Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, in this paper, we investigate the lived experience and social “production” of endurance in this sociologically interesting physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally, and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of “endurance work.” Data emanate from in-depth interviews with nineteen high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The paper responds to the call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing.