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Geographical reflections on Sir Edmund Hillary (1919–2008)
Abstract
During the past year, the media, public and officialdom have focused on Sir Edmund Hillary, his achievements, and what they mean to New Zealand. In this commentary, we reflect on how they relate to human geography. Although we acknowledge the obvious tensions that exist between adventuring and the contemporary concerns of the discipline, we also illustrate how Hillary's life and actions resonate with many of the discipline's current hopes, aims and challenges. Specifically, we discuss thematic overlaps in the fields of geopolitics and national identities, colonial histories and resistances, as well as the emerging public geography. We posit that ‘Hillary's geography’ is closer to human geography than is realized or at least acknowledged by geographers.
The idea of “public social science” has emerged in recent academic literature. Advocates describe it as a renewed scholar activism aimed at reigniting academia’s social consciousness and direct engagement with pressing social issues and causes. While the authors acknowledge that gerontology already possesses an applied focus that includes concerted and practical efforts for welfare and justice, they add that any “public gerontology” would have to go one step further by engaging with issues on the international stage, and that impact significantly on the world’s least advantaged peoples and places. As an illustration, they focus on the crisis of African grandmothers raising AIDS orphans. They describe the severity of the situation, the work of agencies, and some possible approaches for gerontologists in supportive activism and research. These, they contend, might also be used in other geographical and social contexts.
This article builds on recent discussions published in academic journals on climate change and health. It introduces four categories within which the CAM community might establish priorities - tactics, specialties, places, research. Within each category, the most pressing issues are highlighted and the ways in which individuals and the sector might respond.
Many geographers work on matters of great relevance for the issues facing society, but geography is rarely invoked in public debates over matters of contemporary concern. As a result, geographical perspectives are often missing from public discourse, and outmoded conceptions of geography are reinforced. This forum considers the importance and challenge of addressing this state of affairs. Four distinguished geographers who have been involved in different ways with the effort to raise geography's profile consider the possibilities and limitations of enhancing geography's public profile. Consideration is given to the prospects for raising the discipline's visibility in high-profile public venues, the role of geography in organized international research endeavors, the challenge of linking what geographers do to social activism, and the importance of questioning the unproblematized geographical ideas and discursive norms that already circulate in the public arena.
with mountains, from earlier exploratory accounts to contemporary geomorphological and geophysical research, using the latest scientific techniques. Many early physical geography books contained significant chapters on mountains (Lake 1915; Holmes 1965; Miller 1953). For human geographers, Peattie's Mountain geography of 1936 establishes some of the basic concepts of the human geography of mountains. Interestingly, in the subsequent half century there have been relatively few systematic texts in English. Most material on mountains has been subsumed
This article addresses and connects two areas of controversy within contemporary geography: the parochialism of contemporary human geography and the gulf between university and non-university geography. It is argued that we can find the cause of the latter phenomenon in the origin of the former, namely in academic geography's unwillingness to re-imagine the ‘global claim’ that it has inherited from its imperial past. This difficulty has created the conditions for the representation of popular geography as intrinsically dated, as politically suspect and/or as mere ‘traveller's tales’. It is suggested that geography cannot escape the burden of its global claim. Rather it needs to critically engage this formerly imperial paradigm and, in so doing, re-ignite geography's role in public debate and as public knowledge.
The Sherpa-inhabited Mount Everest region of Nepal has become a leading center of Himalayan tourism. This article examines the increasing role of tourism in the Sherpa economy and assesses changes in landuse, environment, and culture. As a result of tourism, the standard of living of most of the population has risen without severe environmental or cultural effects. Increasing regional differentiation in wealth, inflation, out-migration, and changes in pastoralism and forest use may have long-term adverse effects. Efforts are now under way to address some tourism-associated environmental problems.
This article argues that mountaineers, with their long-term relationships with specific regions and peoples, complex motivations structuring their presence and activities, and lengthy history as a distinct cultural community, represent what ecotourism is striving for. They are a group of socially aware, self-reflective travelers who are proactive in the growth and restructuring of the mountain experience. Mountaineering literature is used to describe the changes in the sport and in the mountains, and to illustrate some of the ways in which cultural values, social meaning, and physical reality change when the human/nature relationship is commodified. Assessing consequences of a commodified alpine experience raises further questions as to the efficacy of ecotourism development models, and achievability of “sustainable” tourism.RésuméLe merchandisage de l'alpinisme. Les alpinistes représentent bien les but be l'écotourisme, vu leurs rapports avec certains peuples et régions, leurs motivations pour structurer leurs activités et leur histoire comme communauté culturelle à part. Ce sont des voyageurs qui sont au courant des problèmes sociaux, qui ont pris conscience d'eux-mêmes et qui participent activement à la restructuration de l'alpinisme. Leur documentation décrit les changements dans le sport et les montagnes ainsi que les changements dans les valeurs culturelles, la signification sociale et la réaliste concrète qui ont lieu quand on change le rapport gens/nature en une marchandise. On pose des questions au sujet des modèles de développement de l'écotourisme et la possibilité de réaliser un tourisme ”soutenable”.
A broad review of process-orientated studies of the last two decades, and also of the interaction between human settlement and mountain environments. -K.Clayton
The
Conquest
of
Everest, the official film of the first ascent of Mount Everest, opens with the famous summit photograph of Tenzing Norgay holding aloft his ice axe, from which the flags of Britain, Nepal, India, and the United Nations flutter in the wind. Tenzing, a Sherpa raised in Nepal but for twenty years a resident of India, reached the summit with Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, on 29 May 1953, in a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt. In the film, the summit photograph is followed by the opening credits and the scene in London on 2 June 1953, when news of the ascent was announced on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. As crowds wave British flags to the beat of military bands, the Queen's gilded carriage rolls through ceremonial archways on the streets of London. The narrator then announces: “And to add to the cheers, the newspapers reported an extra of extras. Britain had one new victory: Men had climbed Mount Everest.” 1
This article offers a critical reading of the celebratory biographical and autobiographical texts for three ‘kiwi icons’. It argues that kiwi icons signal the enduring influence of British colonialism upon national imaginings – through a process that I term ‘re-settlement’. I demonstrate how representations of Barry Crump, Sir Edmund Hillary and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, prominent New Zealanders during the 1990s, are entwined with dominant constructions of New Zealand society. Further, I explore how these kiwi icons are constructed to serve the quest for nationhood; an endeavour, it is argued, that is about the reinvention of settlement mythology that involves the continuation of particular narratives of colonisation from the past.
Over the past 50 years the Sherpa-inhabited Mt Everest region of Nepal has become a premier international mountaineering and trekking destination. Tourism development has brought prosperity to many Sherpas. It has also, however, had adverse impacts on regional forests and alpine vegetation because of the use of firewood by camping groups and inns and the felling of trees to construct inns and other tourist facilities. Concern that tourism was causing widespread deforestation helped catalyse the 1976 establishment of an inhabited protected area, Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) National Park, in the Khumbu region and spurred the implementation of a series of forest conservation and alternative energy development measures both within the national park and in a recently declared buffer zone in the adjacent Pharak region. This paper examines the changing pressures that tourism has placed on regional forests and alpine vegetation over the past half century and their role in regional vegetation change. This analysis is based primarily on detailed accounts of past and present forest use and change obtained during fieldwork conducted in all Khumbu and Pharak villages, along with corroborating evidence from early foreign visitors’ accounts and photographs. Contrary to some early reports it now appears there has actually been little deforestation since 1950. The continuing use of firewood by inns, however, has contributed to the thinning of forests in some parts of the national park and to the depletion of shrub juniper in the most heavily visited alpine regions. There has been a greater impact on forests just outside the national park, which have been heavily thinned over an extensive area in order to provide timber to build inns within the national park.
Even though many geographers work on topics of great societal import, geography is largely missing from wider debates on political and social matters. This state of affairs reflects the historical marginalization of the discipline and the paucity of visible studies linking geographical scholarship to the major concerns of the day. Addressing this situation presents fundamental challenges for the community of geographers—ones that go far beyond efforts simply to promote geography as a discipline. Geographers need to grapple more frequently with larger-scale questions, foster more in-depth understanding of different parts of the world, enhance interactions between discrete parts of the discipline, and make explicit the implications of geographical work for the discussions that are shaping public and intellectual agendas. None of this means that geography should allow its agenda to be set by others or that research without explicit social or policy relevance should be abandoned. If the virtual absence of geographical perspectives in public debate goes unchallenged, however, academic geography will not be the only casualty. Efforts to comprehend the nature and changing character of the world in which we live will be fundamentally impoverished.
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
Public geographies: Taking stock Mountain geography: A review Confetti of Empire: The conquest of Everest in Nepal
- Price
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Geography as a world discipline: Connecting popular and academic geographical imaginations 2004 American Sociological Associa-tion Presidential Address: For public sociology
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National Geographic Society Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935: The Forgotten Adventure Livres
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- Linehan
Andrews GJ, Linehan D (2007). National Geographic Society. In: Robbins P, ed. of Environment and Society Astil T (2005). Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935: The Forgotten Adventure Livres, Southampton
Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1935: The Forgotten Adventure
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Astil T (2005). Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance
1935: The Forgotten Adventure. Les Alpes
Livres, Southampton.
The ‘conquest’ of Mount Everest: High mountain environments fifty years on
- Middleton A