High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism

by Sherry B. Ortner

An eminent anthropologist examines the foundlings of the first celibate Buddhist monasteries among the Sherpas of Nepal in the early twentieth century a religious development that was a major departure from “folk” or “popular” Buddhism. Sherry Ortner is the first to integrate social scientific  and historical modes of analysis in a study of the Sherpa monasteries and one of the very few to attempt such an account for Buddhist monasteries anywhere. Combining ethnographic and oral historical methods, she scrutinized the interplay of political and cultural factors in the events culminating in the foundings. Her work constitutes a major advance both in our knowledge of Sherpa Buddhism and in the integration of anthropological and historical modes of anlysis.

 

 

Sherry B. Ortner is professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Sherpas Throught Their Rituals (Cambridge) and editor, with Harriet Whitehead of Sexual Meanings : The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge). She has been awarded a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship for further research in her field.