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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:
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.
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