4 - Hospitality: problems of exchange, status, and authority

Summary

From one, not inaccurate, point of view, the key fact of Sherpa social structure is its relative “atomization” into nuclear family units and estates. At the same time, however, a Sherpa village is a community, with lively social interaction, a reasonable degree of order and solidarity, and often a certain collective identity. Such communal solidarity and identity is reproduced in many contexts: in the periodic macro-events of village temple rituals, and in the countless microinteractions of day-to-day social life.

But there is also an intermediate level of social event in which the community reproduces itself, with its distinctive structures, processes, and style, as a community: in formal parties privately sponsored by individual households, with most of the rest of the village as guests. A household will give a formal hospitality event in conjunction with a wedding, a funeral, or a privately sponsored New Year, mid-year, or other seasonal ritual. While only the wealthier households commission seasonal rituals and entertain large numbers of people on those occasions, even the poorer families will sponsor major parties in conjunction with weddings and funerals, if they are not to drop out of community membership altogether. Giving and receiving hospitality are among the major acts of sociality in Sherpa culture.

The party

Guests are invited to a party only a few hours before the event is to begin, the host/hostess sending their children around to the village households to tell people, “Come, they said!” When the guests arrive later in the day, they are seated and served tea or beer.