Introduction

Abstract

Footprints break the surface of the snow, heading towards the summit of Mount Everest. Who made them? For the past century, many people looking at such footprints have imagined a singular heroic figure, certainly male, probably Western, or perhaps a pair of climbers sharing a rope, such as George Mallory and Andrew (Sandy) Irvine in 1924 or Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. The footsteps in the cover photograph of this book lead upwards on the snows of the ‘Hillary Step’, the imposing obstacle below the summit on the Nepali side of Everest, named after one of the pair who together made the first ascent of the world’s highest mountain.

In June 1924, Mallory and Irvine left similar footprints on the northern, Tibetan slopes of Everest that were visible to observers watching through telescopes below. After they disappeared near the summit, Mallory and Irvine were celebrated for embodying the spirit of man. Yet their deaths were not the first on the mountain. Two years before, in 1922, seven porters were killed in an avalanche on the slopes of the North Col. The porters’ names were later added to a memorial for Mallory and Irvine at Everest Base Camp in Tibet, but their contributions remained largely hidden in the Everest expedition archives, overshadowed by the stories of heroic white men.

Since the 1950s, ‘other Everests’ has implied a mountaineering metaphor to elevate the significance of other endeavours. ‘There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men’, Maurice Herzog famously concluded in Annapurna, his account of the first ascent of an 8,000-metre peak in 1950. Echoing Herzog, the leader of the successful 1953 British expedition, Sir John Hunt, thought the ascent of Everest was justified by the ‘seeking of their “Everests” by others’. Hunt concluded ‘the spirit of man’ could overcome any obstacle and the ascent should inspire enterprising explorers, mountaineers, and adventurers in climbing and other pursuits.

Since then, climbers have often followed the footsteps of Sherpas, the ethnic group in Nepal that became the leading porters and guides on Mount Everest. In the 2020s, fresh footprints in the snows of the Hillary Step were being made by Sherpas, both men and women, and the climbers following their footprints are as likely to be from India and China as from Europe or North America. By the first quarter of the twenty-first century, ‘other Everests’ highlights the contributions and perspectives of diverse communities on and beyond the mountain.

Other Everests is the culmination of a UK-funded research network initially concerned with the commemoration of the centenaries of the early British Mount Everest expeditions. The network examined multiple ethical, social, and political challenges raised by Mount Everest, with attention being given to the meaning of historical commemoration, the agency of Indigenous labour, and the evolution of contemporary mountaineering cultures. The earliest British expeditions were linked to a geostrategic ‘forward policy’, including the military invasion of Tibet, which aimed to realign Tibet away from Republican China towards British India. After the First World War, the assault on Everest became a gesture of imperial redemption, an effort to restore British morale and reassert the vitality of an imperial masculinity considered critical to ruling a multiethnic empire. The ‘epic of Everest’ became a metaphor for the expedition organisers and filmmakers who saw Mallory and Irvine embodying the ‘spirit of modern man’. This language persisted into the 1970s, when the global counterculture transformed relations with Sherpas, Junko Tabei became the first of many women to climb Mount Everest, and a new breed of climbers entered the scene who began to replace imperial masculinities with corporate masculinities drawn from transnational business boardrooms. With the advent of commercial guiding services and the discovery of Mallory’s body in the 1990s, older imperial narratives were exhumed and resurrected along with artefacts from the body. Mountaineering narratives still celebrate heroic men conquering mountains in ways that perpetuate racial and gender stereotypes and continue to inform quasi-colonial practices in contemporary Himalayan mountaineering.

Postcolonial scholars examining such stereotypes and practices highlight the role of ‘Othering’, whereby ‘individuals and groups are treated and marked as different and inferior from the dominant social group’. Since the 1920s, Everest expeditions have relied on vast pyramids of Indigenous labour, an embodied infrastructure that was seldom acknowledged, except when identifying Gurkhas or Sherpas as embodying a ‘martial race’ or ‘mountain’ people. While traditional Everest narratives often adopt such colonial perspectives, the ‘Other Everests’ research network attempted to invert and subvert this rhetoric and reintroduce a plurality of perspectives – a world of multiple or alternative Everests.

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. Everest can be viewed as a ‘fallen giant’ or the height of global prestige; a tourist’s quest for adventure or a commodified package in a global adventure tourism industry. Avalanches and natural disasters in the 2010s caused deaths that highlighted risks from a changing climate, but as many of our contributors make clear, these vulnerabilities co-emerged with inequalities in high-altitude labouring practice over the last century. The other Everests presented in this volume have shaped the present but do not determine the future approaches to the world’s highest mountain.