#Everest : visual economies of leisure and labour in the tourist encounter

Anthropologists have described Nepal as a country of contradictory global imaginaries. Early visitors were drawn to Nepal for the images it evoked of solitude, spiritualism and heroic mountain exploration. More recently, the global mediatisation of Mount Everest has played a key role in attracting visitors to the region. Arguably, Everest has always been mediatised: historically, its appeal as an idea has existed in part through technologies of visual cultures. Everest may be especially mediatised now; recently improved mobile infrastructure in the northern Himalayas has coincided with an increase in the number of tourists arriving between 2016 and 2018. In this chapter, I examine the intersection of visual cultures and the ‘work’ of Mount Everest tourism. Using Deborah Poole’s visual economy (1997) as a starting point, I examine how the production and circulation of images through digital technologies shape how tourists imagine and experience Everest in Nepal. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Solukhumbu region with tourists, guides and porters, I argue that the Everest tourism industry is impacted upon by various forms of digital work: mobile and visual communication are part of tourist experiences, but they are also part of the strategies for meeting aspirations of life projects for workers whose livelihoods depend on the tourist industry. Through focusing on the tourist encounter, this chapter contributes to the intersection of media anthropology and an anthropology of mobilities by considering the aesthetic value of Everest within locally bound and across global networks.