TOURISM AND SHERPAS, NEPAL - RECONSTRUCTION OF RECIPROCITY

Despite nearly 40 years of involvement in tourism and its heavy demands for wage labor, Nepalese Sherpas have found ways to reconstitute traditional productive relations in their new economy. This article takes a cultural approach to tourism capitalism. Sherpa reciprocal labor in the form of kinship, and other types of exchanges, has been reconstituted in mountain tourism alongside well-established patterns of wage labor. It is suggested that the Sherpa logic that informs and shapes Sherpa economic endeavors is a cultural logic revolving around tendencies toward both independence and interdependence into which new tourism opportunities can fit.