Apologies for the lag time since the last post. Believe it or not, I have spent the last two weekends puttering around Dubai of all places, and while this has been a refreshing way to forge stronger bonds with the students here before my rapidly approaching departure date, it has not been terribly conducive to gathering post-worthy material. Nonetheless, per inquiries from a certain Anders Schneider, I will shed light on some of the more zany aspects of campus life in the coming week.
First, however, I’d like to put the finishing touches on our discussion of Nepal. By way of narration, we spent our final two days after returning from the Annapurna Conservation Area around the Kathmandu Valley. On the first day, we explored Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most important Hindu temple. The temple itself was striking, and it was made all the more intriguing by the collection of itinerant (peripatetic, Mrs. Hitt?) sadhus (Hindu ascetics or “holy babas”) who had overrun the place. They had converged on this temple from all over the Indian subcontinent to celebrate Shiva’s birthday, and they appeared to value body paint over shirts and showers. Also poignant was witnessing a pair of funeral rites on the banks of the garbage-ridden but incredibly sacred Bagmati River, which in the Hindu context consisted of open-air cremation on wooden platforms from where the ashes could be cast into the motionless water. Royalty can be cremated directly in front of the temple; those of lesser means must take their dead to the pyres further south. From Pashupatinath we headed toward the enormous Bodhnath stupa, where we encountered a small group of Tibetan protesters and a larger contingent of Nepalese SWAT police. Needless to say, our stay was cut a little short by the unexpected run-in, but if I’m not going to partake in any of the Middle Eastern protests, I might as well get my fix elsewhere. That’s a joke, Mother.
Police gathered at Bodhnath stupa
In all of this we were guided by a friend we picked up randomly along the way by the name of Rakesh. He was 18 years old and a most wonderful and bright kid. He had moved from a poor town in India to Nepal to try to pick up wages accruing from the tourist industry, and his language skills were un-be-liev-a-able. He was conversing with me in unaccented English. He was talking to some other people in French. He informed us he was half-fluent in Hebrew as well, among some other languages, and of course knew two or three Indian dialects on top of those. Had he ever taken a class? No, he was too poor to buy the supplies to ever have gone to school. Was he functionally literate then? Of course not. Then where had he learned all this? Merely from talking to tourists. He warmly invited us into his makeshift tent to share some tea with his family, and we did so obligingly, learning a little more about his scenario and how he got where he is. Without going into too much detail, I think he is going to do well in Nepal, and the e-mails he has since pecked to me about his wellbeing indicate the same.
Our final day in Nepal was marked by a Lonely Planet-guided walking tour of the third of the medieval city-states in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhaktapur (after Patan and Kathmandu). My picture-taking capacity had been thoroughly worn out by our trek in the mountains, so I do not have much evidence of our time there, but getting lost amongst the shrines and brick-lined alleyways of Bhaktapur was every bit as enchanting as our retreats to the other parts of the country. It was hard to say goodbye to Nepal.
Only picture of Rakesh we got! Stunner. (Click for only a few more pictures and videos.)
Beyond narration, however, what I really want to accomplish in this post is to advance some thoughts I have had in light of Nepal regarding encounters with unknown peoples and cultures. My thesis is that cultural familiarity in large part breeds cultural affinity. Perhaps this is obvious and likely one of the foremost arguments in favor of studying abroad, but I don’t think the case can be made too often. For instance, my intellectual engagement with Middle Eastern politics and religious movements inspired a larger interest in all things Middle Eastern, from soccer matches to social commentary. As a result, I decided to study in an Arab country and to do so as a committed Arabophile, a disposition that has only deepened since being here. Why don’t I have as marked an appreciation for European or African or Asian culture? Well, I simply think it boils down to a lack of familiarity.
My encounter with Nepal put this theory to the test, as I had never engaged in a substantive manner, intellectually or otherwise, with Asian culture. I arrived in Nepal like wet clay, waiting to be molded. And, as evidenced by my gushing language over the last couple of posts, that is exactly what happened. If we take as the standard for “sufficient cultural affinity,” as vague as that phrase is, as the willingness to live in a given culture for, say, years at a time, Nepal accomplished that in a mere eight days. (Incidentally, Dubai has not met that standard: I don’t think I would want to live here for any extended period of time. But that is mostly due to the lack of any dominant culture in this über-international city or, alternatively, to a culture so universal—that is, a culture polished such that everyone can buy into it—that you can never claim it as your own. However, I would gladly live in Beirut or many other Arab cities.)
I find this insight, that cultural familiarity breeds cultural affinity, to have powerful implications. I look back through my cyber window onto developments in America and can’t help but see a dangerous spirit of xenophobia creeping back into our culture, especially as regards the world’s Muslims. Panicky congressional hearings on Muslims’ cooperation with police enforcement, the extension of controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the hoopla surrounding the “Ground Zero Mosque”—just three prominent measures that both reveal and propagate a sense of fear about people of the Muslim faith, including those who have hosted me so hospitably over the last four months. These are people, the protesters, who are mobilizing for the very democratic values for which America stands. I can’t even count how many of my Arab friends here have told me that the American media has them all wrong. Whether this is true or not, this is the perception. In turn, through my experience, through this blog, I have endeavored to modify, however slightly, some perceptions about this part of the world. I hope that we can now gently urge others to search a little deeper when approaching cultures about which they know little. I suggest that the result may be favorable to all parties involved.
In that spirit, I’ll leave you with some of Tom Roth’s art. Tom is one of my very best friends here in Dubai as well as a fantastic photographer. He asks that you not reproduce any of the following pictures. Do accept them, however, as a glimpse into the beauty of meeting the unknown.
Captions (from top): textile merchant; a friendly coppersmith, our age, in Patan; ping-pong in Patan; Tommy not sly enough; rickshaw drivers awaiting a fare; girl in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square; monkeys at the Monkey Temple; girls spinning the Swayambhunath’s prayer wheels; soccer as the universal language; Debbie at the World Peace Pagoda, Pokhara; ambling stream; terrain of the Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA); sunrise in the ACA; Nim inspecting the troops.
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