Mustang as a “Dream Place”
Throughout this analysis of Kagbeni and the overlapping barriers creating friction there, I have tried to express the way that Mustang is imagined by people through a variety of listening practices. I have questioned the politics of sound and space, the role of sound Kagbeni’s daily life, and how sound reshapes the lives of people who live there. Through this series of compositions and analysis, we see how a narrow view of life in Kagbeni similarly reshapes the lives of people living there, and alters the interactions between actors.
Mustang has a long history of being pushed to the margins, where its people occupy a space somewhere between Tibetan and Nepali. This has been accentuated by governmental policies, but these policies are mapped onto cultural divisions created concurrently. Tourist literature constantly romanticizes the region, describing it as a place stuck in the past and in need of saving from globalization in the name of preservation. As with the first three sound compositions, a focus on only one of these intersections at Kagbeni neglects the complexity of the town. As I hope to have shown throughout this discussion, there are no simple barriers to be drawn between each of these categories or identities. Politics are entangled with religion which is entangled with tourism. Sound provides a way for us to understand these entanglements, and the impossibility of separating these forces. By trying to separate these from each other, we are not able to look at the full context of Mustang, or understand the ways these forces interact in the daily lives of Kagbeni.
Mustang is currently facing pressure to become more ‘developed’ in our increasingly globalized world. The road was one of the first initiatives to this end, and new heating and power systems are quickly being built throughout the region. The development wanted by locals, the Nepali government, NGOs, and tourists rarely lines up, however. In 2008, a UNESCO project was underway to make the capitol Lo Manthang a World Heritage Site. This ultimately fell through, because among other reasons, the people who live in Lo wanted to have a new sewage system that would make the city more hospitable. While the UNESCO designation would have attracted more tourists, it relied on the image of Mustang as preserved in the past and distinctly not of the current moment. Lo Manthang, if the UNESCO designation was approved, would be like a butterfly pinned on a slide to be viewed under a microscope. Tsewang Bista, one of the nephews of the late king of Mustang, worried if the site received World Heritage designation, “locals’ development needs, including better education and health, [would] be dominated by the conservation efforts of artifacts in the area” (Lo Manthang 2016).
The people of Mustang are by no means against any form of cultural preservation or environmental conservation when it incorporates the needs of the community. Indra Dhara Bista of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) Cultural Heritage Conservation Sub-committee explained: “‘We don’t have any objection if cultural preservation is made looking at the livelihood of the people’” (Lo Manthang). The problem with projects like the UNESCO one is that it neglected the locals in favor of the global community. The ACAP has jurisdiction over conservation in the Mustang region, meaning that any other organization wishing to work with the communities there must work in conjunction with the ACAP. Some current cultural preservation projects focus on the education of children, such as the daycare centers funded by the American Himalayan Foundation and the boarding school started by the Lo Gyalpo Jigme Foundation. Others focus on restoration of buildings damaged by years of water and, more recently, the major earthquake that occurred in April of 2015.
So why has UNESCO failed in it’s attempts in Mustang, while the American Himalayan Foundation has flourished? At the Thubchen Gompa in Lo Manthang, renovation efforts backed by the American Himalayan Foundation have been going on since 1999. Luigi Fieni, a preservationist from Italy, has taught local artists how to properly restore the paintings at two monasteries in the city, using a mix of traditional Tibetan and Western techniques. After some conflict over whether or not it was acceptable to repaint the missing parts of the murals or just to restore what remained, it was decided to move forward with the wishes of the local community and to complete the paintings. After all, the locals could not worship an incomplete Buddha image. Fieni refers to the current project as “painting, not restoration or conservation” (Wong 2013). This is in stark contrast to the Orientalist Western approach which preserves the old above all else. Fieni even went so far as to say that “while working and living within the community, I changed my point of view, and I decided to follow the needs of the culture I was working for” (Wong 2013). This respect that the artist has for the community he is working with – not presiding over – is a common theme in the projects that the American Himalayan Foundation supports. In addition, this project trains locals to do the work and carry on the tradition in the future, as opposed to projects where outsiders come in and take care of everything before picking up and leaving. This ensures that what is added to the cultural memory will remain there as new people are trained and educated with their heritage in mind in each generation.
UNESCO is an example of an organization not taking a holistic view at the needs of a region. Branka Butina argues that “whereas culture generally is determined by a free and illimitable unfolding of creational forces, institutionalisation, in contrast, sets spatial, material and temporal limits” (Butina 2011). To be successful, she argues, cultural preservation projects should strive for a balance between institution and free culture. These limits placed by institutions are the same that Kagbeni grapples with on a daily basis, at the intersections of political, religious, and tourist boundaries. In considering projects which seek to strengthen boundaries in the name of preservation or conservation, we must remember that “boundaries will protect as well as devastate” (Diehl 2002: 5). There are no simple solutions, but listening to the needs of local communities is a good start.
A butterfly pinned to a slide under a microscope displays a static image of its death. Sound, on the other hand, is always changing. Both in its physical resonances and in its cultural meanings, sound provides a dynamic way of understanding the shifting boundaries around Mustang. Throughout this project, I have shown the various ways that imagined boundaries around Mustang have real impacts on the lives of the people who live there. The imagination of Mustang as different from the rest of Nepal might not be entirely real, but it certainly has real impacts. From the Nepali government’s approach to infrastructure in Mustang, to the belief that Loba are less legitimately Nepali than the people in the hills and plains to the south, to the specific forms of elite and adventure tourism and scholarly attention that Mustang receives, there are concrete material impacts of the perpetuation of this idea.
With the information presented here, I hope to continue a conversation about how global forces interact in marginalized communities around the world. Kagbeni is by no means the only town that exists at a crossroads in this way, though its circumstances are what makes it unique. By bringing together a creative representation of sound and listening in Kagbeni with this deeper analysis, I also hope to complicate the way we think about agency and understanding. Echoing Hillel Schwartz’s argument that the ear is not defenseless, I ask that we continue to think about and learn from the differences in listening practices, and the implications they carry about identity.
I began this project thinking that it would be a study about how identity and place are linked in the daily lives and religion of people in Kagbeni, Nepal. I knew that sound would be an important component of the final product, and that it was significant in Tibetan Buddhist culture, but I did not realize the extent to which it would shape this project. In the end, I did learn a lot about the way people in Kagbeni think about and use the land, and how their relationship to the Kali Gandaki has changed over time. Along the way from my conversations and observations in Kagbeni, I came to realize that the more prevalent problem was the discourse surrounding the region, the way it is imagined by people living elsewhere. These two questions eventually proved themselves to be intertwined. Identity and place are constantly reshaped by global forces, global frictions, in a give and take between the identifiers and the identified. Politics, religion, tourism, and sound each contribute to this dance. It is my hope that moving forward, we are able to see more clearly the connections between these forces, and have a greater awareness of how we contribute to their dynamics.