Sherpa

With eight of the world's highest mountains in the country, Nepal is a
mountaineer's paradise. The ultimate glory of mountaineering is reaching the summit of Mt.
Everest. “Mt. Everest” known as the roof the world and the height peak in the world as well. Due
to its majestic elevation and the aesthetic value people from all around the world are enticed
to reach to the top of this peak leading them to go for expedition, trekking in their holidays to
the Everest region of Nepal. According to the statics of Sagarmatha National Park Office at
Manjo the number of people who coming to Everest every year is about 35,000.
The Nepal Himalaya is the most formidable mountain range in the world with
nearly a third of the country lying above the elevation of 3,500 m. Eight of the world's highest
peaks lie within Nepal's territory: Everest, Kanchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri,
Manaslu and Annapurna, which are all over 8,000 m above sea level. The first to be climbed
among them was Annapurna in 1950 by a French Expedition with Maurice Herzog as leader
while Everest was first summitted by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953 with a British
Expedition led by John Hunt.
Besides these eight giant peaks, there are 326 other mountains within Nepal which are open
for mountaineering expeditions and out of them, 103 have never been climbed before. Nepal
offers mountaineers more opportunities than any other country in the world and throws endless
challenges at them including the less glorified trekking peaks which still require climbing gear
and climbing skills if anyone wants to climb them.
With the increasing number of people from across the world coming to Nepal for
expedition has led to the rise in the death numbers as well. And the reason being the lack of
proper Rescue facilities, training centres and other necessary facilities which ensures the safety
of the climbers and the trekkers. Nepal is a disaster-prone country due to its steep terrain, a
rugged and fragile geomorphic condition, high peaks and slopes, volatile tectonic processes,
variable climatic patterns, very rural topography and other factors such as increasing
population, poor economic condition, unplanned settlement, low literacy rate etc.
Earthquake, floods, landslides, lightning, Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), avalanche,
epidemics often occur causing enormous physical damages and losses of human lives. Nepal
is ranked 11th in terms of risk from earthquake and 30th in terms of flood risk according to global
report on disaster risk as per 2003. All parts of the mountains are exposed to avalanche,
landslide. Middle mountain is also exposed to debris flow. Most parts of middle mountains and
Terai are exposed to severe flooding and avalanches as well. Hence the only solution we have
is to provide a rescue facility with the highly trained and skilled manpower. Mountain Rescue
Centres should be establishment an appropriate location close to the popular mountaineering
and trekking regions with the provision of standby helicopter with the integrated teams.

I am looking to document the lives, needs, and special skills and abilities of the high mountain dwellers, the 'Sherpa' people, of Nepal, to show how and why they are willing and so able to support the rest of the world climb to the highest mountain peaks.

I am specifically interested in them as people, personalities and in their physiology.

This paper provides a checklist of 35 hypotheses concerning the identity of the yeti – a hairy creature in Sherpa folklore, Tibetan literature, and cryptozoology. Most scientists dismiss the idea the yeti is an unidentified animal and instead suggest known animal misidentifications such as bears (e.g.,Ursus thibetanus thibetanus) to explain yeti stories by the Sherpa as well as reported sightings of the creature at high altitudes in the Eastern Himalayas. Reports of yeti tracks in the snow (typically above 15,000 ft.) have been explained by many different animals.

There is no place on Earth where mountain climbing, a form of adventure tourism, is more popular than in Nepal. Nepal is home to 10 of the 14 world’s highest peaks over 8,000m, including Mount Everest, at 8,848m, the world’s tallest peak. This chapter discusses the evolution of climbing on Mount Everest, its economic contributions, and associated issues, particularly ecological and ethical.

Sherpas occupy the key position in contemporary Himalayan mountaineering and related tourism industries across the Himalayan chain. Once engaged merely in carrying loads, they now guide clients and organize expeditions. The transformation has left many foreign mountaineers and commentators disoriented. This is largely due to differences in the characteristic ways in which the Sherpas experience the sport, ways different from those of Western mountaineers, Korean mountaineers, and other Nepalis. The dissertation investigates these distinctive ways of experiencing mountaineering. It is based on nine Korean mountaineering expeditions undertaken following the Sherpas and twenty-five months of ethnographic research, which moved between Kathmandu, South Korea, and Sherpa villages in Walung in northeastern Nepal. By comparing with Western and Korean mountaineers’ understanding of Himalayan mountaineering, it examines how Sherpas take participation in the tourism industry as their vocation, encounter foreign visitors, and deal with global impacts the country is facing. It also proposes an original theoretical framework that analyzes experience without committing to “anthromanticism” or the eurocentric assumption of human nature as discrete mind, body, and community.
The dissertation employs a pragmatic phenomenological perspective, which sheds light on ethico-onto-epistemologies or “cosmic dispositions” in relation to the observer’s perspective. The Sherpas’ cosmic disposition is threefold: individualist collectivism, tantric monism, and open-closed chronology. They regard participation in Himalayan mountaineering as their ethnic vocation and venue for social gathering. Though economic interest is important, the collective appreciation relies on the manner of social relationships. Unlike Western or Korean ideal approach to Himalayan mountaineering, moreover, their understanding considers concrete dimensions of the tourism industry. The Sherpas have increasingly made use of the global nexus with their characteristic ease in the face of unknown and uncertain future. Because the dispositions become distinctive only in relation to others, it also suggests Taoist idealism, Buddhist dualism, and Confucian hierarchy for Korean cosmic disposition as manifested by contemporary Korean mountaineers’ experiences. The pragmatic phenomenological perspective provides a non-eurocentric approach to the transnational, cosmopolitan, and globalizing encounters that take place in the Himalayas.

Mountain tourism is one of the few fields Nepal earns international fame and seeks equitable prosperity. Tourism studies literature points out a number of issues Nepali citizens are facing around Himalayan mountain tourism, ranging from ethical concerns over the recent increase of fatalities vis-a-vis summits in commercial expeditions (Nepal and Mu 2017; Nyapane 2017), through state-supported essentialisms of ethnicity and culture (Bakke 2010; Sharma 2016; Sherpa 2009), to models of individual choice and exchange for alternative ways of life (Baumgartner 2015; Ortner 1999). Few studies, however, have examined patterns of internal social structure and/or processual dynamics through which international tourism is uniquely localized in Nepal as well as across the Himalayas, albeit limited examples such as the role of social engagements (Adams 1996), global impacts Nepal tourism has made (Liechty 2012), and non-touristic Thamel (Linder 2017). Moving beyond the conventional frame of tourism versus a priori individual, this paper asks the question: How have local attributes and global forces conjoined to have created the contemporary field of mountain tourism across the Himalayas?
To answer the question, this paper analyzes ethnographic data gathered from a number of field trips scattered from 2012 to 2018 working with Sherpa mountain guides, Sherpa expedition organizers, non-Sherpa Nepali tourism laborers, government representatives, non-Nepali outfitters, as well as foreign tourists. Analytic focus lies in three unique features of the mountain tourism industry in Nepal: transregionalism, hierarchical structure, belonging dynamics. First, Himalayan mountain tourism is now virtually a series of transregional endeavors as distinctively Kathmandu-centered, where international and domestic flows of tourists, staff, information, capital, equipment and other related entities pivot around the capital of Nepal. As much as Thamel is never a permanent mainstay of tourism, geopolitical contest several “hot spots” have posed against Kathmandu will be examined. Second, as an industry, the global sector of Himalayan mountain tourism has developed a complex and still evolving structure of exchange relationships, over which the Sherpa has increasingly attained governance and monopoly. Finally, the Sherpa have never been a single group, establishing peculiarly dynamic practices of belonging as their own tradition of fission and fusion. New groups of “Sherpas” have replaced those industrially successful ones who are retiring to more lucrative fields than guiding novices on mountain slopes. The enduring tension between the usages of the title “Sherpa” for ethnicity and for occupation is not merely of a ethnolinguist’s interest but a crucial juncture from which one may parse out the interplay between the local and the global in Himalayan mountain tourism.

by March, Kathryn S. All Rights Reserved PLEASE NOTE: The negative microfilm copy of this dissertation, was prepared and inspected by the school granting the degree. We are using this film without further inspection or change. If there are any questions about the film content, please write directly to the school. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

A Sherpa laughed off his colleague’s death, stunning a Korean teammate on Mt. Everest. In the face of their friends’ deaths Korean and Sherpa mountaineers behave quite distinctively from each other. Based on anthropological research on Sherpa and Korean mountaineers on Himalayan peaks, this essay makes a case revealing a cross-cultural and pre-psychological aspect of mountaineering that upholds death as a principal component of the sport. A combination of highlander lifestyle, quasi-matriarchy, tantrist ontology, and neocolonial relationship has historically shaped the reciprocal processes of Sherpas’ success in the industry of Himalayan mountain tourism and their characteristic joviality which discounts the negative side of the sport. In contrast, Korean mountaineers being reticent and meditating to mountaineering accidents exhibits a longstanding tradition of Taoist idealism, Buddhist dualism, and Confucian hierarchy, as the set of norms and values they bring to the highest mountain peaks.

This thesis studies the relationship between storyline and macrostructure in five Solu Sherpa conversational oral stories of personal experience to test the accuracy of Robert E. Longacre's statement that storyline material is the "main stuff" from which macrostructural summaries are constructed (1989a:444). This is done by answering the question: What types of clausal information are employed in the construction of the macrostructural summaries of the Sherpa texts and how often is each type employed?

Sherpa is a Central Bodish Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northeastern Nepal, primarily in the Solu-Khumbu district just south of Mt. Everest. The Solu dialect is spoken in the southernmost region of the district. Sherpa is an AOV (SOV) language with verbal suffixes that encode evidentiality and partially encode tense and aspect.

A macrosegmentation of the texts revealed that at least three devices are necessary to indicate a boundary between thematic paragraphs, and it was necessary for at least one of these devices to be a break on one of Givón’s (1984) four unities.

Regarding narrative superstructure, it was found that each story had at least one peak, and one story had two peaks. Three of the six peaks encoded the climax, with two encoding the inciting moment, and one encoding the developing conflict.

Five of Longacre’s (1996) six peak marking devices were used in the Sherpa texts: 1. Change of pace, 2. a concentration of participants, 3. the occurrence of particles, onomatopoeia, and other phonetic devices, 4. heightened vividness, and 5. rhetorical underlining. A change in vantage point and/or orientation was not employed as a peak marking device in the Sherpa texts.

In the analysis of clausal information, nine types were described. These included a storyline Band and eight supportive types: 1. Flashback A, 2. Background actions, 3. Flashback B, 4. Background activities, 5. Setting, 6. Irrealis, 7. Evaluation, and 8. Cohesion.

The Sherpa stories employed between three and five storyline clause patterns. Only one story employed the same device in over half of its storyline clauses. These results suggest a modification of the storyline marking scheme posited by Schöttelndreyer (1978), in which narrative sub-genres were characterized by one or two storyline marking devices.

The macroanalysis resulted in a macrostructural summary for each text. Information from all nine clausal information types were employed in the formulation of these summaries. The storyline was the origin of 38% of information units while the supportive Bands accounted for 62%. However, storyline material was the most employed individual type. Background action was the second most used, accounting for 13%. The least employed types were evaluation and cohesive, with 2% each.
These results seem to indicate that a macroanalysis based on storyline alone as input would not accurately summarize the global semantic content of the Sherpa texts. Therefore, this study is not in agreement with Longacre’s (1989a:444) statement about the thematic importance of storyline material. Rather, these results suggest that there are some narrative sub-genres in some languages in which supportive information has at least as much global thematic prominence as storyline information.

The French Duty of Vigilance Act8 is considered as a major piece of legislation in the field of business and human rights9 . Indeed, it is the first one in the world to convert the soft-law concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD) into a fully binding framework for ensuring that multinational corporations are held accountable for the results of their actions around the world. The French Duty of Vigilance Act (DVA) does this by imposing an obligation on parent and contracting or instructing companies (“entreprises donneuses d’ordre”, i.e. above the supplier) to disclose and carry out due diligence in order to enhance the global protection of human rights and the environment.

The storyline clauses of a narrative push a story forward through time while supportive clauses slow down or stop the temporal movement of a story. This distinction between the functions of event clauses and non-event clauses in narrative discourse has been studied in various languages around the world.

This paper applies a textlinguistics approach to discourse to describe the morpho-syntactic and lexico-semanic features that distinguish types of storyline clauses from types of supportive material in five Sherpa personal experience narratives. Once the storyline markers are described, I then compare my results with Schöttelndreyer’s (1978) study of storyline in Sherpa. Based on this comparison, I suggest a reevaluation of Schöttelndreyer’s classification of personal experience narratives. While Schöttelndreyer suggests that there are four personal experience narrative genres each normally characterized by one storyline marker, the analysis presented in this paper leads to the conclusion that the norm is for personal experience narratives to exhibit multiple storyline markers with each marker performing a different evidential or attitudinal function rather than representing a primary indicator of genre.

Tourism is the largest grossing export industry in Nepal, accounting for 5% of GDP and more than 250,000 jobs (Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation 2017). Meanwhile at least 13 percent of tourists report engaging in trekking or mountaineering. Nepal is home to 7 of the world highest 10 mountain peaks, all of which are surrounded by national parks or conservation areas attempting to balance local development and ecological sustainability. Although the arrival of tourism to remote regions has led to an influx of technology and infrastructure coupled with a rise in living standards for many groups inhabiting these protected areas, it has also led to a new set of risks, including environmental degradation, the subsumption of indigenous rights, a rise in inequality among local populations, and the exploitation of migrant labor. In this essay I will examine the impact of managed and mixed development in one such adventure location from the perspectives of political ecology and ecological economics in order to illuminate the difficulties involved in bringing about growth and development that is both beneficial to local communities and environmentally benign.

Photographs from the 1929 German Kanchenjunga Expedition presented to E. O. Shebbeare (private collection) and paintings of Kanchenjunga by the landscape artist Julian Cooper.

In 1929 Germany launched its first Himalayan mountaineering expedition under the leadership of Paul Bauer.  Its goals were explicitly nationalistic, motivated by a desire to rebuild a faith in German manhood and to finally leave behind the defeat and humiliation experienced in the First World War.  Bauer’s various accounts of the Kanchenjunga expeditions in 1929 and 1931 are shot through with the language of struggle and military metaphors, the celebration of mountaineering comradeship harking back to the camaraderie of the trenches.  Underpinning it all was a sense of German national destiny expressed in the language of racial theory. 

But if the expedition’s goal was to establish German mountaineers on the world stage it also brought them into contact for the first time with the multi-ethnic world of the Himalayas.  The photographs taken by Bauer and his colleagues Julius Brenner and Dr. Eugen Allwein all exhibit a strong ethnographic sensibility, sensitive to the ethnic diversity of Sikkim and the region.  Sherpa and Bhotia high-altitude workers are accorded special attention.  They featured in group photographs and individual portraits.  One remarkable photograph features the expedition cook Tenchaddar, seated outside a tent, praying in the Lotus position.  The sublimity of this image is underlined by the fact that, all too often, Western mountaineers ignored and belittled the indigenous religious practices of the expeditionary labour force they relied on. 

What marks these images out as unique is that they were annotated by E. O. Shebbeare, the British transport officer on the 1929 Kanchenjunga Expedition.  A forestry official and founder member of the Himalaya Club, Shebbeare was able to name most of the Sherpas featured in the photographs, preserving for us their individuality and unique identity.  In one tender portrait a group of seven Sherpas lies in the grass, smiling at the camera, twirling Edelweiss in their hands.  The flowers, a symbolic link with the Germans’ own Bavarian homeland, signal a tranquil moment before the fruitless struggle on the N. E. Ridge.  Mountain of Destiny: Kanchenjunga 1929 captures a unique moment in German Himalayan mountaineering before the deadly focus on Nanga Parbat consumed so many mountaineering lives and before German and Austrian mountaineering organizations became subsumed into the Nazi Reich.

Heaton Cooper Studio Gallery, Grasmere, Cumbria, opens 15th November 2018, part of the Kendal Mountain Festival 2018.
https://www.heatoncooper.co.uk/

by March, Kathryn S. All Rights Reserved PLEASE NOTE: The negative microfilm copy of this dissertation, was prepared and inspected by the school granting the degree. We are using this film without further inspection or change. If there are any questions about the film content, please write directly to the school. UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

event date: Monday, November 26, 2018

event: 特別セミナー 多言語文化とタイポグラフィ：グローバル時代の文化創造に向けて

Special seminar: Multilingual Culture and Typography: Towards Cultural Creation in the Global Era at Tokyo Midtown Design Hub, Musashino Art University Design Lounge (Tokyo, Japan)

organization: Cultural Trade Mission led by Minister Sven Gatz

Taal en poëzie van Friesland tot Siberië

This thesis studies the relationship between storyline and macrostructure in five Solu Sherpa conversational oral stories of personal experience to test the accuracy of Robert E. Longacre's statement that storyline material is the "main stuff" from which macrostructural summaries are constructed (1989a:444). This is done by answering the question: What types of clausal information are employed in the construction of the macrostructural summaries of the Sherpa texts and how often is each type employed? Sherpa is a Central Bodish Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northeastern Nepal, primarily in the Solu-Khumbu district just south of Mt. Everest. The Solu dialect is spoken in the southernmost region of the district. Sherpa is an AOV (SOV) language with verbal suffixes that encode evidentiality and partially encode tense and aspect. A macrosegmentation of the texts revealed that at least three devices are necessary to indicate a boundary between thematic paragraphs, and it was necessary for at least one of these devices to be a break on one of Givón’s (1984) four unities. Regarding narrative superstructure, it was found that each story had at least one peak, and one story had two peaks. Three of the six peaks encoded the climax, with two encoding the inciting moment, and one encoding the developing conflict. Five of Longacre’s (1996) six peak marking devices were used in the Sherpa texts: 1. Change of pace, 2. a concentration of participants, 3. the occurrence of particles, onomatopoeia, and other phonetic devices, 4. heightened vividness, and 5. rhetorical underlining. A change in vantage point and/or orientation was not employed as a peak marking device in the Sherpa texts. In the analysis of clausal information, nine types were described. These included a storyline Band and eight supportive types: 1. Flashback A, 2. Background actions, 3. Flashback B, 4. Background activities, 5. Setting, 6. Irrealis, 7. Evaluation, and 8. Cohesion. The Sherpa stories employed between three and five storyline clause patterns. Only one story employed the same device in over half of its storyline clauses. These results suggest a modification of the storyline marking scheme posited by Schöttelndreyer (1978), in which narrative sub-genres were characterized by one or two storyline marking devices. The macroanalysis resulted in a macrostructural summary for each text. Information from all nine clausal information types were employed in the formulation of these summaries. The storyline was the origin of 38% of information units while the supportive Bands accounted for 62%. However, storyline material was the most employed individual type. Background action was the second most used, accounting for 13%. The least employed types were evaluation and cohesive, with 2% each. These results seem to indicate that a macroanalysis based on storyline alone as input would not accurately summarize the global semantic content of the Sherpa texts. Therefore, this study is not in agreement with Longacre’s (1989a:444) statement about the thematic importance of storyline material. Rather, these results suggest that there are some narrative sub-genres in some languages in which supportive information has at least as much global thematic prominence as storyline information.

Photographs from the 1929 German Kanchenjunga Expedition presented to E. O. Shebbeare (private collection) and paintings of Kanchenjunga by the landscape artist Julian Cooper.

In 1929 Germany launched its first Himalayan mountaineering expedition under the leadership of Paul Bauer.  Its goals were explicitly nationalistic, motivated by a desire to rebuild a faith in German manhood and to finally leave behind the defeat and humiliation experienced in the First World War.  Bauer’s various accounts of the Kanchenjunga expeditions in 1929 and 1931 are shot through with the language of struggle and military metaphors, the celebration of mountaineering comradeship harking back to the camaraderie of the trenches.  Underpinning it all was a sense of German national destiny expressed in the language of racial theory. 

But if the expedition’s goal was to establish German mountaineers on the world stage it also brought them into contact for the first time with the multi-ethnic world of the Himalayas.  The photographs taken by Bauer and his colleagues Julius Brenner and Dr. Eugen Allwein all exhibit a strong ethnographic sensibility, sensitive to the ethnic diversity of Sikkim and the region.  Sherpa and Bhotia high-altitude workers are accorded special attention.  They featured in group photographs and individual portraits.  One remarkable photograph features the expedition cook Tenchaddar, seated outside a tent, praying in the Lotus position.  The sublimity of this image is underlined by the fact that, all too often, Western mountaineers ignored and belittled the indigenous religious practices of the expeditionary labour force they relied on. 

What marks these images out as unique is that they were annotated by E. O. Shebbeare, the British transport officer on the 1929 Kanchenjunga Expedition.  A forestry official and founder member of the Himalaya Club, Shebbeare was able to name most of the Sherpas featured in the photographs, preserving for us their individuality and unique identity.  In one tender portrait a group of seven Sherpas lies in the grass, smiling at the camera, twirling Edelweiss in their hands.  The flowers, a symbolic link with the Germans’ own Bavarian homeland, signal a tranquil moment before the fruitless struggle on the N. E. Ridge.  Mountain of Destiny: Kanchenjunga 1929 captures a unique moment in German Himalayan mountaineering before the deadly focus on Nanga Parbat consumed so many mountaineering lives and before German and Austrian mountaineering organizations became subsumed into the Nazi Reich.

Heaton Cooper Studio Gallery, Grasmere, Cumbria, opens 15th November 2018, part of the Kendal Mountain Festival 2018.
https://www.heatoncooper.co.uk/