ABSTRACT
The best examples of the way representation and control work together in medicine come from the writings of Michel Foucault. He suggested that during the 17th century in European society a discourse emerged about the body which was essential to both a new type of power and new ways of controlling individual bodies and populations. Among the culturally Tibetan Sherpas of northeast Nepal studied over two years first in 1982 and again in 1986-87, 1 found that the “self” was tripartite: social, physical, and mental. Khumbu Sherpas were a culturally Tibetan ethnic minority living at the Tibetan border southeast of Mount Everest in Nepal. Ascending via plane and eventually on foot into the high altitude Sherpa villages from the country’s capital in Kathmandu, one moved progressively from Hindu to Tibetan culture. The individual was accountable for his or her actions in this life and in the afterlife, or next life.
