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 ‘Hollywood and Himalaya’ 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’. This 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.