Volume 46, Number 16 · October 21, 1999
Room at the Top
By Pico Iyer
Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering
by Sherry B. Ortner
Princeton University Press, 376 pp., $26.95
The last time I was in the Himalayas, I met a young, highly Westernized Tibetan who, misled perhaps by my Indian features (born in England, I've never lived in the subcontinent), started talking to me about the strange ways of the exotic foreigners he saw all around him. 'These Westerners,' he confided, in a tone of half-admiring bewilderment, 'they call us Tibetans refugees. But to us they are the refugees: cultural refugees, always looking for somewhere to belong to. We can't understand them. They come here, they always tell us, to find themselves; we believe we never lost ourselves in the first place.'
Review, 3537 words
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