Michel Peissel
| Michel Peissel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 11, 1937 Paris, France |
| Died | October 7, 2011 (aged 74) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Ethnologist, Author, Explorer, Adventurer |
| Years active | 1958–2006 |
Michel Georges Francois Peissel (February 11, 1937 – October 7, 2011) was a French ethnologist, explorer and author. He wrote twenty books mostly on his Himalayan and Tibetan expeditions. Peissel was an emeritus member of the Explorers Club and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Raised in England, Peissel later studied a year at Oxford University and the Harvard Business School and obtained a doctorate in Tibetan Ethnology from the Sorbonne, Paris.
In 1958, at the age of 21 — stranded on the coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico,— he walked 200 miles (320 km) down the coast to Belize discovering, on the way, 14 unrecorded Mayan archeological sites. This journey changed his life, and is an account of Quintana Roo State that unveils a world where 'chicleros', 'cocaleros' and Mayan fishermen ruled a vast and mostly unexplored region of North America. Today millions of vacationers stay in places Peissel once walked, and his often humorous accounts tell us much about contemporary Mayan culture.He left the Harvard Business School after a year, he decided to study ethnology and explore the last unknown regions of Tibet and the Himalayas.
In 1959, Peissel organised his first Himalayan expedition out of Harvard to study the Sherpas of the Everest district.
In 1964, he set out across the Himalayas to explore Mustang, a minute, Tibetan-speaking kingdom whose identity had escaped the attention of both scholars and the general public. His written account of the expedition, Mustang: A Lost Tibetan Kingdom, was published in 1967 and became an international best seller.
The Mustang expedition was followed by 28 others to the remotest regions of the Tibetan-speaking world. In 1968, he became one of the first foreigners to cross Bhutan and study its little-known eastern districts. He then made the first detailed study of the Kingdom of Zanskar in Kashmir, later studying the Minaro (Dards) of Baltistan and Ladakh, while attempting to locate precisely the "land of the gold digging ants" of Herodotus.
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