What can packing lists and receipts tell us about the history of mountaineering on Everest? Sarah Pickman explores this question by examining the archives of the British Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s. The materials used to outfit the expeditions reveal the social worlds that produced the early Everest climbers and the climbers' expectations for life on the mountain. British Everest climbers brought many items that might seem superfluous to the modern eye – from decadent foods to evening clothes – but that reveal Everest's connections to colonialism, the growth of Western consumer culture and advertising, British beliefs about class and status, and assumptions about expedition labour. What they carried also demonstrates that the idea of 'comfort' was part and parcel of expeditions to even the most extreme environments on earth. By taking seriously the quotidian gear and provisions carried on the 1921, 1922, and 1924 Everest expeditions, this chapter demonstrates that the study of material culture can be a fruitful approach for telling new stories about the world's highest mountain.
Everest has always been mediatised and its appeal as an idea has existed historically in part through technologies of visual cultures. Twenty-first-century tourist experiences and mobile livelihoods also depend on configurations of fixed, dispersed, and mobile digital infrastructures. Drawing on fieldwork in the Solukhumbu region of Nepal with guides, porters, and tourists, Jolynna Sinanan argues that digital practices create gradients of visibility in visual narratives of Everest. The production and circulation of images through digital technologies shape how tourists imagine and experience Everest. At the same time, the digital practices of guides and porters can be strategies for livelihoods and aspirations for recognition and intergenerational mobility that have the potential to create alternative Everest narratives based on regional knowledge and experiences of work. Guides and porters in Everest tourism were formerly Sherpa but are increasingly from Tamang and Rai ethnic groups, which have been historically at the margins of Nepali society. Sinanan interrogates the relationships of power in representing Everest through contemporary digital practices and the tensions between the valorisation of regional knowledge and neocolonial imaginations.
What can theatre offer the cultural record of Everest that has not already been expressed in literature, music, photography, or film? Less visible than these media, the dramatic record of Everest on stage is nevertheless rich, extensive, and long-lived. In this chapter, Jonathan Pitches focuses on the staging of Everest in the 2010s and early 2020s, considering three performances to establish what they reveal about the changing significance of Everest in the contemporary world. Drawing on insights from newly conducted interviews with four artists (Matt Kambic, Carmen Nasr, Gary Winters, and Gregg Whelan), the selection of recent performance work serves as a paradigm of the ways in which Western contemporary theatre has engaged with the history, culture, and geopolitics of the world’s highest mountain. Each of the live acts and performances uses varied means to render Everest’s cultural complexity, contradictory reception, and historical density with a lightness of touch which belies their rigour and import.
Agnieszka I. Kaczmarek examines expectations of hypermasculinity when Wanda Rutkiewicz broke gender barriers in high-altitude mountaineering as the first Polish mountaineer and first European woman to scale Mount Everest in 1978. The chapter discusses why male team members in the German–French Mount Everest expedition diminished her achievements and held Rutkiewicz to high expectations of hypermasculinity during the climb. Utterly determined to stand on top, Rutkiewicz did exhibit hypermasculine patterns of behaviour while climbing and had similar expectations for Marianne Walter, a German woman climber whom Rutkiewicz criticised for her dependence on her husband and lack of self-reliance. Tough on herself and her companions, Rutkiewicz also commented on her own fear and loneliness. Rutkiewicz oscillated between behaviours and attitudes too often regarded as embodiments of either femininity or masculinity. The chapter presents Rutkiewicz as a woman who embodied a mountaineer with a hybrid identity, not binary, blending attributes of gender as multiple, not just one.
Tim Chamberlain examines the allure which the Himalaya has long exerted upon Western adventurers, both in fiction and in real life. Drawing upon contemporary interest in the early British expeditions to climb Everest, this chapter shows how two novels blurred the line between imagination and authenticity, playing upon themes of escape and adventure. In response, travelogues fed back into Western notions concerning the remoteness of the Himalaya. Chamberlain demonstrates how networks of mobility for the Indigenous guides supporting Western travellers spanned the full extent of the Himalayan massif. Though portrayed as a distant and inaccessible region for Westerners, this interconnected landscape was, in fact, already well-known and consciously mapped by local polities. This network of knowledgeable and experienced Indigenes was essential for the travellers who wished to fulfil their aspirations ‘to step off the map’ and ‘escape modern civilisation’. Their search for a notionally ‘unexplored’ Shangri-La thereby created an abiding leitmotif for Himalayan exploration in the Western imagination.
In the 1850s, Andrew Waugh, head of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, named the highest peak in the central Himalayas after his mentor, George Everest. As Ruth Gamble describes in this chapter, Waugh’s decision obscured the mountain’s centuries-long association with Chomolungma, also known as Miyo Langsangma, a deity revered by the Tibetans and Sherpas who lived near it. By tracing this goddess’s history back through the centuries, Gamble places the goddess in the wider contexts of Himalayan sacred geography, demonstrating the role she and her sisters, the Tseringma Chenga (Five Sisters of Long Life), played in the region’s cultural history and the life stories of two of the Himalaya’s most famous religious figures, Guru Rinpoche (semi-mythical, eighth century) and Milarepa (eleventh century). By tracing this history, Gamble shows that the British claims that there were no local names for the mountain are incorrect, and the Tibetan and Sherpa communities have continued to venerate the goddess despite commercial imperatives to refer to it as Everest and Chinese and Nepali attempts to recast the mountain as nationalist symbols.
Other Everests attempts to clear a space to engage the many worlds that share the same mountain, the multiple ways of being-in-the world, ‘a world where many worlds fit’. This introductory chapter highlights some of these ‘worlds’ and overlapping themes in Everest’s many names, nations, genders, tourists, climates, and stories. Throughout this volume, the international and interdisciplinary array of contributors reactivate old and new archives, engage with multimedia and live performances, and participate in historical or ethnographic fieldwork. They shed light on the different ways of being in relationship with the mountain and how these are navigated by climbers and high-altitude workers alike, from ritual ceremonies to the mountain’s immovable goddess, through to contemporary digital practices as global adventure tourists and guides curate their Everest experiences. The authors in the volume contribute to a plurality of new histories and perspectives.
Felix de Montety examines the nineteenth- and twentieth-century naming of Mount Everest from the perspective of critical place-name studies. In 1856, the surveyor Andrew Waugh proposed this place name for the world’s highest peak as a tribute to his predecessor, George Everest. Initial debates between Waugh and Brian Hodgson, a naturalist and linguist, echoed in later controversies over exonomy (the use of non-local place names by outsiders) in mountain toponymy and cartography. This chapter looks at the role of maps, instruments, philology, publications, and archives from geographical and mountaineering societies to examine arguments over proposed place names, including Mount Everest, Deodunga, Gaurisankar, or Chomolangma. Since the mid-twentieth century, China and Nepal have embraced Qomolangma or Sagarmatha as official names despite the enduring presence of Mount Everest as a mountain exonym in postcolonial societies. Mountain toponymy is a case study in modern mountaineering’s limited interest in local knowledge and blindness to political issues in climbing areas. The history of ‘Mount Everest’ as the product of Himalayan surveying, mapping, and mountaineering shows that place names can change and reminds us that alternatives exist and can and should be debated.
Mountaineering traffic on Everest frequently breaks records and the numbers game has several elements. Increasing numbers of climbers result in more employment opportunities in adventure tourism and rising revenue for the government of Nepal. The Nepali Ministry of Tourism charges a summit fee of USD 11,000 for a permit to climb Everest. Climbing permits and tourism revenues contribute significantly to Nepal’s economy. Growth of tourism on Everest has also transformed the lives of Sherpas and other local communities. The shift to a commercial business model that promotes adventure tourism on Everest has led to over-tourism above 8,000 metres – increasing risks of overcrowding, injury, and death. Commercial outfitters de-emphasise these risks when seeking customers and increasingly offer a range of commercial packages based on different consumer price points. High-end adventure travel companies in the 2020s offer luxury expeditions, requiring Sherpas to carry unnecessary Western consumer items to higher camps, significantly increasing the associated risks. Government regulation has failed to manage these crises of overconsumption on Everest.
Mount Everest looms large in the popular imagination. Since the deaths of mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in 1924, histories of the mountain have overwhelmingly focused on the mythologies of Western male adventure and conquest. But there are many more stories waiting to be told. Other Everests brings together new voices and perspectives on the historical and cultural significance of Everest in the modern world. The book shines a light on the overlooked role of local people and high-altitude workers, while also revealing the significant contributions women have made to climbing the mountain and writing its history. It explores the depiction of Everest in a range of media and investigates how the forces of nationalism and commercialism have shaped many different ‘Everests’. After years of exploitation, Indigenous people are now reclaiming Mount Everest in the twenty-first century. Other Everests re-examines the past and present of the world’s highest peak, presenting an exciting vision of what Everest might become in the future.