Sherpa by trade or Sherpa by necessity? An ethnographic analysis of transnational class relations in Namche Bazaar.

Researcher: Chloe Wynne
Supervised by: Dr David Webber
Home department: History
Project department: PAIS
Expected start date: 20/8/2016
Expected end date: 1/10/2016

I graduated from Warwick this summer with a First Class Degree in History and Politics. My dissertation focused upon the politicsed motivations behind skin-colouring processes, such as artificial tanning and bleaching. I also completed a URSS project last summer, surveying sexism in Formula 1. Thus, my research interests have a clear focus on understanding everyday and esoteric processes through both anthropolgical and sociological lenses.

While I am taking a year out of study to work in the Students' Union as the Welfare and Campaigns Officer, I hope to return soon after with a postgraduate degree in Social Anthropology in 2017.

This project was inspired by a third year Politics module, 'The Cultural Political Economy of Sport'. Mountaineering - a topic I knew little about until recently, and which isn't a particular hobby of mine - became a topic of study and I was so intrigued by the power relations and labour movements happening right now in the sport. It is a sport filled with postcolonial tensions, racialised hierarchies, money (and lots of it), masculinity, political geography and European exceptionalism.

As such, motivated by this topic and the critical study of it, I came up with the idea of combining the issue with my love for anthropological study. I will be visiting Namche Bazaar, a small village en route to Everest Base Camp from 20th August until 4th September. This is a Sherpa village, and thus a perfect place for ethnographic analysis. I have established contact in the village, and hope to speak to the Sherpa community about their experiences with Western mountaineers. I will then combine any findings with my theoretical readings on the subject of ethnography and its practice.