Anthropologist Ortner's (Columbia) ethnographic immersion into
Sherpa life and how it has been affected by the international
climbing culture is a remarkable display of agile fieldwork,
sensitive to all the distinctive shadings that compose her subject.
In the valleys and foothills of the Everest massif live the
Sherpas, who for the last 100 years have had their remote outpost
unsettled by the influx of mountaineering expeditions run by sahibs
(a Sherpa term Ortner uses both ironically and as a handy tag). In
an effort to gain a sense of how the two groups interrelate - how
much each group's perceptions of the other have validity and in
what context - Ortner draws upon a substantial arsenal of
ethnographic theory. The work of Clifford Geertz is brought to bear
on both camps' intentions and desires; so too Edward Said's notion
of orientalism and how it erects ideologically warped imagery.
Althusser, Foucault, James Clifford, and Marshall Sahlins help her
clear away the fog of colonial complicity and the asymmetries
conjured by power and wealth: though she can't slip into the Sherpa
perspective like an old pair of shoes for reasons of cultural
conditioning, she is ever attentive to it. Ortner is most
interested in the nexus of the mountaineers' and Sherpas' values,
beliefs, and ideals, and the various relationships that were
spawned from their commingling, which often unwittingly reinforced
misconceptions. In the records of the mountaineers, she seeks among
the representations the allusions within the illusions, measuring
the biases and fantasies against the touchstone of the "cumulative
record of high-quality ethnographic work." Ortner arrives at a
complex but cohesive portrait of the century-long Sherpa
association with the mountaineers, an elegant wedding of two
distinct cultural strands - with all the inherent harmonies and
tensions - a moving picture that shifts focus and emphasis as new
elements, from identity politics to the counterculture, come into
play. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Sherpas were dead, two more victims of an attempt to scale
Mt. Everest. Members of a French climbing expedition, sensitive
perhaps about leaving the bodies where they could not be recovered,
rolled them off a steep mountain face. One body, however, crashed
to a stop near Sherpas on a separate expedition far below. They
stared at the frozen corpse, stunned. They said nothing, but an
American climber observing the scene interpreted their thoughts:
Nobody would throw the body of a white climber off Mt. Everest.
For more than a century, climbers from around the world have
journ-eyed to test themselves on Everest's treacherous slopes,
enlisting the expert aid of the Sherpas who live in the area.
Drawing on years of field research in the Himalayas, renowned
anthropologist Sherry Ortner presents a compelling account of the
evolving relationship between the mountaineers and the Sherpas, a
relationship of mutual dependence and cultural conflict played out
in an environment of mortal risk.
Ortner explores this relationship partly through gripping
accounts of expeditions--often in the climbers' own words--ranging
from nineteenth-century forays by the British through the historic
ascent of Hillary and Tenzing to the disasters described in Jon
Krakauer's "Into Thin Air." She reveals the climbers, or "sahibs,"
to use the Sherpas' phrase, as countercultural romantics, seeking
to transcend the vulgarity and materialism of modernity through the
rigor and beauty of mountaineering. She shows how climbers'
behavior toward the Sherpas has ranged from kindness to cruelty,
from cultural sensitivity to derision. Ortner traces the political
and economic factors that led the Sherpas to join expeditions and
examines the impact of climbing on their traditional culture,
religion, and identity. She examines Sherpas' attitude toward
death, the implications of the shared masculinity of Sherpas and
sahibs, and the relationship between Sherpas and the increasing
number of women climbers. Ortner also tackles debates about whether
the Sherpas have been "spoiled" by mountaineering and whether
climbing itself has been spoiled by commercialism.
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