Dreams of a Final Sherpa

In: American anthropologist: AA, Band 99, Heft 1, S. 85-98

Abstract

This exploration of a Himalayan Sherpa ritual engages contemporary cultural anthropology debates concerning ethnographic essentialism, positivism, and so‐called postmodernist approaches. The author notes a parallelism between Buddhist Sherpa ritual processes that call upon patrons to engage in mimesis with idealized images of themselves and ethnographic representations that call for Sherpas to become that which is desired by foreign others. A positivist reading of Sherpas thus leads us toward both a necessary reflexivity about the effects of our writing upon them and the adoption of a strategic essentialism aware of its karmic consequences.