Everest, Everestland, #Everest: A Case for a Composite Visual Ethnographic Approach

Abstract

Arguably Mount Everest has always been mediatized: its appeal as an idea has existed in part through technologies of visual cultures. Exploring the digital media practices of tourists and the tourism workers, this article considers how imaginaries of Mount Everest that appear through technologies of visual culture relate to experiences of Everest in Nepal. I argue for a composite visual ethnographic approach that entails examining experiences on site in relation to cumulative media and visual texts, both historically and on digital media platforms. The article contributes to an anthropology of mobility through its focus on how digital visual communication becomes constitutive of work and practices in tourism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fieldwork for this project was conducted in compliance with approval from the University of Sydney Human Ethics Committee, project number 2019/831.

Notes

1 Mount Everest is known as Chomolungma to Sherpa and Tibetans and the Nepali government named it Sagarmatha in the Sagarmatha National Park in 1976. I refer to the mountain as “Everest” throughout as my aim is to engage with how it has become emblematic and symbolic in popular imagination.

2 My ethnography-based research in Trinidad (Sinanan 2020) compared images posted to Facebook and Instagram, revealing that individual aspirations for global mobility are negotiated within social relationships based on structures of class and ethnicity that have been shaped, in part, by the country’s colonial history.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jolynna Sinanan

JOLYNNA SINANAN is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her books include Social Media in Trinidad (2017, UCL Press), Visualizing Facebook (with Daniel Miller, 2017, UCL Press) and Digital Media Practices in Households (with Larissa Hjorth et al., 2021, Amsterdam University Press). Her current research focuses on mobile media and mobile livelihoods in the Everest tourism industry. E-mail: [email protected]