"This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists."--William H. Sewell Jr., author of "Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation" von...

The Sherpas of the Himalayas practice Tibetan Buddhism, a variety of Mahayana Buddhism that has never before been studied in its social setting by an anthropologist. This book is at once a general interpretation of Sherpa culture, an...