Articlebronze2012

Tourism, Persistence, and Change: Sherpa Spirituality and Place in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal

29 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Ecological Anthropology

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Religious Tourism and Spaces Religion, Ecology, and Ethics Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond

Abstract

Ecotourism and cultural tourism are emerging as vehicles for many of the world’s indigenous peoples to integrate into the global market economy. The ecological knowledge and understanding of these societies may in turn be affected by these nascent industries. As part of shifting human-environment relationships, tourism can influence place-based spirituality. In this manuscript, I describe research on how tourism affected Khumbu Sherpa place-based spiritual values in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal. As Tibetan Buddhists, the Sherpa embodied dual overlapping conceptions of sacred landscape that connected people to place in some environmentally sustainable ways. Since the 1960s, tourism had been consistently increasing in their homeland, totaling more than 25,000 visitors in 2008. The Sherpa maintained a degree of control over the tourism economy through locally run lodges, teashops, and providing trekking and mountaineering services. Tourism as a vector of integration into the global market economy may consequently influence these spiritual values in concert with other social and ecological forces. I chose a stratified random sample of 100 individuals and 12 monks and used quantitative and qualitative ethnographic methods to assess fundamental place-based spiritual values across select demographics at the time of study. The values chosen by key Sherpa consultants to represent their spiritual connection to place included: sacred valleys, mountain protector deities, principles of kindness and compassion towards animals, sentient trees and groves, and water spirits. Results showed that indeed tourism and other related drivers appeared to influence ecological knowledge and understanding exemplified by less knowledge of spiritual values among the more market-integrated individuals and younger generations. Principles of kindness and compassion towards animals were stable and knowledge of mountain protector deities was reinforced and remade by tourism.

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References

1992Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation 2002Global environmental consequences of tourism 2005Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel 1990High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism 2000Life and death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan mountaineering 1996Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas 2002Cognitive Aspects of Intergenerational Change: Mental Models, Cultural Change, and Environmental Behavior among the Lacandon Maya of Southern Mexico 1995The Case of the Disappearing Shamans, or No Individualism, No Relationalism

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