a Western audience and perhaps inspired novelists such as James Hilton, the Himalaya has become a kind of spiritual and geographical backcloth onto which popular tropes of solipsistic questing can be projected. Yet the continuing ubiquity of such clumsy metaphors and cultural misappropriations which seem to abound in Hollywood’s fascination for the Himalaya as an always remote, hidden and inaccessible region seem to attest to a continuing need to locate an ‘orientalising’ search for the self through tests of spiritual, psychological and physical endurance in this notion of esoteric mysteries persisting somewhere far away. In this sense, the Himalaya as it is seen in Hollywood remains a place which is pristine and untouched by modernity, a place located beyond the ordinary mundane nature of our own humdrum lives, somewhere lost perhaps in someone else’s or some other culture’s past whether real or imagined. As a meta-myth it has become a cliché, a cultural trope in and of itself which only serves to occlude and evade a deeper and far more intriguing question: why does such a need to culturally appropriate as a means of mediating inwardly with ourselves by projecting our own perceptions through such a process of ‘othering’ continue to persist?

Original Movie Trailer

Watch The Abominable Snowman (1957) on BFI iplayer

Also on 'Waymarks'

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

NB - I am currently in the process of re-working this blog post as a proper academic paper for inclusion in an edited volume of film studies, due to be published in 2024. For more info, see here.