Over the last two years Höpfner’s expeditions have led him to Central and Western Tibet, to Lhasa (capital of the autonomous province of Tibet), to the Kertsch Peninsula, the eastern part of the Ukraine and to the Sinai Peninsula.

What interested him the most during his trip was the evident distinction between the associations and “images of longing“ that western society tends to have of eastern cultures and countries and their actual lifeworlds; of those people “who, in recent years, have been satisfied and settled by state administration or global changes” (Höpfner, 2007).