The Hill of the Skull is a book-length photo-essay by Jeremy Bassetti, a “writer, photographer and educator,” and Professor at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida in the USA.
With the text and photographs, Bassetti tracks his journey to a sacred mountain in Quillacollo, Bolivia as part of his academic research on mountain cultures, ostensibly to get an understanding of an annual festival to celebrate the ascension of the Virgin Mary. He explains the mix of indigenous ideas of Andean people with traditions and rituals of Catholicism, and engages, himself, in some of the practices.
I bought the e-book because it was convenient; less because of the text, and more because of the photography. I should state that I have for a long time become more and more uncomfortable with The World According to Paul Theroux, or any other Westerner traveling and exoticizing “others” in Asia, Africa and South America. The European (male) gaze in “travel writing” and visual art – from Joseph Conrad to Paul Gaugin, and anyone in-between (people like Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, or the Theroux family adventures) – seems to be quite unaware of itself….
Anyway, Bassetti’s Hill of the Skull is a brief introduction to the annual pilgrimage to the Andean sacred mountain where believers hold on to hope for a better life, and are “rewarded with a sense of peace, a renewed sense of faith in the divine, and the promise that better days are ahead”. It is a short text as an introduction to the pilgrimage to Quillacollo’s sacred mountain, and with the writer’s own struggles with belief and disbelief.
What does stand out is Bassetti’s personal journey in and out of faith, the absence of faith (belief and disbelief), and his personal difficulties…. He makes that clear. The interested reader should find those passages and observations insightful.
At one stage in the book (pp 23-24) Bassetti describes the changing hues of sunset and approaching nightfall, and continues: “I once read that in Bolivia we are ruled by the heavens. And while I didn’t believe in signs, I couldn’t ignore that the heavens above me were turning dark. At this hour, I wouldn’t be able to get a shaman to perform a ceremony for my friend. At least I tried. Besides, it’s not that I believe in any of it anyway.” (p 24)
This expression of disbelief pops up elsewhere. Earlier, on page 19, he responds to a friend’s email, request for a blessing. “Would you be so kind,” the woman asks, “as to ask any shaman, priests, or anyone to heal my baby?”
Bassetti writes: “I turned over her request in my head. Before I got her email, I had no intention of performing a ceremony on the Hill of the Skull. I didn’t believe in any of it….” While he expresses his disbelief, Bassetti wonders whether his own “lack of faith” would cost him and his loved ones “if not now, in this world, at some point in the future and in another realm”.
There is probably no moral equivalence, but after reading the text for a second time, I recalled Chinua Achebe’s comment about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?”
Bassetti’s podcasts and online resources Travel Writing World and Artifact International would be useful for the ingénue or anyone interested in conventional travel writing that does not challenge Eurocentric orthodoxy or types of Orientalism. The book is probably too much for the tribe of travel and food vloggers who are much more interested in their own social media profiles, and being “influencers” of people with short attention-spans. Just by the way, for greater depth and sensitivity about the world and history beyond Britain and the USA, the Empire Podcast hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple would be/is time infinitely better spent.
The photographs
Because of my own shortcomings I had difficulty assessing the photographs properly. By the time I made the transition from film to digital photography, I had returned to writing full-time and to academia (before that), and I am now back to writing – with professional news and documentary photography more than three decades in my past.
The most significant of my shortcomings is that I am quite unable to “do post-production” with digital photography. It requires too large an investment in technology – especially time. This means I am unable to “see” Bassetti’s pictures in the appropriate way. In the traditional darkroom we would look for good blacks, good whites and good greys, dodge and burn and crop pictures accordingly. In the e-book, Bassetti’s pictures look grey and muddy in places – by no fault of his, to be sure. Kindle is not a good platform for sharing pictures. Nonetheless, the pictures are a good accompaniment to the text. The viewer/reader gets a sense of the Andean community, and of the traditions that hold people together.
I especially liked the individual portraits of the women and men; the picture of the two women with their backs to the camera, one on the right pointing to something in the distance, deserves a deep caption. It’s probably my favourite picture in the book.
I am not sure why the hands of people (in separate pictures) are cropped out of the frames. Hands (and faces) are almost always central features of the image. They tell marvellous stories of the people captured in photographs. I can only guess that “cutting off” the hands of people in some of the pictures was unintentional, and probably a result of the publishing process.
In a post-script, to the book, the British writer, Pico Iyer added something that I found unsettling: While travelling to Bolivia with a friend, he writes: “We sensed something raw, untamed… when we arrived in La Paz, we noted that the ladies in rainbowed ponchos and bowler hats who lined the streets spoke a language with no written texts and made no attempt to press their goods on us.” (Emphases added)
The dialogue between Bassetti and Alys Tomlinson, a British “editorial and fine art documentary photographer”at the back end of the book, helps provide further, more detailed insight into how he (Bassetti) went about the project, and how Tomlinson approaches her work. It is my favourite part of the book.