The imperial phase of Himalayan climbing reached its climax, as in a Pathé newsclip, when news of Hillary's and Tenzing's ascent was trumpeted to the world (thanks to Morris's coded dispatches to the London Times) on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, promising the dawning of a new Elizabethan age (or, some would say, marking the last gasp of Empire). In the years that followed, it was left to professional climbers from around the world - America, Germany, India, Japan - to remake the Sherpas in their own image, and to mount expeditions that looked more and more like war by other means (one American crew in 1963 took along 909 porters). No longer able to be the first to the top, climbers devised ever more outlandish ways to distinguish themselves - the first to get to the summit without oxygen, say, or the first to get there from the more difficult West Ridge, or the first to climb Everest solo, a Guinness Book of World Records form of one-upmanship that culminated in aspirants yearning to be the oldest woman to climb Everest, the first black, even 'the first Jew.' As Everest became the site of a kind of existential consumerism, it also began to look like the world's highest therapy couch; he climbed, the great Austrian mountaineer Reinhold Messner said, not to get to the top, but to 'face my own fears and doubts, my innermost feelings.' There is ample scope for social observation here, or at least for the kind of cross-cultural investigation mounted, not always convincingly, by Donald S. Lopez Jr., in his 1998 book Prisoners of Shangri-La, in which he suggests that every Western translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from Walter Evans-Wentz through Timothy Leary and friends to Robert Thurman, has somehow produced a different Eastern text that seems to respond to the Western moods and demands of the moment. But Ortner's approach, alas, is more theoretical. 'In Althusser's terms,' she writes, 'one might say that if one seeks the illusions within the allusions (the ideological biases within the seemingly realist claims), at the same time one seeks the allusions within the illusions, fragments (or more) of ethnographic truth in even the most eccentric sahib representation.' In other words, there may be a grain of truth, as well as of wishful thinking, in foreign impressions of the Sherpas. To the Sherpas, as the years went on, it must surely have seemed as if people from the privileged parts of the world (not just the West but, increasingly, Japan and Taiwan, among others) were seeking out the very hardship and discomfort that those born to it were keen to put behind them. The visitors from the West may well have seemed to be seeking out the First Noble Truth of Buddhism (that the truth of reality is suffering), even as they were importing a somewhat foreign version of the pursuit of happiness. By the 1970s, in what is the most amusing part of Ortner's survey, the Sherpas were listening to foreigners quote from the Chinese Yellow Emperor's Medicine Book on the slopes (once it had been Montaigne) and watching them practice vegetarianism. (When the Dalai Lama tried to become a vegetarian, as he engagingly writes in his Freedom in Exile, he almost died, such a diet not being well suited to Himalayan constitutions.) Ortner knows the Sherpa culture well enough to be sensible when it comes to the question of how much it has been 'spoiled' by the sudden influx of 15,000 climbers a year into a region that, as of 1950, had never seen a single foreigner. Most Nepalis are highly resourceful, she reminds us, and not without their own forms of hierarchy and machismo; it must be a matter of local pride now that roughly half the largest trekking agencies in Kathmandu are run by Sherpas, and that four Sherpas have become commercial pilots for Royal Nepal Airlines. Though a trekking Sherpa still earns a tenth of what his Western counterparts command, he can make as much on a two-month expedition as the typical Nepali earns in twelve years. Besides, nearly every foreigner since Mallory has taken to the accommodating Nepalis he's climbed with, and foreign climbers have helped bring schools and medical facilities and hydroelectric power to the region. Though they have denuded valleys and left trash on the mountains, they have also, if partly for public relations reasons, launched elaborate campaigns to clean the slopes of trash. A few years ago, Ortner points out, The New York Times reported that foreigners, by bringing candies to the Sherpas, had also brought tooth decay. But now, apparently, a 'Canadian-trained Sherpa woman has opened a dental clinic' in Namche Bazar, the words 'Canadian-trained,' 'woman,' and 'clinic' in that phrase all showing how things might be said to have improved. The way Ortner puts all this, though, again is somewhat oblique. 'The point is that, for all its negative positioning within a certain Western countermodern imaginary, money points precisely toward (as much as it might seem to point away from) something we may think of as an 'authentic' Sherpa cultural universe, a framework within which they articulate their own desires.' Sherpas, in short, like to survive as much as the rest of us do. When, at one point, Ortner devotes sixteen pages to the possible link between their making of money and their legendary cheerfulness, one feels like saying that, even post-Freud, sometimes a smile is just a smile. What the book lacks here, in fact, is precisely what a long-time anthropologist should be in the best position to give us: a sense of how the Sherpas feel about all these rich aliens who risk their lives, and spend $ 70,000 apiece, to pass fewer than five minutes atop a mountain that has no traditional meaning for them and who become so light-headed and exhausted they hardly know where they are, and are in any case mostly preoccupied with the harder task of getting down. One of the most striking passages in Ortner's book comes when one Sherpa, asked (almost desperately) by a Westerner if he is not moved to climb by something other than his livelihood, replies, 'Maybe you people have too much money, and you don't know how to spend....If you want to know what we think, we think it is kind of silly. But you people seem to like it.' What makes the Sherpa situation fascinating, after all, is that we find in it many of the same dramas we see in an Indian ashram, or in a Southeast Asian go-go bar: a well-to-do affluent foreigner takes on a poorer local to help him attain some vision of enlightenment, or self-realization, or just exotic adventure, rewarding him - or as often her - for the effort with the forms of comfort and opportunity they need most. To many Sherpas, surely, it is the people from Seattle who seem most like residents of Shangri-La. The Nepalis on treks find themselves not just in the position of local bellboys in a luxury hotel catering to foreign needs (for simplicity or peace), but in that of gatekeepers to a shrine of sorts, who accept payment to let infidels trample over their sacred ground. At the very least, they might wonder who really are the children in this transaction. This exchange of dollars for dreams has intensified dramatically in recent years as Everest has become a status symbol for the man or woman who has everything, leading to such unlikely sights as that of Pittman being carried up the slopes for several hours by a Sherpa, or the late Frank Wells, who became president of Disney, paying $ 250,000 a trip to climb the highest mountains in all seven continents. Ortner raises a few questions about how much the Sherpas, like their counterparts from Bali to Haiti, are 'playing themselves' for foreign consumption (or, as she puts it, 'consolidating the category 'Sherpa' in such a way that the ethnic category became virtually isomorphic with the work role of high altitude porter'). But her biggest contribution comes in bringing to them an affectionate understanding free of romantic sentiment. The Sherpas, she points out from close acquaintance, are notably competitive toward their Tibetan neighbours, with whom they share a devotion to Buddhism; and now there is talk of the 'first Newar' or the 'first non-Sherpa Nepali' to scale Everest, reminding us that self-assertion is not unknown in Asia. In recent years there has even been an all-Sherpa expedition on Everest (with Westerners helping out in a menial capacity), and one Sherpani, or female Sherpa, who raised $ 50,000 in order, it seems, to beat a rival to the top. Our own fascination with the ways in which man is humbled by Everest, and occasionally indulged by it, seems likely only to increase. The appetite for tales of humans being punished by Nature (not just on Everest, but on the high seas, in the Antarctic, and aboard the Titanic) mounts in direct proportion to technology's claims that we have everything under control. Three books on Mallory are in the works, and where Sebastian Junger's bestselling A Perfect Storm was bought by its publishers three years ago for $ 30,000, now even an account of the 1820 shipwreck of the Essex goes for $ 1.2 million. And Everest offers the particularly charged drama of people testing themselves in a higher, rare zone that trembles on the edge of myth, where many of the normal rules don't seem to apply. ('Above 8,000 meters,' a Japanese climber says, in one of the most chilling moments in Into Thin Air, 'is not a place where people can afford morality.') As interesting as the story of man against the mountain, though - and far less covered - is the one of man against man, and, more recently woman against woman, especially as the relative simplicities of the British Empire have given way to a criss-crossing chaos of cultural interactions. Ortner's solemn talk of 'gender reflexivity' sounds a little strange in the setting of a mountain known as a goddess, but she does describe such scenes as that of an all-female expedition to Annapurna in 1978. True to their imported priorities, the leaders took pains to hire two Sherpanis, as 'kitchen girls,' but both of them were fired after one took up with a male Sherpa. Things grew even more troubled as one of the American women fell in love with a Sherpa kitchen boy and then another with an 'untouchable' porter. (Though the Sherpas are notably free and easy in their attitudes to sex and drink, they still have qualms both about the shedding of blood on the slopes of their holy mountain and about frenzied couplings there.) When Mallory was asked why he attempted Everest, as all of us know, he is reported to have said, 'Because it is there.' When Stacey Allison, the first American woman to scale Everest, was asked the same question, she said, 'Because I'm here.' CONCLUDED This is a review of Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering by Sherry B. Ortner and is reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1999 NYREV, Inc.