Two Worlds

A blog about UK housing, Latin America, migration and the environment

  • Home
  • Housing
  • Migration
  • Housing and migration publications
  • About
  • Contact
You are here: Home > Latin America > Utopias?

Utopias?

November 9, 2013

Christopher Columbus 'discovers' the Americas

Christopher Columbus ‘discovers’ the Americas (picture: Wikimedia Commons)

Shangri-La and El Dorado: hoped-for earthly utopias, searched for but never quite found. Last month offered glimpses of the real stories of both, through the debut of the restored version of John Noel’s 1924 film The Epic of Everest and the British Museum’s exhibition Beyond El Dorado. Though separated by almost 400 years, the searches had similarities.

The myth of Shangri-La was set out in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Its origins might well be in the early attempts on Everest, which sparked a rash of popular travel books as well as Noel’s two remarkable films of the 1922 and 1924 expeditions. Noel centres the myth on the Shining Crystal Monastery in Shegar, where the climbers halted en route. Noel had been strongly impressed by the monastery’s beauty and dramatic location when he first saw it in 1922, but according to Wade Davis it was the first expedition’s leader, Charles Howard-Bury, who saw it as the pinnacle of his ‘spiritual seeking’, having had no previous knowledge of its existence despite his familiarity with Tibetan culture.

Other climbers such as George Mallory were more prosaic: Tibet was ‘a hateful country inhabited by hateful people’. However, the high level of interest in the film (which included the last shots of Mallory and Irvine before their dramatic disappearance) meant that a mystical presentation of Tibet prevailed. For the many who saw it on both sides of the Atlantic, the film offered their first impressions of Shangri-La itself, augmented by the lamas and musicians shipped over by Noel to enliven the screenings.

El Dorado was both Spanish America’s mythical ‘lost city of gold’ and the name given by the Spanish to the chief of the Muisca people, who was literally ‘the gold one’. The Muisca initiation ceremony for a new ruler was to cover his naked body in gold dust, and despatch him to the middle of the sacred LakeGuatavita, on a raft loaded with gold ornaments. Once in the centre of the lake, the chief would hurl the gold into the water as an offering to the god believed to live beneath it. The BritishMuseum’s show has a gold model of the raft as well as many of the exquisite ornaments made by the Muisca and other peoples skilled in gold artistry in what is now Colombia.

Needless to say, following the conquest, several attempts were made to find the Muisca gold, none very successful.  The Spanish greed for the metal made them blind to the beauty of the objects themselves. Gold held no monetary value for the indigenous peoples, it was simply an exquisite material from which to create religious and other images. Some of the exhibition’s most striking pieces are the smallest: tiny gold jaguars and other sacred animals. The collection from which they come, the Museo de Oro in Bogota, must represent a small fraction of what the Spanish found, the rest having been melted into ingots.

What similarities are there between the stories of the two utopias? Both discoveries were marked by violence. After various attempts to penetrate mystical Tibet, British forces finally entered in 1904, were frustrated in their attempted passage to Lhasa and massacred more than six hundred soldiers armed only with swords who stood in the way. The search for El Dorado involved torture of ‘Indians’ thought to know the whereabouts of the gold, although Hugh Thomas says the first conquest of the region ‘brought almost as much tragedy to the conquerors as to the conquered’.

Both utopias were real places, with some of the characteristics attributed to them, although neither lived up to the more exaggerated expectations. Neither utopia had a precise location, however, the names Shangri-La and El Dorado being pinned on many other places apart from those noted here.

And in both cases the utopias were destroyed, or at least severely degraded, by the outsiders who encountered them.  The indigenous peoples of Latin America are a tiny fraction of the numbers there when Columbus first arrived, and many of these are still under threat from plunder of gold and its modern equivalent, oil. The Shining Crystal Monastery was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and the destruction of Tibet’s traditions under Chinese occupation is well known.  While both film and book remind us that the realities of Shangri-La and El Dorado were less than utopian, they also allow us to savour some of the explorers’ amazement when they first came upon them.

Category: Latin America | Tags: Colombia

« Previous Next »

Subscribe

Subscribe to the Two Worlds blog and we'll send you an email alert when we publish a new post. Please review our Privacy Policy if you have any questions or concerns.

Categories

  • Housing
  • Migration
  • Latin America
  • Masaya project updates
  • Energy and the environment
  • Central America wildlife
  • Book reviews
  • Obituaries

Tags

allocations ALMOs Amazon river Argentina armadillos asylum beds in sheds Berta Cáceres birds Bolivar borrowing rules Bosawás Brazil budget butterflies caribbean census chile climate change Colombia community cohesion coronavirus Costa Rica council housing Covid-19 Cuba daily life destitution dictators drugs economics Ecuador El Salvador energy efficiency env environment Green Deal Guatemala Gypsies and Travellers Haiti homelessness homeownership Honduras housing housing associations housing benefit housing finance housing i housing investment housing market housing policy hum human rights iguanas immigration checks India Indigenous people inequality integration interoceanic canal investment Ireland Latin America Latin writers local authorities Malvinas Masaya media Mexico migration migration policy migration statistics mining model cities Nicaragua Nicaragua crisis Nicaraguan elections Northern Ireland outsourcing panama Paraguay pension funds planning private rented sector public transport race refugees regeneration rents right to buy right to rent Scotland sloths slums solar energy Spain Spanish conquest stock transfer syria tenancy reform tenant involvement transport ukraine US intervention Venezuela Vista Alegre volcanoes welfare reform

Blogroll

  • Blogs for the London Review of Books
  • Articles for The Guardian
  • Blogs for Open Democracy
  • Blogs for Council on Hemispheric Affairs
  • Articles for Counterpunch
  • Articles for The Grayzone
  • Articles for NACLA
  • Posts for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
  • Articles for Global Research
  • Articles for LA Progressive
  • Two Worlds on Substack

Related websites

  • Chartered Institute of Housing
  • Housing Rights
  • Leicester Masaya Link Group
  • Council on Hemispheric Affairs
  • UK Housing Review
Housing Guardian contributor

Admin

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
John Perry John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on
UK housing and migration issues and writes about those
and other topics covered in this blog.
Copyright © 2012- Two Worlds. Privacy & Cookie Policy. Powered by WordPress and Hybrid.