ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Travel” Beyond the Cold War: Tourists, Travel Medicine, and the Emergence of a Biomedical Landscape in Nepal, 1950s-1960s

• In Event: ‘Beyond Bandung: Histories of Scientific, Technological and Medical Assistance between Decolonising Nations during the Cold War’ 2

English Abstract

Nepal has become the world center of mountaineering soon after the PRC took over Tibet and closed the way between Tibet and the Himalayas in 1951─ Western mountaineers who had competed to conquer Everest then all turned to Nepal. The Cold-war geopolitics further fueled this process: In a way, the Nepali government was able to build up the infrastructure for mountaineering tourism with the help of the long-term U.S. aid. Meanwhile, coming along with the aid, the families of American diplomats and technical experts became the first group of foreign tourists in Nepal and lit up the Nepali government’s interest in mountaineering tourism. This paper traces the stories of foreign tourists who visited Nepal for various reasons during the Cold War and demonstrates how, through their needs for medication and encounters with locals, they also brought about dynamic perceptions, imaginations, and aspirations of biomedicine to the Nepali people. In their traveling, this paper suggests, foreign tourists had unintentionally crafted a new biomedical landscape in Nepal, which became the ground for travel medicine, a specialized form of medicine that emerged in the 1980s, to thrive also in Nepal. Previously, scholars have had fruitful discussions about the entanglements between the U.S. aid, “modernity,” and scientific/ medical programs around the world. By focusing on “foreign tourists” that were specifically made in the Cold War, this paper provides a window onto the more complicated relations between geopolitics, biomedicine, and knowledge production in Cold-war Asia that were related to but made outside of direct medical and technical assistances.

Author

• Alex Yu, University of Toronto