Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering » (New Edition)

"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is a stunning book: it is a probing ethnography of the strange, unequal relationship between 'sahibs' and Sherpas, a suggestive social history of the contemporary leisure class, and a powerful, often painful meditation on the cult and culture of high-risk mountaineering. With a humane, ironic, steady, and compassionate gaze, Ortner looks at lives lived at the edge of an abyss."--Stephen Greenblatt

"Sherry Ortner's Life and Death on Mt. Everest is an extraordinary study of the Sherpa people, opening windows into the realities of their lives and minds, a revelatory look at the whole mountaineering thing from their perspective, and an amazingly rich account of the fascinating world of the Himalayas and the Tibetan peoples. This book is a must read for any student of Tibet and the history of the interactions of Westerners and Tibetan peoples."--Robert Thurman

"Ortner has always been one of the clearest and most forceful writers among contemporary anthropologists and her wit and lucidity are once again in evidence here."--Arjun Appadurai, University of Chicago

"This highly readable book demonstrates the best of what contemporary anthropology can offer scholars and the reading public alike. A fascinating account of a timely subject."--Naomi Bishop

New Scientist - Ed Douglas

The Himalayas have nurtured one of the strangest alliances of all time....She pierces through the assumptions and prejudices that have been held by climbers about their extraordinary hired help, setting their behavior in the mountains firmly within its social context. Her explanation of "zhindak", a concept that relates, broadly speaking, to our ideas of patronage and loyalty, should be required reading for anyone who relies on a Sherpa to get him or her up a mountain.