Conclusion and Epilogue

Abstract

This book has traced depictions of Tibet and the Himalayas in four broad areas — politics, religion, people and natural environment — over the course of approximately one century. Examining such a long period of time has allowed us to distinguish certain changes which surface in all four of these broad areas, albeit to a different extent. Scepticism, and even hostility, towards organized religion in Inner Asia was replaced by a growing appreciation of a more individually experienced spirituality. While in the late nineteenth century Tibetan Buddhism had often come under attack for being mechanical, ignorant, superstitious and conducive to feudalism, interwar comments were much more frequently focused on the lessons Europe could draw from both the good and evil aspects of spirituality. This change was closely connected to a turn away from organized religions in Europe and the emergence of more and more individual theories and models of spirituality, such as those of Blavatsky or Ludendorff. When writing about the indigenous populations of Inner Asia, this change was less pronounced, yet there still existed a gradual breaking up of older attitudes through an appreciation of individual ‘indigenes’ encountered or through less clear-cut ways of interpreting behaviour such as racial psychology. This change, however, was more ambivalent than that in the area of religion, as is demonstrated by the easy return to blatantly racist and jingoist stereotyping during the late 1940s and 1950s.