Poetic transformations of Yolmo 'sadness'

One way in which Yolmo Sherpa of Helambu, Nepal, come to terms with loss is to sing of it. The paper seeks to show how one Yolmo 'song of sadness' works to express, evoke and assuage sentiments of funerary grief. Yet to best explore the transformative poetics of the song, we must trace its semantic links to other songs and situations, and so develop a contextual understanding of the experiential contours of Yolmo 'sadness,' the local ethos of emotional avoidance and restraint, and the sociopolitical nature of emotional distress in the Helambu valley. The findings of this analysis lead the author to argue, in contrast with recent ethnographies which treat discourses on emotions as rhetorical strategies rather than as reflections of personal or communal experience, that we need an integrative approach which focuses on the relationship between language and experience, politics and felt emotion.