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Contribution short abstract:

Exploring how the perception of Emptiness of the landscape made by Western trekkers in the Nepali Himalayas emerges, this paper discusses how the local inhabitants running hospitality businesses respond to the trekkers’ imaginaries. It also highlights the global imaginative connections they draw from in doing so.

Contribution long abstract:

Every year tens of thousands of trekkers, mostly from Euro-American contexts, walk along the Annapurna Circuit Trek in the central Nepali Himalayas. Generally departing from Besishahar, a town at around 800 meters a.s.l., after about a week the trekkers reach the Thorong La, a 5,416 metres pass, to then descend in the valley of Muktinath and lower Mustang. As emerged in the research I have carried out in Kagbeni, a village located on the route, and through extensive digital ethnography with former trekkers, an important factor contributing to the lure the Himalayas exert on the visitors is the perceived emptiness of the Himalayan landscape. An emptiness that the trekkers deem central in the experiences of personal growth they report making on the route.

This paper discusses how the emergence of this perception of emptiness is bound to an understanding of the locals as “noble-savages” in a state of nature, and has its roots in the historical Western imperial project in the Himalayas. Besides contrasting the trekkers’ experience with that of the locals, who experience the local landscape as a living space shared by humans, deities, and other beings, this paper will also explore how the locals interact, attempting to run successful hospitality businesses, with the desires and imaginaries of the trekkers. It will focus in particular on how they do so by relying on multiple imaginative connections that stretch to places as far as the United States and that play out both through personal relationships and on social media.