This paper suggests that the principle of autochthony widely practiced by most Nepalis works not categorically but contextually and compels them to practice belonging dynamically, often resulting in multiple identity-making. Based on field research about Himalayan mountaineering and Sherpa semi-migratory lives, this paper explores the mode of dynamic practices of belonging, practices that have allowed a group of Sherpas from Walung, northeastern Nepal, to go through the drastic changes of their lives induced by modernization, transnationalization and sanskritization in the country. Sherpa’s monopoly of the mountaineering industry solidifies ever more along the Himalayan chain, fitting the ethnic group into a niche at the triple nexus: surveillance of the nation state, opposition to other ethnic and caste groups, and compunction of international counterparts. The key to this propping themselves relies on the dynamic practices of belonging.
While recently efforts have been made to clarify differences and similarities between practice of belonging and making of identity, the concept of belonging that is more intimate and inward-oriented than identity demands fuller explanation for one to resist falling into the trap of essentializing autochthonous identity in the context of Nepal. Sherpas from Walung perceive differing senses of belonging according to the contexts—villages, local town centers, the capital, mountaineering expeditions, etc.—and sometimes, but not always, explicitly express the senses in the form of identity. Cases show two characters of belongingness: one, no claim of belonging is made without identity-making, but not vice versa. Two, claims of belonging are likely to be made at the matters of ethics, rather than at abstract economic or political matters.
This conception partly explains the Sherpa’s monopoly of Himalayan mountaineering industry today. By organizing multiple mountaineering expeditions for various groups of foreign mountaineers, a Kathmandu-based agency run by Sherpas substantiated social networks in contexts of mountaineering as well as in their semi-migratory urban lives. In response, the afno manchhe politics of belonging as well as practical obstacles against the rationalizations of expedition management keep both the Nepali government from intervening and foreign agencies from engaging in practical matters, sustaining the industrial niche in which Sherpas of Walung come to assert their positioning. Meanwhile, the measure of the under-rationalization in economic relations of the country has raised complaints from foreign mountaineers, complaints so far largely suppressed in discourses of mountaineering communities due to compunctious feelings toward the ironically heroized hired workers in these communities and media in the West.
Thus, the recent rise of Sherpa governance over the Himalayan mountain tourism industry offsets the leverage of Western expedition organizers that has dominated the field for decades. Further, Kathmandu-based agencies encroach on neighboring countries, including India, Pakistan and China, dispatching expeditions to high peaks in those countries by subcontracting local agencies there. Although the contemporary Sherpa practices of Himalayan transnationalism rely on the global trend of Himalayan mountaineering initiated and still led by the Eurocentric neo-romantic athleticism, through dynamic practices of belonging Sherpas also seek to have posited themselves in the midst of the regional, national and global fields.