Meandering through space, place, and environment:
A Personal Journey
By Sanjay Nepal
The purpose of this brief address is to give a reflective account of my lived experience and how that has influenced my perspectives as a geographer. I hope to highlight the significance of space, place, and environment in my exposure to geography.
To begin with, I have had a long association with geography, starting from my undergraduate years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and up until today. I was told by one of my instructors early on that “geography is something about everything and everything about something.” Although brief and simplistic in this explanation, geography has offered me, and I hope has offered you, excellent opportunities to think broadly, to connect the dots, make meanings of those dots and connections, and the bigger picture that emerges sometimes clear, and other times complex. That complexity provides fodder for more curiosities and discoveries. My research is focused on conservation geographies and international tourism, these are subject matters that are greatly relevant to space, place, and environment. Even though this note will not focus on these subjects, I hope to weave these topics into my personal experience described below.
The COVID‐19 pandemic has had a disastrous impact on human psychology, emotions, and physical well‐being. Many of my close family members and friends were impacted by this— some lost their lives. Living in the horror of the present naturally made me long for the happy memories of the past. The pandemic made me homesick in some ways, even though Canada has now been my home for more than two decades. I first visited Canada as a tourist in 1994, and as graduate student in 1995. But I was more nostalgic about my carefree days of childhood spent in Kathmandu, where I was born and lived until I became an adult.
Often referred to as the city of gods, Kathmandu was a peaceful city in the 1970s, it was a green city, nothing like today, as it has become one of the most polluted cities in the world. The Kathmandu of the 1970s and ’80s very much lived up to its old name: “Kantipur” (in Nepali, Kanti means light, pur means city, or City of Light). Kantipur attracted hordes of westerners in the 1960s and early ’70s, many of them had left their hometowns and headed east. Kathmandu was the final destination for many westerners, as they sought peace and spirituality in a part of the world least affected by anxieties associated with global protests and wars. But many westerners were also pulled by the cheap, and sometimes freely available, cannabis and other psychedelic drugs of that period. Some of them were also looking for something pure and innocent, sweet and simple pleasures in life, and were just happy to be living amongst the gods and goddesses and devotees in Kathmandu Valley (Figures 1 and 2). Many stayed back, became entrepreneurs, some married locally or became part of the Nepalese society.
Figure 1
Inner courtyard in Patan Durbar Square. The Square is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its focal attraction is buildings and monuments reflecting traditional Newari architecture that has made Kathmandu famous for cultural tourism.
Today, Kathmandu still maintains a strong contingent of expats from the Western world. An excellent anthropological and sociological account of countercultural influences in Kathmandu during that period can be found in Mark Liechty's (2017) Far out: Countercultural seekers and the tourist encounters in Nepal. The western tourists found happiness wandering the narrow and crowded streets of Kathmandu. Paknajole, where my family lived, is now considered part of downtown Kathmandu, but at that time it was located at the urban fringe. Our neighbourhood was characterized by many small parcels of private and public open spaces covered with fruit trees of all kinds, and punctuated by tall, stately trees and beautiful ornamental shrubs. Unlike today, back then land use around Kathmandu's perimeter road was primarily rural, mostly covered with paddy and vegetable fields. There were many orchards and ornamental trees even in my neighbourhood. Most among the fruit trees in the neighbourhood were pomegranate, persimmon, plum, melon, and fig. My family had a small vegetable garden that also had two plum trees, one pomegranate and one fig tree, in addition to many other ornamental plants. Each spring, the fruit trees delighted us with their splendid blooms. They also provided good cover for hide‐and‐seek games with friends from the neighbourhood. During summer, the fruit trees filled our insatiable appetites for sweet and tangy plums, persimmons, and peaches. There were times when we would sneak into neighbours' orchards, steal as many fruits as we could in one go, and run away to find a safe place so we could eat them all, chat and boast about the bounties we had for the day, and how we were going to tell the stories of our heroic acts and make our other friends jealous.
Figure 2
Boudhanath, a Buddhist pilgrimage and World Heritage site in Kathmandu Valley.
A 15‐minute walk either in the northerly or westerly direction from my house led to one of the two major rivers that drains the Kathmandu Valley. Hot summer days were spent swimming in the river and cold winters were warmed by the majestic views of the snow‐capped mountains further north, glistening in the early morning sun. Mountain views in the distance were unobstructed, as there were no high‐rise buildings in the Valley— the tallest private building at that time had merely 10 floors. Of course, the Royal family's residence was an exception.
Nostalgia about my childhood made me look up Yi‐Fu Tuan's conception of “topophilia.” I am sure most geographers are familiar with the term, but I will just say a few things about it. Topophilia, in its simplest form, means love of a place. It refers to “the human being's affective ties with the material environment” (Tuan 1974, 4). It is the “warm feelings you get from a place,” as a recent article in The Atlantic states (Brooks 2021). It is “a vivid, emotional, and personal experience, and it leads to unexplainable affections” (Brooks 2021). Topophilia does not need to be associated with one's childhood home. In my case, I have unexplainable affections for Kathmandu, even though today the city is crowded, polluted, and dirty. I frequently long for the majestic views of the mountains seen in the horizon. I long for the hot summer days spent swimming in the river close to home. The ancestral home no longer exists, bought out and demolished. Where once stood our house is now the entrance to a tourist hotel. The entire neighbourhood today is part of the central tourist district in Kathmandu. Almost 90% of the original residents from that neighbourhood has either moved out to other parts of the city, or migrated overseas (like myself) in search of, quote unquote, a “better place.”
Looking back, the old neighbourhood was indeed a happy place, and perhaps would qualify as a “better place.” Today, my past is a “foreign country” (Lowenthal 1985), as I find myself a stranger in my old neighbourhood. I need a visa to visit Nepal as dual citizenship is not permitted there. All street signs, symbols, and markers of old neighbourhood are gone, and the landscapes are unrecognizable as high‐rise modern buildings slowly replace traditional architectural houses.
Let me tell you a little bit about Kathmandu Valley's drainage pattern. The two major rivers that flow across before exiting the valley are Bagmati and Bishnumati. Originating in the Shivapuri Hills, Bagmati flows down the valley from the north- eastern direction and is joined by several tribu- taries (Figure 3). The Bishnumati river merges with Bagmati at almost a central point in the valley before flowing westward and finally leaving the valley. The two rivers and their tributaries were, and still are, the lifeline of Kathmandu residents, but they were more than a lifeline for local farmers who depended on them for irrigating their fields and washing their vegetables after harvest, before selling them in Kathmandu's market centres and street corners. The rivers are sacred, with strong ties to Kathmandu's religious, cultural, and social fabric. To sum up, if Bagmati was the soul of Kathmandu Valley, Bishnumati was its soulmate, and the valley their theatre to stage their elegance, beauty, charm, and occasional wrath. Together, they supplied the blood that enriched the soul, mind, and body of valley residents.
Today, the rivers that once irrigated paddy fields, vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards of many Kathmandu residents, have been relentlessly abused as the number of residents grows unchecked. The valley's human population has increased four‐fold since the 1980s. Valley residents have come to think of the rivers as places to dispose of their household waste and garbage. Once considered sacred, water in the rivers flows as a toxic sludge and is a major health hazard.
Kathmandu was changing dramatically in the 1980s and ’90s. Gone were the days of counter- cultural tourists, who were gradually replaced by adventure‐ and thrill‐seekers coming to tramp in the high mountains and tropical jungles of Nepal. Technology was rapidly changing and greatly facilitated global travel. For a landlocked country dependent totally on India for outside exposure, residents in Nepal found new ways of seeing the world and connecting with it. Technological marvels such as the home videos in the early 1980s, and later email and the Internet, allowed residents in Kathmandu to imagine and fantasize the world in their own personal ways. Pico Iyer (1988) in his travel writing—Video night in Kathmandu— expertly captures this fascination. He states that the 1980s was a period of social and cultural upheaval largely influenced by the spread of globalization. In addition to Kathmandu, Iyer's book documents technology‐influenced globalization trends and social transformations in cities in several other countries in South and South- east Asia.
Today, local news channels in Kathmandu show real‐time live footage of events happening around the world. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and similar other social media have provided locals in Kathmandu unprecedented opportunities to engage with the world at a fraction of the price paid two decades earlier. Barriers associated with time, space, technologies, ideas, cost, and access no longer exist. Changes in Kathmandu's economy, societal norms, and the values and attitudes of its residents may perhaps be considered as manifestations of a society trending toward the modern world, a world that embraces “modernity.” According to the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1998, 94), modernity is associated with a society, “...which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past.”
Figure 3
Bagmati River after a clean‐up campaign. The river flows through Kathmandu Valley and is impacted by housing encroachment, household waste, and negligent river management.
In 2019, I had an interesting encounter with a husband and wife team of shop owners selling Nepalese arts and crafts in a shopping alley in Shanghai. The husband was Caucasian, and had lived most of his adult life in the US. The wife was Chinese, but from a different city in China. They traded exclusively in Nepalese crafts. A year before in Kathmandu, as I was searching for Tibetan instrumental music CDs, I met a couple that owned a shop selling Tibetan gemstones and jewelleries in the tourist shopping district of Thamel. The wife was from China, the husband a Nepali (from outside Kathmandu). They traded exclusively in Tibetan crafts and sold mostly to Chinese tourists. These two examples illustrate a different meeting of the foreign and the local, or the cosmopolitans and the locals. In both cases, the locals become cosmopolitans and the cosmopolitans become the locals. This is perhaps yet another example of Gidden's conception of modernity, a state of being in which complementary identities co‐exist at the same time. In addition, the shopping alley in Shanghai was once part of a tightly clustered traditional residential district. Similarly, the tourist shopping districts in Kathmandu were gradually displacing old residential neighbourhoods and transforming into modern enclaves exclusively for the purpose of serving the global tourists (Figure 4). In this way, local gives in to global, and the global adjusts to the local. In other words, residents in Shanghai and Kathmandu may be living in con- fused realities.
However, the above examples about Kathmandu match up with examples elsewhere. My own experience living in Bangkok (Thailand), London (Ontario), Berne (Switzerland), Otago (New Zealand), Prince George (British Columbia), College Station (Texas), and here in Kitchener‐Waterloo, convinces me that Kathmandu is just a microcosm of a global society in transition—a society that is in flux. Many traditional societies are in sync with modernity, as the old gives way to the new. In other instances, the old struggles to maintain its compo- sure against the new, as in the case of the heritage building in Shanghai where Chairman Mao held the first congress of the Community Party of China. This building today stands in sharp contrast with the tall and futuristic buildings around it. Others welcome change as the inevitable, as illustrated earlier with the examples of shopping districts in Kathmandu and Shanghai.
But there is also tension between the old and the new. Some transformations make special places ordinary, almost without any defining characters. Differences between Las Vegas and Macau, or between Los Angeles and Tokyo, to name a few, become less pronounced. Places become placeless. Every modern city looks the same and offers similar thrills, amusements, and escapades. Disneyland Paris, Disneyland California, Disneyland Hong Kong, and Disneyland Shanghai (the most recent addition to the Disneyland franchise) all offer the same fantasy, albeit at a global scale. In the words of Appadurai (1996), a well‐known theorist in globalization studies, globalized spaces I described above can be conceptualized as dia- sporic and deterritorialized.
Figure 4
A street souvenir shop in Basantapur Durbar Square, Kathmandu.
One key point Appadurai (1996, 32) raises about globalized influences is concerned with the new global cultural economy, which “is a complex, over‐lapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center‐periphery models,” or similar other theories of development. He then proposes a framework to explore the disjuncture in the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnos- capes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes - see Appadurai (1996) for a critical analysis of these concepts. These multiple scapes are the products of an inter‐connected world that is characterized as deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational, and are instrumental in creating multiple localities, multiple identities, and multiple modernities, concepts gaining recent grounds in sociology and globalization studies. In the same vein, natural environments give way to cultural environments, but many environments are hybrid of nature and culture, with multiple identities, multiple meanings, and complex associations. I experienced this in Shenzhen, which today claims itself as the electronics capital of the world, but the city is also known for its incredible wetlands, parks, and treelined streets. The tension is no longer about the nature‐culture divide, but about how places are developed, perceived, lived, and consumed. The integration or disconnect between nature and culture is a fascinating aspect of geographical studies.
To conclude, in this brief point of view, I have tried to raise four main points. First, change is a hallmark of geographical studies—space, place, and environment inevitably change. Change brings tensions, increases complexity. Second, globalization speeds up change and triggers social transformation. Global societies are complex arrangements of multiple cultures, values, attitudes, aspirations, and perspectives. Third, amidst the complexity, many seek simplicity and authenticity, and find happiness in small‐scale but interesting differences. Fourth, desire for simplicity triggers inexplicable attachment to particular places. I find myself most at ease in mountain environments whether in Nepal, or in the Canadian Rockies or the Swiss Alps. Finally, Kathmandu, is a microcosm of the world at large, enveloped in modernity, tense with opportunities and challenges, and simultaneously charting constructive and destructive futures.
Fortunately for me, I continue to visit Kathmandu and other places in Nepal, either for personal family matters, or for research. I have had several Canadian graduate students who have conducted fieldwork in Nepal and continue to supervise graduate students conducting research in Nepal. These activities have given me opportunities to reconnect with the past and learn new things about the ever changing place. Personally, where there are no high mountains, I am drawn to neighbourhoods that are named Foothills, as in Prince George, or West Heights in Kitchener where I currently live. Appadurai (1996, 54) calls this the “social practice of fantasy.” I have lived in many places and travelled widely, but the glamour of transnational travel and living pales in comparison to the simplicity of a life I once lived and experienced as a child. I try to introduce such simplicity in my backyard garden with Buddha heads, Tibetan prayer flags, and Yak bells. To others, these are garden accessories. To me, these are nostalgia triggers and representations of topophilia.
References
Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large – Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Brooks, A. 2021. Find the place you love. Then move there. The Atlantic, January 14. www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/ 2021/01/What Moving House Can Do for Your Happiness ‐ The Atlantic/617667/
Giddens, A. 1998. Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making sense of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Iyer, P. 1988. Video night in Kathmandu: And other reports from not‐so‐far east. New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf Inc.
Liechty, M. 2017. Far out: Countercultural seekers and the tourist encounters in Nepal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Tuan, Y.‐F. 1974. Topophilia: A study of environmental perceptions, attitudes, and values. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Prentice‐Hall.