In Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal, Mark Liechty fluidly unfurls the interconnected stories of Nepali entrepreneurs and Western travelers who built the infrastructure of Nepal's tourism industry. Artfully threading together comings and goings of people, capital, and ideas in Nepal, especially Kathmandu, he utilizes interviews with key actors and ephemera from various phases of tourism to create an exceptionally readable text, with interest within and beyond the academic world. Liechty challenges broad-brush stories of Shangri-la and lawless lands with investigations of how Nepal's tourism industry changed over a half-century because of very particular encounters with distinctively positioned actors.
Far Out questions assumptions about Nepal's interaction with the West, insisting that the arrival of foreign tourists and seekers led not to mimicry, but to a more complex exchange of ideas and practices. In rewriting a story of engagement that makes Nepali actors active agents in interactions, Liechty is able to explore Nepal's important political and social changes between the 1950s and 1980s, including the existence of Nepal's own countercultural movement. Liechty has unusual access to dozens of key actors in the emergence of the tourism industry in Nepal and shows skill in connecting these very detailed nuggets with larger sweeps of Nepali and global history.
The Theosophy tradition and other Shangri-la fantasies of Nepal in the nineteenth century are important background to contemporary tourism, but Liechty notes that these conditions, like many others, are not alone sufficient. Before 1951, when Nepal became a nation-state, Nepal had a reputation in Western popular writing, but few international visitors. Subsequent press coverage of the successful summiting of Everest (1953) and the skill of King Mahendra to turn his coronation (1956) into an international event took Nepal out of the books and onto the map as a site to be visited.
There are a number of historically structured conjunctures in this tale; disparate events such as the Cold War and the Yeti Mania shape the scale and nature of international encounters in Nepal. In the 1950s, foreign mysticism and Nepal's political opening came together to make it possible for Nepal to be a physical instantiation of Western mystical fantasies. Furthermore, Liechty attends to the infrastructures that are necessary in different periods to attract different constituencies to Nepal. Far Out goes beyond these intersecting phenomena to show how individual actors, such as Boris Lissanevitch, John Coapman, Ravi Chawla, and many others, led Nepal into new realms of tourism that the government struggled to embrace. Liechty's chapter on John Coapman, who “… stared me straight in the eye and told me things I knew to be untrue … realizing that the myth was the story” (p. 95), showcases his ability to bring to life the characters of Nepal's tourism journey and contextualize their fantastical accounts.
In many accounts, Nepal served as a background for Western hippies and alternative lifestyle movements. Far Out explores how these counterculture actors, especially those escaping the politics of the West in order to “just live” in Nepal, were interpreted by Nepalis as Western renouncers—people rejecting social conventions, but also dirty foreigners, both literally and ritually. Nepali youth observed the exotic outsiders, but were also creating their own modernity and alternative politics. Liechty notes that Nepal's call for new worlds is not imitative, but “derives from exactly the same modern forces that also drove her Western peers to Kathmandu” (p. 263). He also observes how the impure practices of hippies not only challenged Hindu ideas, but also offered opportunities for subaltern subjects in Nepal. Westerners found in Nepal not merely an alternative lifestyle but an alternative life that freed them from the politics and history of 1960s America and Europe that drove many out of their homes. “Hippie Nepal” is the focus of Far Out, and this rich account could stand as a book by itself.
Liechty observes how, by the 1970s, “a broad shift in global youth culture, not government policy” (p. 288) led to the end of the quest for the challenges of living rough, replaced with an interest in struggles with nature and the Nepali government's promotion of the country's cultural attractions. These new tourist attractions found support from the international development industry and elite Nepalis with overseas experience, who were able to provide the comforts of home with a “traditional” flavor. This new generation of tourists had more money but less time than their predecessors, and hoped to “do Nepal,” whether its mountains or its monasteries, efficiently.
Liechty's wide-ranging review of Nepal's encounters with the world takes readers from street-level views of Bishnu Shahi's Chai and Pie shop to the influence of US-China rapprochement in the 1970s on Nepali tourism policy. Infusing decades of research into his text allows Liechty to produce a tour de force that offers details for the Nepal expert, new and sophisticated approaches for tourism scholars, and a model of interdisciplinary, well-researched, and readable scholarship.
