Dr. Young Hoon Oh is an adjunct professor in anthropology at University of California Riverside. Based on extensive field research in the Himalayas, he recently completed the dissertation, entitled "Sherpa Intercultural Experiences in Himalayan Mountaineering: A Pragmatic Phenomenological Perspective." His anthropological expertise is on the topics including mountaineering and the sports, Sherpa intercultural experience, and social change in South Korea. He has been regularly writing for Webzine Munhwada, a Seoul-based magazine on issues of humanities and culture, and Monthly Magazine Mountain.
Cultural anthropologist Young Hoon Oh has expertise in South Asian ethnicity, Asian religions, and modernization across East Asia, with years of ethnographic and historical research on Himalayan mountaineering. His ethnographic research among Makalu Sherpa people from northeastern Nepal is unprecedented and has been highly acclaimed in the scholarship. Also, his highly engaged research data as obtained by participating in the hardy Sherpa village lives as well as Himalayan mountain climbing for multiple times prove the resulting discussion to be innovative and suggestive in several ways. Focusing on the notions of cultural distinctiveness and of intercultural experience, Dr. Oh's theoretical discussion criticizes Western conventional methodological individualism and onto-epistemological presuppositions in social sciences and has contributed to understanding of cultural difference in reconciliation between a sociohistorical perspective and a phenomenological perspective.
