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MODERN MOUNTAINS FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE ANTHROPOCENE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

THOMAS SIMPSON
THOMAS SIMPSON*
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
*
Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, cb2 1ta[email protected]
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Abstract

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 553 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

My thanks to Shinjini Das, Lachlan Fleetwood, Taushif Kara, Seb Kroupa, Catarina Madruga, Steph Mawson, Jake Richards, Sujit Sivasundaram, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.

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130 Ibid., p. 8.

131 Ibid., p. 35.

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134 Ibid., pp. 180–1.

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146 Ibid., p. 224.

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159 Ortner, Life and death on Mt. Everest, p. 8.

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161 Ghosh, The great derangement, pp. 4–5.

162 Chakrabarty, ‘The climate of history’, pp. 201–7.

163 Ghosh, The great derangement, p. 22, passim.

164 An excellent example of this work is Nayanika Mathur's account of human–big cat relations in the Himalaya, and her methodological considerations concerning ‘translation’ as a prime task of scholars in the Anthropocene: Mathur, ‘The task of the climate translator’.