In the case of PNG little or nothing was known about conditions on the ground or the people living there. In the case of Ethiopia so
little was known (or the need so great) that it functioned as a vessel for wishes born of hope and desperation. The need to idealize goals is legitimate,
necessary and particularly human, in part to generate the motivation to achieve them, but there is a point on the continuum where justifiable optimism
begins to create imaginary geographies directly proportional to the exaggerated desire. |
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That is the sovereign territory of Shangri-La and it has its counterpart in a territory delineated by exaggerate fears, a country of
ethnocentrism and racism.
Many Western Shangri-Las are located in the south but whether they are tropical or just relatively inaccessible, they are normally countries
of the mind where life is less complex, there is less so-called civilization - but often no less comfort - greater order and more deeply rooted tradition.
Sometimes these Shangri-Las contain all the elements of reaction - a nostalgia for a past, for an enlightened golden age gone by which never existed.
There are aspects of this in Gaugin’s South Seas quest, for example. “...Tahiti was in 1890, in fact, a place that had broken almost
entirely with its old religion and Gaugin’s source of information was not the Tahitian people, but accounts first published by European travellers
a century earlier. The stories recounted by Gaugin in Noa Noa are, as the art historian Nicholas Wadley points out, lifted verbatim from a book
published in Paris in 1837.”
Shangri-La is just one of a number of dangerous visions formulating utopian conditions. Often the structure of government in these ideal
societies is authoritarian (enlightened or otherwise); frequently - like El Dorado - they are Lands of Promise where there is to be real land for the
landless, real riches for the poor and comfort and ease for those struggling to exist in the here and now. These imaginary geographies are proposals
of innocence and quests for freedom - spiritual and secular. However, when they move from the realm of ideas into real territory, history indicates that
- intentionally or otherwise - they have become genocidal in their consequences. One ethnicities’ Shangri-La can be another ethnicities’ perdition. |
