Situationally Sherpa: race, ethnicity, and the labour geography of the Everest industry

ABSTRACT

Following Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, western mythmaking transformed Sherpa ethnicity into a signifier for a labour category, a place, and a set of cultural characteristics. Westerners have come to link Sherpa-ness with stereotypes of superhuman strength, mountain skill, and loyalty. However, most labourers in the Everest industry are not Sherpas; they are upland ethnic minorities who migrate seasonally from the lower hills to the high Khumbu. Many of these ethnic minority labourers also pass as Sherpa. Becoming “situationally Sherpa” is a common practice, but little is known about how, why, and with what effects claims to Sherpa-ness are formed and deployed. This paper explores how and why this identity practice emerged alongside new labour geographies in the Everest region. The case of “situational Sherpas” reveals how racial, ethnic, and labour hierarchies intersect and blur to produce new experiences of oppression, and new possibilities for resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• identity
• labour
• Sherpas
• race

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank research participants in the Solukhumbu and Kathmandu for sharing their time and knowledge. Thanks to Myles McReynolds for his GIS expertise. Thanks to Dr. Emily Yeh, for her mentorship. Thank you to the Kolff Memorial Fellowship and the CU Geography Department.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Shae A. Frydenlund is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work examines race, gender, and labour in the Himalayas and Myanmar. She is the author of “Labor and Race in Nepal’s Indigenous Nationalities Discourse: Beyond ‘Tribal’ vs ‘Peasant’ Categories” in the journal Himalaya, Journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies.

ORCID

Shae A. Frydenlund http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0011-6807

Notes

1. For an excellent analyses of gender and trekking labour in Nepal, see Grossman-Thompson (2013).

2. Membership records of the NMA suggest that sardar positions are dominated by those who identify as Sherpa, but this does not account for the fact that many workers pass as Sherpa. What figures do show is that the labour category is affiliated with Sherpa-ness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Colorado Boulder.