Will the Himalayas remain a protected sanctuary where free peoples can continue to live according to their customs, far from civilization and able, thanks to the relief, to keep between them and our world an ultimate barrier? Journalist-writer Olivier Weber asks the question from all angles, with talent and affection.
Here is what the daily “Liberation” wrote about its book: “Nourished by the stories of the mythical characters who preceded them; from the exalted delusions of the Man who wanted to be king of Kipling to the redemption of the swastika mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, in Seven Years of Adventures in Tibet, the frozen solitudes inspire…
It was therefore necessary to have a well-made head to approach these highlands without getting lost in them. This is what Olivier Weber, major reporter, war correspondent, writer and adventurer, who ventured into the lost valleys of Mustang, a tiny kingdom (like neighboring Sikkim or Bhutan), has succeeded in stuck between China and Nepal. A “little Tibet” whose culture it shares, closed to foreigners until 1992, with untouched nature and the culture still protected.
Journalist and ethnologist
The opportunity for the journalist to become an ethnologist (the work appears in the Terre humaine collection) in a region that has remained unchanged for millennia and yet is undoubtedly living its last hours of freedom. Because the Chinese ogre is at the gates of this autonomous confetti with its backhoe loaders and bulldozers. Opening up, assistance, modernity; then enlistment, assimilation and repression … The examples of Tibet and Xinjiang leave little hope for its inhabitants. “In the south, voluntary submission [le Népal, lui-même sous tutelle économique chinoise, ndlr] with or without popular opium. In the north, the coercion of spirits by the new social contract, a control of souls. Beyond its role as a buffer zone, the enclave floated in this in-between. ”
To read urgently in the collection “Terre Humaine” (Plon)
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