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Drawing on elements of various genres--anthropological monograph, literary memoir, and photojournalism--James Fisher has devised this multivocal format to trace the impact of modern education and mass tourism on contemporary Sherpa society and to present and assess the Sherpas; views of their collective future.

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Sherpas

University of California Press

As a self-proclaimed science, anthropology until recently paid little attention to the personal impact of the field experience on the observerhow the raw conditions of life in some remote corner of the world affected the anthropologist's life and, especially, observations and conclusions. Fieldwork in highly stratified Asian societies is so complicated by people's hiding behind masks, to help them play the role they want the world to think they normally play, that something akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle exists: we can scarcely be sure that what we see is not an artifact of our presence rather than the routine day-to-day unfolding of what is naturally there (see Berreman's 1962 description of how people in the Indian Himalayas fool outsiders).

The question of what impact an anthropologist has on the long-term development of a society, however, is also rarely raised, except in applied anthropology projects where that is the only issue that matters. In Nepal, no one has studied the later developments produced by his or her previous work, and for good reason: anthropologists normally have no long-term effects on a society, although the effects on the individuals an anthropologist comes to know particularly well can be enormous.

My case is a partial exception. As a member of the Himalayan Schoolhouse Expedition of 1964 (but not yet as a bona fide anthropologist), I was inextricably part of cataclysmic events that changed the face of Khumbu forever. This chapter, using excerpts from the diary I kept at that time, puts those events on record.

What had first attracted me to Nepal, in an unabashedly romantic way, was the Himalayas. I cannot recall how I first became interested in this impossibly distant mountain rangeperhaps it was only the typical American fascination with whatever was the world's biggest, whether the genre was buildings or animals, cities or mountains. Had I known about the Guinness Book of World Records, I would have been an avid reader of it. I was intrigued by singular, preferably arcane, facts about our planet and could never resist Ripley's Believe It or Not. But for as long as I could remember I had read voraciously on the Himalayasbooks on exploration, mountaineering, history, and what little existed on its peoples.

The book that had seized my imagination more than any other, to the point of briefly paralyzing any thoughts other than those devoted to figuring out a way to get to Nepal or Tibet, was James Hilton's Lost Horizon. Although the idea was never a fully conscious one, I suppose what I really was searching for in Nepal when I went there in 1962, as an English teacher in the first Peace Corps group, was Shangri-La and its benignly perfect people or at least a more equitable, less frenetically driven and materialistic society than the one I had just come from. Like many anthropologists, I was drawn to other cultures because I couldn't stand my own.

Much as I liked the Kathmandu Valleyits lush, verdant beauty and its warm, fascinating, hospitable peopleit somehow fell short of Shangri-La. Maybe it just wasn't high enough. Anyway, from what I had read, if there were a Shangri-La anywhere, it must be in the Sherpa countrythe fabled Solu-Khumbu area around Mt. Everest. But that was so far away and difficult to reach, and the Peace Corps in those first days was so timid about placing people where they couldn't be evacuated in medical emergencies, that the dream of being assigned there was an impossible one. Although to me the Peace Corps seemed unnecessarily cautious and conservative, in its own self-view the sheer political fact of its existence was a risk sufficiently bold unto the day.

Still, I knew that Sir Edmund Hillary had built a primary school in Khumjung (Fig. 1), the largest Sherpa village in Khumbu, and as an educator in Nepal, I was interested to know more about it. Having read in the newspaper that the conqueror of Everest was in town (his movements never escape public notice), I decided to track him down.

If the name Sir Edmund Hillary conjures up magic even for people

Fig. 1.
Aerial view of the hour-glass villages (Sherpas think they resemble the body of
a horse) of Khumjung (below) and Khunde (above), with the Japanese built
Everest-View Hotel set among the trees above and to the left of the villages. Still
further left and out of sight over the hill lies Syangboche airstrip and,
below Syangboche, Namche Bazaar. The high peak is Kwangde.

who see mountains merely as inconvenient aberrations in the earth's crust to be flown over as quickly as possible, it certainly is special to anyone who loves mountains high and low. As someone who has always felt an attraction to mountains and the thrill (including the fear) of being in high placeswhether in a tree in my front yard in Kentucky, where I grew up, or on a steep face in the RockiesI came quickly under his spell. My journal entry for December 20, 1962 (almost ten years after the Hillary-Tenzing ascent of Everest) tells how I found him at the bungalow of Charles Wylie, a military attachi at the British embassy.

I went to see if Hillary was there. He was and was seeing two gentlemen off in the driveway. I waited for about fifteen minutes while he talked to them; then they left. He walked toward the house (and me), and I stepped forward and introduced myself. I felt rather small, for he is a tall manI'd say between six feet two inches and six feet five inches; his hair is rather long, especially in front, with a long shock falling down over his forehead, just as it did in the movie The Ascent of Everest. I told him I was interested in his school, and he

said he would be glad to discuss it with me, so we talked there in the driveway for about a quarter of an hour. I asked him if he could use a Peace Corps teacher up there, and he said he didn't think the facilities would warrant it yet. Only elementary schools are involved, and they teach, according to Hillary, just reading and writing, mostly of Nepali but also possibly of English. He said most of the Sherpas could speak Nepali, but few could read or write it . . . . They are not building schools in Namche Bazaar, the area's main town, partly because there is a school there already (but no teacher), partly because the need is greater in the other small villages; Hillary said Namche is now full of rogues, thieves, and other such people he described with unprintable adjectives; apparently the town is quite commercialized by now. Hillary was extremely nice and not at all arrogant or above talking to me, and I think we both enjoyed the conversation.

I had another long talk with him in June 1963 and wrote to him in November of that year, outlining my thoughts about the educational needs of the Sherpas in light of what I had learned by this time about education in Nepal. On November 20 I was standing on King's Way when Father Moran (the worldly, perennial, and primordial Jesuit priest who had started the Catholic secondary school in Kathmandu in the early 1950s) came roaring past in a battered van with the New Zealand mountaineers Mike Gill and Jim...