Claiming the high ground: Sherpas, subsistence, and environmental change in the highest Himalaya

Abstract

Stanley Stevens brings a new historical perspective to his study of a subsistence society in ever-increasing contact with the outside world. The Khumbu Sherpas, famous for their mountaineering exploits, have frequently been depicted as victims of the world's highest-altitude tourist boom. But has the flow of outsiders to Mt Everest and the heights of Nepal in fact destroyed a stable, finely-balanced relationship between the Sherpas and their environment? Steven's innovative use of oral history and cultural ecology suggests that tourism is not the watershed circumstance many have considered it to be. Drawing on extensive interviews and data gathered during three years of fieldwork, he documents the Sherpas' ingenious adaptation to high-altitude conditions, their past and present agricultural, pastoral, trade and forest management practices, and their own perspectives on the environmental history of their homeland.

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