In Life and Death on Mt. Everest, Sherry Ortner delivers a compelling historical ethnography and analysis of Himalayan mountaineering in Nepal. The author covers the 80 years or so of both European and Sherpa attempts to scale Nepal’s mountains. She relies on over three decades of fieldwork in the region, coupled with a sympathetic review of the large mountaineering literature. In pairing mountaineering and ethnography, Ortner skillfully brings together two “serious games” (p. 21), each of which consummates its singular sort of risk in a memorial act of writing. Consequently, in Life and Death on Mt. Everest the epic of mountaineering is combined with the epic of trying to make sense of its practices and literature.

Ortner offers a bicultural answer to the puzzling question “Why climb Mt. Everest?” deftly filling the space left behind by George Mallory’s famously empty signifier: “Because it’s there.” At the same time, she writes a straightforward moral critique of mountaineers, trekkers, and travelers who have typically orientalized and subordinated Sherpas and too frequently exploited them.

The pursuit of two theoretical objectives focus the ethnography. First, Ortner unravels familiar ethnic and gender stereotypes to yield the complexity that they compress and dissemble. She fractures Europeans’ view of Sherpas as unspoiled, naïve, intractable, and infantile, revealing instead Sherpas who carry, Sherpas who climb, Sherpas who themselves hire and organize, and Sherpa women, some of whom now climb high. Similarly, the Europeans of this book are neither quintessential dominators nor comic-strip heroes.

Europeans first arrived in Khumbu as militaristic, massively equipped, would-be conquerors of Everest and as enforcers of a paternalistic hierarchy. On these expeditions Sherpas tended to be cast in the role of low-paid servants. By the 1960s, however, Europeans began to travel to Khumbu as mountaineering representatives of the counterculture, lightly equipped for Alpine ascents and cognitively and morally equipped for reciprocity with the mountain and with their Sherpa employees. Today, Sherpas are recruited as proper members of expeditions. In addition, from the 1960s onward, European women have climbed on Everest both in all-women teams and together with men (the feminist aspect of women’s mountaineering is well covered in the book). Other identity ascents besides first woman have taken place: first black person, first Sherpa woman, first Jew. Finally, breaking from the critical spirit of European mountaineering, commercially minded European climbers brought “yuppie mountaineers” (p. 283) to the thin air of Everest, with tragic consequences in 1996.

Ortner, however, wants history to do more than expose the usual stereotypes; she desires anthropology to be more than the cultural text that damns these stereotypes. History in Life and Death on Mt. Everest is relational and representational, configured and periodized. The main actors are animated by questing, restless identities, identities shaped and guided by deeper contradictions in social structure. In making her second theoretical point, Ortner argues that identities are patterned and determined but at the same time practiced as sources of transforming agency. They are determined and yet determining. This famous antinomy has, of course, been an enduring focus of Sherry Ortner’s anthropological paradigm. Here, its resolution turns on the author’s comprehension of a contact that is neither a simple narrative of power and resistance nor a forlorn story of a dying Sherpa culture, contaminated by the materialism of arrogant Westerners.

Ortner replaces these two familiar tales with analysis of the transforming cultural practices that collide and mesh to make contact constitutive. Ortner views the context of Himalayan mountaineering, for the most part, as a space in which climbing Europeans subordinate Sherpas to a singular project that dialectically combines romantic rejections of materialism with the worship of technology and fervent goal orientation that romanticism normally eschews. In this situation, the Europeans’ exercise of power is never purely benevolent and never solely a willful exercise in domination. Similarly, recruited to this alien project, Sherpas appropriate and append mountaineering to the indigenous pursuit of becoming Sherpa men of stature, both inside and outside of the monasteries. They bring to mountaineering the beliefs, forms, and gestures of both high and low Khumbu Buddhism. Moreover, when Sherpa women begin climbing, they do so by stretching the elasticity of indigenous values, not by breaking free of them. Sherpas extract from, project onto, and constantly inflect the practice of Himalayan mountaineering both in responding to the dialectic of reciprocity and hierarchy and in mapping its scenarios onto the extraordinary sphere of climbing. Indeed, in the author’s general view of this contact, Sherpa actors realize the inner potential of the indigenous projects that define them by encompassing projects of the Other.

Life and Death on Mt. Everest, is a worthy sequel to the author’s High Religion (Princeton University Press, 1989) and a good companion to the analytical accounts of contact written, for example, by Sahlins (Historical Metaphors, Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom, University of Michigan Press, 1981) and Schieffelin and Crittendon (Like People You See in a Dream. First Contact in Six Papuan Societies, Stanford University Press, 1991). Sherry Ortner’s uniquely detailed and complex appreciation of exactly where Sherpas are coming from, as well as where they are currently heading, helps explain what Sherpas have made of mountaineering in the past; what mountaineering has made of them; and, finally, how Sherpas have begun to reorient themselves toward mountaineering in the new century.