30 December 2024

Exploring "Other Everests" - One Mountain, Many Worlds


 

Probably the highlight of my year was receiving my copy of Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds (MUP, 2024). This book is the culmination of one of the most interesting and enjoyable academic ventures I’ve ever been involved with. I feel very fortunate to have been able to add a small contribution to this collection in the form of an essay which helped me to find a focus and a framework for an idea which I had long been mulling over – the ‘Lost Horizon’ idea of the Himalaya as a home for imaginative geographies, utopian projections, and the realities upon which such notions where actually grounded. Now, having read the finished book in its entirety, I feel absolutely in awe of the company amongst which my chapter is collected. Hats off to my fellow Other Everests authors and the editors, who have all done a magnificent job in creating such a wide-ranging, thoughtful, thought-provoking, insightful, and immaculately edited collection.

 

Given my involvement with the project and the fact that I’ve authored one of the chapters, it would be highly inappropriate for me to attempt to write an in-depth review of the book here on my own blog. So instead, I have collated the abstracts for each chapter (see below), as these give a very good overview of what the book is all about – summarising its aims, its intentions, and the conversations and continuing work which it hopes to inspire. The book’s introductory essay, written by Paul Gilchrist, Peter H. Hansen and Jonathan Westaway, also does this in a much more connected, cohesive and coherent way, so I highly recommend beginning with this – it can be accessed and either read on-line or downloaded for FREE (as can all of the book’s chapters) from the publisher’s website here. I very much hope that libraries, academic and non-academic alike, will purchase physical copies of the book – so do please encourage any librarians you might know to consider buying a copy or two for their institutions!

 

Just to give a little extra background: my own involvement with the Other Everests research network began back in the summer of 2022, when I attended a two-day symposium held at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London. This was a really inspirational meeting which aimed at opening up hitherto little-known, unexplored or under-explored perspectives on Mount Everest/Chomolungma. You can read my thoughts and reflections on this genuinely horizon-expanding gathering here, and you can also hear some of the fascinating keynote lectures which were given at that event via the Other Everests webpage. I also wrote a review of an exhibition which was held at the RGS entitled Everest through the Lens in 2022-2023; this exhibition used archival material, early cinema documentary film, and artefacts associated with the Everest expeditions of the 1920s to highlight some of the ‘hidden histories’ of Everest from both Western and Indigenous perspectives. You can read my review here on this blog, or download a PDF of it from my personal website.

 

Lastly, there is an excellent discussion with editors, Jonathan Westaway and Peter H. Hansen, and essay contributor, Sarah Pickman, who very eloquently elucidate more about the Other Everests book and the themes it explores on The Alpinist magazine’s podcast, which you can listen to here.

 

Before closing, I hope it’s not too out of place for me to add a note here that my chapter for the Other Everests book was in fact only one half of a linked undertaking for me. An undertaking which I like to think of as my ‘Himalaya and Hollywood’ project. I wrote my Other Everests chapter in conjunction with another book chapter, which I hope will be published in a second edited collection in the coming year or so (I’ll post updates on the schedule for this as and when I know more about it). This second essay is also concerned with Western perceptions and depictions of the Himalaya on film, but seen from a slightly different angle to that looked at in Other Everests, having grown out of a blog post which I wrote a few years ago, and which you can read here. This future book chapter gives a much more detailed and academic analysis than the original blog post of the same topic of mountains and mysticism explored in my Other Everests chapter ... and, this time, also of monsters! – so keep ‘em peeled and watch this space – But, in the meantime, I very much hope you will enjoy exploring the chapters of Other Everests, as outlined below:

 





 Chapter Abstracts

Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds (MUP, 2024) attempts to clear a space to engage the many worlds that share the same mountain, the multiple ways of being-in-the world, ‘a world where many worlds fit’. The book’s introductory chapter highlights some of these ‘worlds’ and overlapping themes in Everest’s many names, nations, genders, tourists, climates, and stories. Throughout this volume, the international and interdisciplinary array of contributors reactivate old and new archives, engage with multimedia and live performances, and participate in historical or ethnographic fieldwork. They shed light on the different ways of being in relationship with the mountain and how these are navigated by climbers and high-altitude workers alike, from ritual ceremonies to the mountain’s immovable goddess, through to contemporary digital practices as global adventure tourists and guides curate their Everest experiences. The authors in the volume contribute to a plurality of new histories and perspectives.

 

Chapter 1: The immovable goddess: The long life of Miyo Lang Sangma, by Ruth Gamble.

In the 1850s, Andrew Waugh, head of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, named the highest peak in the central Himalayas after his mentor, George Everest. As Ruth Gamble describes in this chapter, Waugh’s decision obscured the mountain’s centuries-long association with Chomolungma, also known as Miyo Langsangma, a deity revered by the Tibetans and Sherpas who lived near it. By tracing this goddess’s history back through the centuries, Gamble places the goddess in the wider contexts of Himalayan sacred geography, demonstrating the role she and her sisters, the Tseringma Chenga (Five Sisters of Long Life), played in the region’s cultural history and the life stories of two of the Himalaya’s most famous religious figures, Guru Rinpoche (semi-mythical, eighth century) and Milarepa (eleventh century). By tracing this history, Gamble shows that the British claims that there were no local names for the mountain are incorrect, and the Tibetan and Sherpa communities have continued to venerate the goddess despite commercial imperatives to refer to it as Everest and Chinese and Nepali attempts to recast the mountain as nationalist symbols.

 

Chapter 2: Naming Mount Everest: Mountain cartography and languages of exonymy, by Felix de Montety.

Felix de Montety examines the nineteenth- and twentieth-century naming of Mount Everest from the perspective of critical place-name studies. In 1856, the surveyor Andrew Waugh proposed this place name for the world’s highest peak as a tribute to his predecessor, George Everest. Initial debates between Waugh and Brian Hodgson, a naturalist and linguist, echoed in later controversies over exonomy (the use of non-local place names by outsiders) in mountain toponymy and cartography. This chapter looks at the role of maps, instruments, philology, publications, and archives from geographical and mountaineering societies to examine arguments over proposed place names, including Mount Everest, Deodunga, Gaurisankar, or Chomolangma. Since the mid-twentieth century, China and Nepal have embraced Qomolangma or Sagarmatha as official names despite the enduring presence of Mount Everest as a mountain exonym in postcolonial societies. Mountain toponymy is a case study in modern mountaineering’s limited interest in local knowledge and blindness to political issues in climbing areas. The history of ‘Mount Everest’ as the product of Himalayan surveying, mapping, and mountaineering shows that place names can change and reminds us that alternatives exist and can and should be debated.

 

Chapter 3: Re-activating the expeditionary archive, by Felix Driver.

The centenary of the Everest expeditions offers an opportunity to consider the role archival collections have played and could play in histories of exploration and mountaineering. The history of these expeditions as told in word and image during the 1920s has weighed heavily on subsequent re-tellings across a variety of media. Yet the collections they generated have the potential to inform radically different versions of this history, foregrounding the role of colonial infrastructure, expeditionary labour, and Indigenous agency. To realise this potential, Felix Driver argues, requires developing an expanded vision of the expeditionary archive which recognises its multiple forms and affordances. This chapter explores the ways in which the story of the early Everest expeditions has been told and might be re-told using materials in the Royal Geographical Society’s collection, focusing particularly on the avalanche which killed seven Indigenous porters in 1922. The capacity of expeditionary archives to surprise and challenge, move and inspire – indeed, their wider significance as world heritage – depends partly on what they contain but also on the way they are approached; the questions which are asked of them; the methods used to research them; and the means by which they are shared more widely.

 

Chapter 4: The benefit of chocolate and cold tea: Equipping early British Everest expeditions, by Sarah Pickman.

What can packing lists and receipts tell us about the history of mountaineering on Everest? Sarah Pickman explores this question by examining the archives of the British Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s. The materials used to outfit the expeditions reveal the social worlds that produced the early Everest climbers and the climbers' expectations for life on the mountain. British Everest climbers brought many items that might seem superfluous to the modern eye – from decadent foods to evening clothes – but that reveal Everest's connections to colonialism, the growth of Western consumer culture and advertising, British beliefs about class and status, and assumptions about expedition labour. What they carried also demonstrates that the idea of 'comfort' was part and parcel of expeditions to even the most extreme environments on earth. By taking seriously the quotidian gear and provisions carried on the 1921, 1922, and 1924 Everest expeditions, this chapter demonstrates that the study of material culture can be a fruitful approach for telling new stories about the world's highest mountain.

 

Chapter 5: Far-away frontiers and spiritual sanctuaries: Occidental escapism in the high Himalaya, by Tim Chamberlain.

Tim Chamberlain examines the allure which the Himalaya has long exerted upon Western adventurers, both in fiction and in real life. Drawing upon contemporary interest in the early British expeditions to climb Everest, this chapter shows how two novels blurred the line between imagination and authenticity, playing upon themes of escape and adventure. In response, travelogues fed back into Western notions concerning the remoteness of the Himalaya. Chamberlain demonstrates how networks of mobility for the Indigenous guides supporting Western travellers spanned the full extent of the Himalayan massif. Though portrayed as a distant and inaccessible region for Westerners, this interconnected landscape was, in fact, already well-known and consciously mapped by local polities. This network of knowledgeable and experienced Indigenes was essential for the travellers who wished to fulfil their aspirations ‘to step off the map’ and ‘escape modern civilisation’. Their search for a notionally ‘unexplored’ Shangri-La thereby created an abiding leitmotif for Himalayan exploration in the Western imagination.

 

Chapter 6: Seeing histories from the margins: An Indigenous labour force on Everest, 1921–53, by Jayeeta Sharma.

This chapter explores ‘ways of seeing’ the labouring infrastructure of the British Mount Everest expeditions from 1921 to 1953. Jayeeta Sharma juxtaposes photographs of mountaineering labour with first-person narratives from British mountaineers such as General C.G. Bruce and Indigenous Sherpa mountaineers including Ang Tharkay and Tenzing Norgay. A selection of first-person narratives from imperial and Indigenous mountaineers in dialogue with expedition photographs becomes a way to make visible and frame Indigenous histories from the margins of the British Empire. The sentient labour of Indigenous animals and humans provided the indispensable infrastructure for Euro-American mountaineers to realise their ambitions on Everest. The Mount Everest expeditions also relied on domestic infrastructures of Indigenous labour in places well beyond the mountain. The contribution of Sherpa women as well as men may be hidden in archives but is still visible in the margins of history.

 

Chapter 7: Women on Everest: A summit beyond, by Jenny Hall.

In 1975, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Everest and was celebrated as a symbol of women’s social progress. Since then, over seven hundred women have followed in Junko Tabei’s footsteps on Everest, representing over 11 per cent of all summiteers. Asian women played an important and pioneering role in these developments. Yet the representation of high-altitude mountaineering in popular culture still tells the story of adventure as white male middle-class masculinity that stubbornly resists diversity, as shown by Julie Rak’s False Summit (2021). This chapter explores how women navigated multi-dimensional inequalities concerning race, gender, and class through pioneering, women-centred approaches to high-altitude mountaineering. The analysis of memoirs and expedition accounts of and by women from the global South offers a critical reappraisal of women’s contribution to climbing Everest. Asian women built transnational support networks to tackle intersecting challenges through women-centred practices, infrastructures, and camaraderie. By showcasing the women-centred approaches of these Asian women pioneers, this chapter aims to diversify and balance the representation of mountaineering adventure as a shared cultural heritage.

 

Chapter 8: Rewriting Irvine into Everest: Audrey Salkeld and Julie Summers, by Anna Saroldi.

Anna Saroldi focuses on the role of women in the writing and transmission of mountaineering histories. The chapter focuses on the example of Andrew Comyn (Sandy) Irvine, who died on Everest in 1924 when 22 years old and while attempting a summit push with George Mallory. Saroldi highlights how Irvine had been sidelined in accounts of the British Everest expeditions and portrayed as a passive figure. Thanks to historians Audrey Salkeld and Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine has been recentred and his agency highlighted in more recent accounts. Audrey Salkeld (1936–2023) was also notable in pioneering the role of ‘expedition historian’ when she joined the 1986 Everest expedition led by Tom Holzel with the specific goal of finding Mallory’s and Irvine’s bodies. The presence and authority of women historians represents an important intervention in an environment such as mountaineering that is dominated by men in terms of both practice and ideology. Finally, Saroldi stresses the importance of choral and multivocal methodological approaches that go beyond the figure of the solitary male and white hero in favour of more inclusive and diverse portrayals of mountaineering history.

 

Chapter 9: Expecting hypermasculinity from a woman mountaineer: Wanda Rutkiewicz’s ascent of Everest, by Agnieszka Irena Kaczmarek.

Agnieszka I. Kaczmarek examines expectations of hypermasculinity when Wanda Rutkiewicz broke gender barriers in high-altitude mountaineering as the first Polish mountaineer and first European woman to scale Mount Everest in 1978. The chapter discusses why male team members in the German–French Mount Everest expedition diminished her achievements and held Rutkiewicz to high expectations of hypermasculinity during the climb. Utterly determined to stand on top, Rutkiewicz did exhibit hypermasculine patterns of behaviour while climbing and had similar expectations for Marianne Walter, a German woman climber whom Rutkiewicz criticised for her dependence on her husband and lack of self-reliance. Tough on herself and her companions, Rutkiewicz also commented on her own fear and loneliness. Rutkiewicz oscillated between behaviours and attitudes too often regarded as embodiments of either femininity or masculinity. The chapter presents Rutkiewicz as a woman who embodied a mountaineer with a hybrid identity, not binary, blending attributes of gender as multiple, not just one.

 

Chapter 10: The ‘Slovenian’ Everest 1979: A small nation and the highest mountain in the world, by Peter Mikša & Matija Zorn.

Peter Mikša and Matija Zorn focus on the 1979 Yugoslav Everest expedition and the environment in which Yugoslav and Slovenian mountaineering operated in the 1970s. On 13 May 1979, Andrej Štremfelj and Nejc Zaplotnik became the first Slovenians (and Yugoslavs) to climb Mount Everest. They reached the summit after forty-five days of climbing the challenging West Ridge Direct, the most difficult route on Everest to that time. The ascent represented the success of a twenty-five-strong Yugoslav team, of whom twenty-one were Slovenes. The majority of Yugoslav ascents before the breakup of Yugoslavia were made by Slovenian mountaineers. Critical to their success on Everest was the wealth of experience gained from a series of past Yugoslav Alpinist Himalayan Expeditions with several ascents of 8,000-metre peaks. Since 1979, Slovenian ascents of Everest have included three noteworthy achievements: the first married couple, an ascent without supplemental oxygen, and the first continuous ski descent from the summit. Another legacy of the Slovenian mountaineers in 1979 was the founding a climbing school for Nepalis at Manang, Nepal.

 

Chapter 11: Reclaiming Everest: Discontents, disasters, and the making of a Nepali mountain, by Ian Bellows.

Mount Everest endured a series of high-profile disasters and disruptive incidents during the 2010s, including a violent 2013 confrontation between high-altitude workers and professional mountaineers followed by the deadly 2014 Khumbu Icefall avalanche which sparked protests that ended the climbing season. In both cases, demands by mostly Indigenous high-altitude workers for greater rights and recognition brought renewed scrutiny to the structural inequities of the Everest industry. This chapter situates the tumultuous 2013 and 2014 Everest seasons within a century-long struggle for respect and better working conditions on the world’s highest mountains. From strikes and labour organising during the expeditionary period to the increasing prominence of Nepali expedition operators, guides, and alpinists on Everest and in Himalayan mountaineering over the past decade, acts of resistance and reclamation have marked critical junctures in Everest’s history. While Nepali alpinists have achieved global recognition for climbing accomplishments and Nepal-based companies have claimed a growing share of the commercial mountaineering market, this chapter argues that recent transformations have left the foundational mountaineering modality and moral economy of Everest relatively unchanged. This raises critical questions about what it means to ‘reclaim’ a mountain like Everest and the long-term sustainability of the Himalayan mountaineering industry.

 

Chapter 12: Sherpa’s Everest and expedition conglomerate, by Young Hoon Oh.

Complexly patterned hierarchies dictate the various roles and ideal behaviours of Sherpa and other Nepali employees in Himalayan mountaineering expeditions. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the 2010s, Young Hoon Oh considers Sherpas’ perspectives on the industrial practices in mountaineering expeditions to Himalayan giants such as Mount Everest. The workforce on Himalayan expeditions has been diversely stratified and pyramidally governed to uphold what Oh calls expedition conglomerate – a mega-sized expedition that efficiently supports large numbers of client-members and their pleasurable Himalayan experiences. The workforce ordinarily consists of a variety of positions including team guide, base camp manager, climbing Sherpa, trekking Sherpa, kitchen staff, and porters. This chapter offers observations of climbing Sherpas’ wage structure, dissecting the multiple and often irregular income sources, including daily wage, equipment fee, carry bonus, summit bonus, tip, and significant payments from by-work. A brief analysis of the patterns of these expeditionary practices sheds light on the transformative nature of the guiding industry, which is, Oh concludes, a function of colonial legacies and unchecked neoliberalism rampant on the Himalayan slopes.

 

Chapter 13: The numbers game on Mount Everest: New ‘lows’ on the world’s highest mountain, by Pradeep Bashyal & Ankit Babu Adhikari.

Mountaineering traffic on Everest frequently breaks records and the numbers game has several elements. Increasing numbers of climbers result in more employment opportunities in adventure tourism and rising revenue for the government of Nepal. The Nepali Ministry of Tourism charges a summit fee of USD 11,000 for a permit to climb Everest. Climbing permits and tourism revenues contribute significantly to Nepal’s economy. Growth of tourism on Everest has also transformed the lives of Sherpas and other local communities. The shift to a commercial business model that promotes adventure tourism on Everest has led to over-tourism above 8,000 metres – increasing risks of overcrowding, injury, and death. Commercial outfitters de-emphasise these risks when seeking customers and increasingly offer a range of commercial packages based on different consumer price points. High-end adventure travel companies in the 2020s offer luxury expeditions, requiring Sherpas to carry unnecessary Western consumer items to higher camps, significantly increasing the associated risks. Government regulation has failed to manage these crises of overconsumption on Everest.

 

Chapter 14: Digital media on Everest: Practices, imaginations, and futures, by Jolynna Sinanan.

Everest has always been mediatised and its appeal as an idea has existed historically in part through technologies of visual cultures. Twenty-first-century tourist experiences and mobile livelihoods also depend on configurations of fixed, dispersed, and mobile digital infrastructures. Drawing on fieldwork in the Solukhumbu region of Nepal with guides, porters, and tourists, Jolynna Sinanan argues that digital practices create gradients of visibility in visual narratives of Everest. The production and circulation of images through digital technologies shape how tourists imagine and experience Everest. At the same time, the digital practices of guides and porters can be strategies for livelihoods and aspirations for recognition and intergenerational mobility that have the potential to create alternative Everest narratives based on regional knowledge and experiences of work. Guides and porters in Everest tourism were formerly Sherpa but are increasingly from Tamang and Rai ethnic groups, which have been historically at the margins of Nepali society. Sinanan interrogates the relationships of power in representing Everest through contemporary digital practices and the tensions between the valorisation of regional knowledge and neocolonial imaginations.

 

Chapter 15: Thin ice, thin air, by Yvonne Reddick.

In this creative piece, Yvonne Reddick visits the melting Khumbu Glacier at Everest Base Camp and reflects on climate change. She meets trekking guide Hem Raj Dharmala and asks him about the climate change impacts he has seen in Nepal. Global heating is leading to increased avalanche activity, disappearing lakes, and landslides in the region. However, new areas are also becoming available for Nepali farmers to grow crops. She reflects on her own conflicted position, as a concerned citizen committed to understanding climate justice, while still benefiting from fossil-fuelled transport that contributes to the problem. What are the trade-offs between tourism and thinning ice at the world’s ‘third pole’? What do the dwindling glaciers mean for mountain communities and mountaineers? With a nod to Jon Krakauer’s Everest classic Into Thin Air, Yvonne Reddick looks at the process of glacial sublimation whereby high-altitude glaciers change state directly from solid to vapour – literally vanishing into thin air.

 

Chapter 16: Everests on stage: Contemporary theatre’s contribution to decolonising the mountain, by Jonathan Pitches.

What can theatre offer the cultural record of Everest that has not already been expressed in literature, music, photography, or film? Less visible than these media, the dramatic record of Everest on stage is nevertheless rich, extensive, and long-lived. In this chapter, Jonathan Pitches focuses on the staging of Everest in the 2010s and early 2020s, considering three performances to establish what they reveal about the changing significance of Everest in the contemporary world. Drawing on insights from newly conducted interviews with four artists (Matt Kambic, Carmen Nasr, Gary Winters, and Gregg Whelan), the selection of recent performance work serves as a paradigm of the ways in which Western contemporary theatre has engaged with the history, culture, and geopolitics of the world’s highest mountain. Each of the live acts and performances uses varied means to render Everest’s cultural complexity, contradictory reception, and historical density with a lightness of touch which belies their rigour and import.





15 November 2024

Beyond the Dark Clouds

 



I’ve found myself feeling a bit like Cameron Frye in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) this week. Watching my follower count on Bluesky take off like the odometer of his father’s prized Ferrari when it gets boosted by two garage attendants, who take it for a surreptitious day-long spin, had me gasping in utter disbelief. It’s been several days now and there still seems to be no let up. But, so far (and keeping my fingers firmly crossed), this seems to be a good thing.



 

I moved over to Bluesky from Twitter a little over a year ago. This was when Twitter was beginning to shift irremediably away from all the things which, for me, had previously made it so invaluable. Back then, quite a few people also made the move. But, sadly, many of them soon seemed to drift back to Twitter, or rather X, as it is now meaninglessly known. In some ways this reflected the general disorientation of people who had grown so acculturated to what Twitter had once been. I think the problem was that there were too many alternatives offering asylum, and, at that point, it was impossible to reach a consensus about which platform would fill the malevolent blackhole-like void that Twitter was swiftly morphing into. Threads, Mastodon, or Bluesky? – People couldn’t decide.



 

I tried Mastodon first, but I couldn’t get my head around how it operated. I found it a frustrating and completely fruitless experience. I’m not on Instagram, and so Threads didn’t appeal. As for Bluesky, well – at this point, you needed an invite code. Initially this made me somewhat suspicious of it. But when I saw some people I knew and trusted announcing they’d joined Bluesky, I managed to get a code from a friend whose lead I was more than happy to follow. At first, I found Bluesky, like Mastodon, a bit awkward and clunky to operate. Plus, most of the historians who’d migrated to Bluesky all seemed to be medievalists – a field I’m interested in, but certainly not my academic specialism, and so there was little there for me to engage with. Consequently, for a long time, Bluesky seemed like a new planet which I was orbiting solo, like a lonely Michael Collins circling the Moon when left on his own during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. However, I now see that this was in fact a blessing in disguise.



 

Firstly, the relatively diminutive size of this pool of people newly signed up to Bluesky (when compared to Twitter) meant that traffic on the platform was fairly slow. Consequently, it didn’t take long for me to catch up on what people were posting each day! – Another reason for this was the fact that most users seemed to be based in Europe, the UK, and the USA. I live in Japan. Hence the time difference meant that most people whom I followed posted while I was asleep, and, vice versa, my posts appeared during their nocturnal slumbers. The second boon to this new ‘slow-travel’ style social media was that it gave me plenty of space and time to see how Bluesky actually differed from Twitter, particularly in terms of how it operated.



 

Bluesky is all about ‘Feeds,’ (NB – plural). Like the newsfeed on other social media sites, Bluesky encourages the creation of multiple feeds, enabling users to filter posts using certain topic markers (e.g. #hashtags, emojis, or particular words). You can opt to follow a feed, thereby more easily allowing you to see posts upon certain themes or subjects (for example, ‘What Is History?’) without having to follow those particular posters directly. This really appealed to me and was probably the main reason why I persisted with Bluesky, abandoning Mastodon and slowly started to tune out of Twitter/X. On Twitter I had already set up for myself something very similar to ‘Feeds’ in the form of private ‘Lists’ devoted to certain topics. In order to ensure that my lists didn’t double-up on content, I realised it was important that I should assign a person or institution’s profile to one list only. This seemed to work well, and so I repeated the system by creating my own lists on Bluesky, which I use alongside the various feeds other people have set up. The disadvantage to lists, however, is that they show all of a person’s posts, whereas feeds are more specifically tailored to whatever topic they are dedicated to. This neatly by-passes the frustration of following Professor Stein because of their particular specialism (say, ‘Voodoo Economics’), only to find Professor Stein almost never posts about their specialism!



 

I’m certainly no computer whizz kid, but I now see that it was handy to have signed up to Bluesky at such an early point. I saw how some of the functionality of Bluesky evolved or was newly introduced by its developers. I think the fact that it wasn’t fully developed was one of the reasons why the site began as invite only. Having said that though, it is – to certain extents – still a site “under construction,” but this is essentially because it is developing elements of functionality which Twitter never had. So far these elements make it feel far more like the user is in control. Functions such as properly effective ‘blocking’ and ‘muting,’ as well as the ability to detached your posts from other users who ‘quote re-post’ it – these are great ways to manage how people interact with you and how you engage with the platform as a whole. The idea being to deaden the effect of trolling and the kind of angry collective bullying which could so easily and needlessly be sparked on Twitter. Specifically because of caring and well thought-out, user-minded strategies like these, it is vocally hoped by the majority of Bluesky users at present that a new and more equitable kind of social media platform will be created as a result of these innovations. A new social media platform which hopefully will promote a culture of mutual respect, one which will allow a more civil and welcoming mode of engagement to flourish.



 

This is what Twitter used to be for me when I first logged on. I was quite late in joining up to social media as a whole. It all seemed a bit unfathomable and somewhat geeky-cliquey to me. But after being badgered by many friends – especially those who were located overseas – who assured me that it was a great way to keep in touch over long distances, I was eventually persuaded to sign up to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This seemed to me like voluntarily opting to plug myself into the sinister Matrix-like circuits of the world wide web. I still feel a bit wary of this ‘Brave New World’ and its insidious algorithms.



 

But signing up to Twitter, in particular, just at the moment when I was returning to university as a mature student doing an MA degree was actually a total gift. I found it hugely useful on an academic front. It was a great way to keep up-to-date with new innovations and trends in the subject fields which interested me. It was also a great way to network with other people with similar interests. I made so many useful connections, some of which also transitioned into real world connections. Writing this blog, Waymarks, was also a big part of that too. Initially I began blogging purely as a personal recreation, and as a way of fending off the paralysing effect of staring at a blank page – writing regularly, so as to hone my writing and editing skills; and doing so publicly, as a means to sharpen and clarify how I said what I said. Something which you can’t really do when you simply scribble in private notebooks that live only in your desk drawer, or type out manuscripts which sit unread by others on your hard drive, consigned and condemned to a potentially sightless posterity.



 

It’s been very sad to watch the demise of Twitter since it was taken over by Elon Musk. He’s still trying to tout it as “the world’s town square,” when in fact it is increasingly becoming his personal self-aggrandising stadium for political and socially coercive rallies. Cynically, I think this was always his aim and intention all along. It seems to have paid off for him as well. People were quick to laugh at the $44 billion he paid for the site when its value suddenly plummeted soon thereafter. But, ludicrously, that sum of money is nothing to the world’s richest man. I thought at the time that he’d merely bought it in order to run it into the ground; intending either to totally transform it beyond all recognition, or, if that failed, then simply to destroy it. And it seems like he has succeeded too.



 

It’s not the first time that I’ve watched something like this happen. Back in the early days of the internet, before Facebook et al existed, I used to enjoy posting on a regional UK internet forum or chat board called ‘Knowhere.’ Such websites were purely text-based, and this meant they required more effort in terms of engagement and attention. There were no memes, no gifs. You scrolled much more slowly and carefully. Reading, rather than looking. The Knowhere chat board for my hometown was a wonderful open space for kind and courteous, community-minded discussions, as well as a space for sharing local history stories, which is what I liked best about it. But it was slowly taken over by a band of nasty oiks whose sole intention was to totally hijack the site and overwhelmingly fill it with mindless profanities and unprovoked personal attacks. What seems most remarkable about this collective act of verbal vandalism, looking back now, is that this occurred long before legions of bots could be programmed to do the same. Anonymity, especially that offered by the internet, has always been the greatest enabler of the meanest, most selfish and wilfully ignorant, mob-minded sort of people to wreak unwarranted havoc.



 

In this regard, the social history element in the evolution of social media has been a fascinating thing to observe over the course of the last twenty years or so. The rise and demise of Twitter is just another cycle of waxing and waning in that process. It’s been amusing to watch, this week especially, as the so-called social media ‘big hitters’ who have resisted leaving the platform, presumably because of the significant size of their follower counts, have one-by-one steadily begun to realise that their faithful flock are now deserting the paddock in droves and are running for the hills! – Only when all the big names and big institutions leave Twitter en masse will it be deemed to have truly died, but the truth is Twitter was already dead long before that. The ‘elite’ need the hoi polloi, ‘twas ever thus. Bread and circuses are only one part of the silent deal.



 

But what am I to make of this sudden transformation personally, particularly in the form of all my 1000+ new followers on Bluesky? – I don’t imagine for a moment that it means anything in particular. The main reason for it is a new innovation on Bluesky, known as ‘Starter Packs.’ They work somewhat akin to the way feeds do. Essentially, they are lists of Bluesky users which a user can create according to whatever theme they choose – for instance, grouping all users who call themselves ‘Medievalists,’  ‘Retro-Anime Artists,’ or ‘Astrophotographers,’ etc – which other users can peruse and choose to follow individually, or they can press a button and follow all of the users listed in toto. I’ve been added to a couple of ‘Starter Packs’ and I have no doubt I have been followed as a result of people pressing that ‘Follow All’ button. Consequently, I’m sure I’ve been followed by a large number of people who probably haven’t even seen my Bluesky profile, and who will no doubt in due course wonder why my posts are showing up in their personal feeds when I post about things that have nothing to do with what they are interested in. For example, I’ve been added to a list of scholars who post upon the subject of ‘Buddhist Studies’ – and to be fair, I am interested in this and I do sometimes post about it. But, in truth, I will – in all likelihood – do so very rarely. Most of my posts will be about the ‘Histories of Exploration & Travel Writing’ (a starter pack which I myself set up), or only appeal to the niche interests of ‘Imperialism & Commonwealth Historians’ (a starter pack to which I was added by someone else).



 

There will, no doubt, be a reckoning in due course. Follower count odometers will be “cracked open and rolled back by hand.” Bluesky will eventually settle down and find its own sense of equilibrium. The current, Ferrari joy-riding sense of euphoria will come to an end and normality will prevail. But hopefully, that new sense of normality will be one which makes the world wide web a little less divisive and a lot more welcoming and user friendly. More power to the people; less power to the oikish oligarchs and autocrats who have muscled their way in! – We can evade them, if we want to. There is always a blue sky beyond the dark clouds – No Pasaran!




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31 October 2024

Remembering Ralph Jackson


Dr Ralph Jackson (1950-2024)

 

Very sadly my friend and former colleague at the British Museum, Ralph Jackson, passed away on 16 September 2024. 

I first met Ralph in February 1991, when I began volunteering in the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities at the BM. I was still at school at that time, studying for my GCSEs, and Ralph was one of the most welcoming members of the Department. I still remember him looking up and giving me a warm, friendly smile when I inadvertently ventured into his small corner of the Students Room. I was nosily looking around the place, exploring the labyrinthine byways of this large, communal room which was overly-stuffed with furniture, typewriters, microscopes, light-boxes, desk-mounted magnifying glasses, photo-stands, card indexes, padded baskets and trays for safely handling and examining artefacts. It was crammed with all manner of bookishly curious and intriguing things. There seemed to be tall cupboards, filing cabinets and plans chests everywhere, behind which were hidden desks and tables, all heaped with books, maps, papers and pot plants, and, squirreled away amongst it all were quietly studious people, all busily working away. The walls surrounding the room were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves chockful of books behind sliding glass doors. It was a deeply scholarly space, perched high upon the roof, hidden behind the Museum’s pediment, overlooking the green dome of the Round Reading Room. I apologised for disturbing him, but Ralph sat back in his chair, having first reached for his cup of coffee (which I noted stood next to a small cafetiere on his desk – this seemed to me to be the height of scholarly sophistication!). He told me I wasn’t intruding at all and asked me how I was getting on. Pleased to find him so open and affable, I remember I asked him: “So what do you do?”

 

Ralph was primarily an archaeologist of Roman Britain, but he was also a curator who specialised in the study of Greco-Roman medicine, becoming an expert in bronze medical instruments and also cosmetic grinders, the latter in particular was an area of small finds analysis (or material culture studies, as it’s called nowadays) which he largely pioneered. Many of the ancient surgical implements he studied are surprisingly similar to those used in hospitals today. He used to speak with fluid ease and eloquence about the writings of Galen and other Roman writers with a familiarity which made it seem like he’d actually known these ancient writers personally. Similarly, he could talk in forensic detail (with a quietly-knowing, showman-like glint in his eye) about some of the unanaesthetised medical practices and surgical procedures used by ancient doctors with a steady and unflinching sense of immediacy which was decidedly not for the squeamish or faint of heart!


Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (1988)


During his long and distinguished career at the BM, Ralph co-directed a number of archaeological excavations, most notably at Stonea in Cambridgeshire and at Ashwell in Hertfordshire. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to dig with Ralph, although I did help with some of the final post-excavation work on Stonea after I joined the Department as a full-time member of staff having graduated from university with my first degree. Most of my work with Ralph during that time centred on creating museum displays at the BM. I first worked closely with him (and a huge cross-departmental team of people) on a totally new suite of permanent exhibition galleries dedicated to telling the history of Roman Britain which opened in 1997. These displays, which remain largely unchanged to this day, are hugely popular – especially with visiting parties of school children. 


Soon after the Roman Britain gallery opened, Ralph and I worked together on a special temporary display of the recently excavated grave of a Romano-British doctor found near Colchester, at Stanway in Essex. The complete assemblage of objects from this grave, comprised a bronze skillet and a number of ceramic vessels, including an amphora, along with a set of surgical implements and a number of glass gaming pieces which had clearly been set out – in positions ready to commence playing – upon a wooden gaming board, which had long since decomposed and disappeared in the soil. Ralph described the significance of this ‘healer’s’ grave (dated circa AD 50-60) in his most recent book, noting the find as: ‘The earliest surviving firm evidence of instrumentation for surgical practice in Britain – and, indeed, one of the earliest dated kits from the Roman Empire.’ (Jackson, Greek and Roman Medicine at the British Museum (2023), p. 20; see also Figure 22a-d, p. 22). At the time I’d read about the discovery of this grave in a local newspaper article which had been saved for me by a relative who lived nearby, so it was quite a treat to get to work with these objects and put them on show for the visiting public in the new Roman Britain gallery. It also meant I got a chance to explore Colchester Museum with Ralph when we later returned the grave goods at the end of the loan; the foundations of the building – which is a Norman Castle – are actually the vaults of a Roman temple to the deified Emperor Claudius that date from the period when Colchester was the capital of the Roman province of Britannia.


Installing the Stanway Doctor's Grave display with Ralph, c.1997 (photo by Catherine Johns).

 

A few years later, I worked with Ralph on an exhibition, entitled Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, which had previously been on show at two museums in Germany. It was the first large special exhibition which I had properly worked on and it happened to coincide with the release of Ridley Scott’s famous film, Gladiator (2000). We had a clip from the film which showed the fighting in the Colosseum, along with another clip of the chariot race from Ben-Hur (1959), both of which played on a loop at the centre of the exhibition. There was even talk of inviting Russell Crowe to open the exhibition. It was opened though by another Hollywood luminary also with Roman-acting credentials, Mark Rylance; who was then most famous for his work at The Globe Theatre in London, particularly in staging and acting in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. I was lucky enough to meet Mark Rylance at the exhibition opening, although oddly enough Rylance never actually saw my face because I had been persuaded (by Ralph, among others) to dress up in a full-scale replica set of gladiatorial armour! – I’m not sure I’d have been so readily persuaded to do this for anyone else on the staff other than Ralph, who was always such a genial and supportive soul that it was impossible to say no.


Gladiators and Caesars (2000)


Ralph was a genuinely warm and supportive colleague. He instantly picked up the phone and called the Personnel Department to see if the Museum was still part of a Civil Service accommodation assistance scheme that he knew about when I was having trouble finding somewhere to live. Unfortunately, the Museum wasn’t part of the scheme any longer, but the gesture spoke volumes about Ralph’s capacity for empathy and his desire to help. It was nice to be able to re-pay kind favours such as these, especially when during the course of the Gladiators and Caesars exhibition I was contacted by Roy Friendship-Taylor, the director of a dig on a Roman Villa site in Northamptonshire which I’d been a member of for many years, where a bronze and iron folding knife depicting a gladiator had just been unearthed. I went up to Northampton and took a look at it, identifying it as showing a type of gladiator known as a Secutor – the ‘chaser,’ who was usually pitted against the Retiarius, or ‘net fighter.’ Returning to London, Ralph and I were then absolutely thrilled that we managed to get the knife conserved and included in the exhibition. It is now on long-term loan to the BM and can be seen on display in the Roman Britain gallery (Room 49).


Greek and Roman Medicine at the British Museum (2023)


After I left the Prehistory and Roman Britain Department, Ralph and I remained in touch. He used to tell me about the projects he was working on and often invited me to the launch of his publications, such that it felt like that question I’d first asked him in February 1991 had continued to echo and be answered down the years. The last time I bumped into him, after he had retired – not all that long ago, we had a long chat, and he briefly mentioned that he’d been ill, but he didn’t go into details as he usually did concerning medical matters when they related to ancient Romans. It was a shock later on to find out just how unwell he was. But I’m glad – having known Ralph for such a long time – that I was able, in company with a number of my former colleagues, to pass on a message of love and support to Ralph shortly before he died. And it’s a curious thing, because, just at the time that he passed away, I had a very vivid memory of Ralph, which popped into my mind unprompted while I slept, in which Ralph appeared and asked me in his characteristic way: “How are you getting on? – Everything OK?”

Warm, witty, kind, inquisitive, and reassuring – Ralph was a true gentleman with a generous heart and a great soul. He will be greatly missed by all those who were fortunate enough to have known him.


Ralph Jackson talking about Roman surgical instruments, c.2001.


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Ralph Jackson - Obituary, by Richard Hobbs (The Guardian)


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Postscript: Curiously enough, another gladiator knife with a Secutor-type handle has recently been found in the UK just as Ridley Scott's sequel to Gladiator is about to open in cinemas. "What we do in life echoes in eternity," indeed. – I'm sure this parallel would have made Ralph smile.


18 October 2024

Nebuta in Tokyo's Nakano


 

Aomori, at the northernmost end of Japan’s island of Honshu, is renowned for its annual ‘Nebuta Matsuri’ or Nebuta Festival. ‘Nebuta’ are large, illuminated floats, originally made of wood, bamboo and coloured or painted paper, and were lit from within by candles. Nowadays they are made with wire and electric lamps, but they still conform to the same designs and motifs, often representing historical persons or famous kabuki actors, as well as gods and mythical beasts.



The key elements of the festival are thought to date back to the Nara Period (710-794), and there are a number of theories concerning its origins, some of which are quite gruesome, relating to historical episodes of regional military conflict and feudal oppression. Although other theories root the festival in Shinto religious practices. As such, it has very likely evolved down the centuries having first arisen in connection to the annual Tanabata festival (7 July) and O-Bon rituals, in which lanterns are floated on rivers in memory of the dead.




Nebuta scene from 1928

Originally carried by one man with a number of supporters, over time the Nebuta lantern floats have grown in size and nowadays they are usually mounted on wheels, requiring large numbers of people to move and operate them during the festival processions. These processions are characteristically made up of large numbers of people dressed in traditional Japanese attire, playing flutes, shaking bells and beating taiko drums, chanting ‘Rasserā’ (ラッセラー), encouraging others to join in.



The main and largest Nebuta Festival takes place in Aomori City, but smaller Nebuta Festivals also take place in different towns and villages across Aomori Prefecture. Other Nebuta Matsuri, or the inclusion of Nebuta in similar festivals, can also be found in different parts of Japan too. Curiously enough, I first saw a Nebuta lantern float in London at the British Museum in November 2001, when one was especially commissioned and built by Japanese crafts people who came to the UK from Aomori as part of "Japan 2001", a year-long series of events celebrating Japanese culture. It was huge and filled the entire space of the large room which used to be the old North Library of the British Library, now the Wellcome Gallery of Living and Dying, just off the Great Court. But my first experience of an actual Nebuta Festival was the one held in Tokyo’s Nakano-ku in October last year (2023). These are some of the pictures I took of the lantern floats.



There was a great atmosphere which grew all the more spectacular after dusk as night fell. The sound of the taiko drums was visceral and could be felt distinctly and almost overwhelmingly in the pit of one’s stomach, resonating with even greater intensity than it was heard, even though the volume itself was ear-splittingly loud. But one of the most impressive sights was watching one person balancing a sail-like rig of lanterns hoisted high on a single bamboo pole – to which extensions were added that progressively raised the sail high above the heads of the people in the procession and those watching from the sidelines, all while deftly balancing them on the palm of one hand, or their forehead, or hip (scroll down to see the pictures posted below). They did accidentally drop one of them on the crowd though, so the sense of drama was quite real!



Nakano Nebuta Festival – properly called the Nakano Tohoku Kizuna Matsuri (なかの東北絆まつり) held in support of the reconstruction of the Tohoku region following on from the earthquake of 2011 – this year will take place on 26-27 October 2024. Further information on the history of Nebuta can be found here.



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All photographs by Tim Chamberlain, October 2023.