Ortner’s evolving theoretical concerns are explored in three major ethnographic studies of Sherpa culture. In Sherpas through
Their Rituals (1978), Ortner summarizes four sets of Sherpa rituals, organizing her analysis by the distinctive problems each ritual encounters. “Rituals do not begin with eternal verities,”
Ortner writes,
but arrive at them. They begin with some cultural problem (or
several at once), stated or unstated, and then work various operations upon it, arriving at “solutions”—reorganizations and
reinterpretations of the elements that produce a newly meaningful whole. The solutions (and the means of arriving at
them) embody the fundamental cultural assumptions and orientations with which we are partly concerned. (1978:2–3)
Sherpas through Their Rituals is very tightly focused on the
specific ethnographic case, but it touches on issues and strategies that Ortner develops in later works. First is her emphasis
on ritual as “first and foremost a system of meanings—goals,
values, concerns, visions, world constructions” (Ortner 1978:5).
Second is her consideration of rituals as providing a strategy for
action, “a matter of shaping actors in such a way that they wind
up appropriating cultural meaning as personally held orientations” (Ortner 1978:5). At the same time, ritual is reshaped by
the actualities of social life. Ritual is a “a sort of two-way transformer” modifying an individual’s conscience in reference to
cultural meanings but in turn reshaped to align with the realities of everyday life (Ortner 1978:5). Third, Ortner notes that the
Sherpa and other societies contain central contradictions that
are rarely eliminated but usually mediated through rituals. In
sum, culture is symbolic and meaningful, symbolic systems
provide guidelines for action, and the action is often directed to
the central contradictions of social life (see below, pp. 317–19).
Rituals are a class of symbolic systems. These themes are developed in later books.
In her most recent Himalayan ethnography, Life and Death
on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (1999),
Ortner examined the complex relationships between Western
high altitude climbers and the Sherpas. Initially Sherpas were
employed as porters on foreign expeditions and then became
high altitude climbers and trekking entrepreneurs. Expeditions
originally were all male, but Western and Sherpa women became increasingly involved in climbing. Accompanying these
changes were variations in the climbing ethos. The large postwar military-style expeditions—with tons of gear, hundreds of
porters, hierarchical command, and the goal of “conquering”
the mountain—gave way to smaller expeditions whose counterculture members sought equality among themselves and
with the Sherpas. The emergence of all-women expeditions,
commercialization and the appearance of “yuppie climbers,”
and the development of identity politics all shaped the social
dynamics of climbing on Mount Everest. In this the mountain
becomes an extremely prominent microcosm to understand
how human social life is shaped by complexities of power relationships, the patterns and contradictions of social forms, and
the way humans employ symbolic systems to resolve (without
eliminating) those contradictions.
Ortner’s third Himalayan ethnography, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (1989), examines the
establishment of Buddhist monasteries of celibate monks in the
early twentieth century but also treats a central issue in anthropological theory regarding symbols, structure, and practice in
the Himalayas—and in human culture in general.