Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T18:33:40.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

1 For details of this episode, see Davis, Wade, Into the silence: the Great War, Mallory and the conquest of Everest (London, 2012), pp. 465–6Google Scholar.

2 Peter L. Bayers critiques Mallory's words as a key instance of occluding the ‘masculine imperial and anti-imperial ideologies [that] fuel the impetus to climb a mountain’: Bayers, Peter L., Imperial ascent: mountaineering, masculinity, and empire (Boulder, CO, 2003), p. 15Google Scholar. For an alternative reading, see Edwin Bernbaum's claim that Mallory's response gained traction because of its ‘intriguing, Zen-like nature’: Bernbaum, , Sacred mountains of the world (San Francisco, CA, 1994), p. 238Google Scholar.

3 Ortner, Sherry B., Life and death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan mountaineering (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 39Google Scholar.

4 On these trends in historical and humanities scholarship more broadly, see Eisenstadt, Shmuel, ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129 (2000), pp. 1–29Google Scholar; Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 113–50Google Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The muddle of modernity’, American Historical Review, 116 (2011), pp. 663–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Debarbieux, Bernard and Rudaz, Gilles, The mountain: a political history from the Enlightenment to the present, trans. Marie, Jane Todd (Chicago, IL, 2015), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cosgrove, Denis and Dora, Veronica della, ‘Introduction: high places’, in Cosgrove, Denis and Dora, Veronica della, eds., High places: cultural geographies of mountains, ice and science (London, 2009), pp. 1–16, at p. 1Google Scholar.

6 On the concept of ‘heterotopia’, see Foucault, Michel, ‘Of other spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16 (1986), pp. 22–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Hansen, Peter H., The summits of modern man: mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2013), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dora, Veronica della, Mountain: nature and culture (London, 2016), p. 108Google Scholar.

8 My terminology here is adapted from Berman, Marshall, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

9 Rudwick, Martin J. S., Bursting the limits of time: the reconstruction of geohistory in the age of revolution (Chicago, IL, 2005), pp. 15–21, 641–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Della Dora, Mountain, p. 140.

11 See, for example, Stephen, Leslie, The playground of Europe (London, 1871)Google Scholar; Coolidge, W. A. B., The Alps in nature and history (London, 1908)Google Scholar; de Beer, G. R., Early travellers in the Alps (London, 1930)Google Scholar; Clark, Ronald, The Victorian mountaineers (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Engel, Claire Eliane, Mountaineering in the Alps: an historical survey (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

12 In this vein, Peter H. Hansen effectively argues that William Windham's ‘discovery’ of Mont Blanc in 1741 ‘has served as a foundation myth in narratives of mountaineering and modernity’: Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 33.

13 Quotation from Coolidge, The Alps, p. 75; see also Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps, p. 24.

14 Stephen, The playground of Europe, pp. 354–5.

15 Ibid., pp. 44–5.

16 Ibid., pp. 1–39.

17 Ibid., pp. 40–78; quotation at p. 41.

18 See, for example, Gavin de Beer's distinction in 1930 between ‘early travellers’ and the ‘modern standpoint’ in de Beer, Early travellers, pp. vii–viii.

19 At one point, Peter Hansen reads The playground of Europe in this way: Hansen, The summits of modern man, pp. 7–8.

20 Stephen, The playground of Europe, p. 32.

21 Ibid., pp. 359–71.

22 Freshfield, Douglas W., ‘On mountains and mankind’, Geographical Journal, 24 (1904), pp. 443–60, at p. 452CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At this point, I depart from Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz's claim that since the eighteenth century mountains have been placed decisively apart from culture and on the side of nature: Debarbieux and Rudaz, The mountain, pp. 15–16. On the simultaneous assertion and blurring of the nature/culture divide in modernity, see Latour, Bruno, We have never been modern, trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

23 Stephen, The playground of Europe, pp. 24–5.

24 The concept of ‘never quite overcoming’ as a way of thinking shifts between the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern appears in Butler, Judith, ‘Revisiting bodies and pleasures’, Theory, Culture & Society, 16 (1999), pp. 11–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, trans. Reynolds, Sian (Berkeley, CA, 1972; orig. edn 1949), pp. 25–53Google Scholar; Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Mountain gloom and mountain glory: the development of the aesthetics of the infinite (Ithaca, NY, 1959)Google Scholar.

26 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 28.

27 Mathur, Nayanika, ‘The task of the climate translator’, Economic and Political Weekly, 52 (2017), pp. 77–84Google Scholar; Ghosh, Amitav, The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (Chicago, IL, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The climate of history: four theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), pp. 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On the significance of the uncanny in narratives of climate change, see Ghosh, The great derangement, p. 30.

29 For a similar programme in the history of political thought, see Forrester, Katrina and Smith, Sophie, eds., Nature, action and the future: political thought and the environment (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Reidy, Michael S., ‘The most recent orogeny: verticality and why mountains matter’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 47 (2017), pp. 578–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Withers, Charles W. J. and Livingstone, David N., ‘Thinking geographically about nineteenth-century science’, in Withers, Charles W. J. and Livingstone, David N., eds., Geographies of nineteenth-century science (Chicago, IL, 2011), pp. 1–20, at p. 1Google Scholar. See also Livingstone, David N., Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago, IL, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bigg, Charlotte, Aubin, David, and Felsch, Philipp, ‘Introduction: the laboratory of nature – science in the mountains’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 311–21, at p. 314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Science in Context, 22, 3 (2009).

34 This question is famously posed and pondered in Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, NJ, 1985)Google Scholar.

35 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes (1779), quoted in Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, p. 317.

36 Reeves, Nicky, ‘“To demonstrate the exactness of the instrument”: mountainside trials of precision in Scotland, 1774’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 323–40, at p. 325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, p. 317.

38 Heggie, Vanessa, ‘Why isn't exploration a science?’, Isis, 105 (2014), pp. 318–34CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Vetter, Jeremy, ‘Rocky mountain high science: teaching, research, and nature at field stations’, in Vetter, Jeremy, ed., Knowing global environments: new historical perspectives on the field sciences (New Brunswick, NJ, 2011), pp. 108–34, at p. 109Google Scholar.

39 Lane, K. Maria D., Geographies of Mars: seeing and knowing the red planet (Chicago, IL, 2011), p. 17Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 66.

41 Ibid., pp. 97–139.

42 Ibid., p. 107.

43 Ibid., p. 95.

44 Ibid., pp. 92–3.

45 Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, p. 314.

46 Hevly, Bruce, ‘The heroic science of glacier motion’, Osiris, 11 (1996), pp. 66–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the importance of narratives of physical hardship in British endeavours in the early nineteenth-century Himalaya, see Fleetwood, Lachlan, ‘“No former travellers having attained such a height on the Earth's surface”: instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830’, History of Science, 56 (2018), p. 6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

47 Hevly, ‘The heroic science’, p. 84.

48 For example, Tracy, Sarah W., ‘The physiology of extremes: Ancel Keys and the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 86 (2012), pp. 627–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fleetwood, ‘“No former travellers”’; Heggie, ‘Why isn't exploration a science?’, p. 319.

49 Nall, Joshua, ‘Constructing canals on Mars: event astronomy and the transmission of international telegraphic news’, Isis, 10 (2017), pp. 280–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, p. 316.

51 Becker, Catherine Nisbett, ‘Professionals on the peak’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 487–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Ibid., pp. 489–90.

53 Mathieu, Jon, The third dimension: a comparative history of mountains in the modern era, trans. Brun, Katherine (Cambridge, 2011), p. 37Google Scholar.

54 Lane, Geographies of Mars, p. 79

55 Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, pp. 314–15.

56 Hevly, ‘The heroic science’, pp. 73–5.

57 Speich, Daniel, ‘Mountains made in Switzerland: facts and concerns in nineteenth-century cartography’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 387–408, at p. 389CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century (Cambridge MA, 1990)Google Scholar.

59 See, for example, Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ‘Introduction: the work of vision in the age of European empires’, in Ramaswamy, Sumathi and Jay, Martin, eds., Empires of vision: a reader (Durham, NC, 2014), pp. 1–24Google Scholar; Cosgrove, Denis, Geography and vision: seeing, imagining and representing the world (London, 2008)Google Scholar.

60 Lane, Geographies of Mars, p. 137; Macfarlane, Robert, Mountains of the mind: a history of a fascination (London, 2003), p. 156Google Scholar; della Dora, Mountain, pp. 107–38; Simpson, Thomas, ‘“Clean out of the map”: knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers’, History of Science, 55 (2017), pp. 3–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

61 Colley, Ann C., Victorians in the mountains: sinking the sublime (Farnham, 2010), pp. 9, 224Google Scholar; Fleetwood, ‘“No former travellers”’.

62 Shepherd, Nan, The living mountain (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 101Google Scholar.

63 Brevern, Jan von, ‘Counting on the unexpected: Aimé Civiale's mountain photography’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 409–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the visual experiences associated with panoramic images more generally, see Bigg, Charlotte, ‘The panorama, or la nature a coup d’œil’, in Fiorentini, Erna, ed., Observing nature – representing experience: the osmotic dynamics of romanticism 1800–1850 (Berlin, 2007), pp. 73–95Google Scholar; Oettermann, Stephan, The panorama: history of a mass medium, trans. Lucas, Deborah Schneider (New York, NY, 1997)Google Scholar.

64 On body-as-instrument in upland spaces during the earlier nineteenth century, see Outram, Dorinda, ‘On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation, and enlightenment exploration’, in Livingstone, David N. and Withers, Charles W. J., eds., Geography and enlightenment (Chicago, IL, 1996), pp. 281–94, at pp. 287–9Google Scholar; Fleetwood, ‘“No former travellers”’, p. 8.

65 Felsch, Philipp, ‘Mountains of sublimity, mountains of fatigue: towards a history of speechlessness in the Alps’, Science in Context, 22 (2009), pp. 341–64, at pp. 357–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Robbins, David, ‘Sport, hegemony and the middle class: the Victorian mountaineers’, Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (1987), pp. 579–601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reidy, Michael S., ‘Mountaineering, masculinity, and the male body in mid-Victorian Britain’, Osiris, 30 (2015), pp. 158–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Freedgood, Elaine, Victorian writing about risk: imagining a safe England in a dangerous world (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 99–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Heggie, Vanessa, ‘Experimental physiology, Everest and oxygen: from the ghastly kitchens to the gasping lung’, British Journal of the History of Science, 46 (2013), pp. 123–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tracy, ‘The physiology of extremes’.

68 Heggie, ‘Experimental physiology’, pp. 132, 146.

69 Tracy, ‘The physiology of extremes’, quotation at p. 630.

70 Hevly, ‘The heroic science’, p. 66.

71 Braudel, The Mediterranean p. 34.

72 See, for example, Coolidge, The Alps, p. 75.

73 Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 40.

74 Zimmer, Oliver, ‘In search of natural identity: Alpine landscape and the reconstruction of the Swiss nation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40 (1998), pp. 637–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Schär, Bernard C., ‘On the tropical origins of the Alps: science and the colonial imagination of Switzerland, 1700–1900’, in Purtschert, Patricia and Fischer-Tiné, Harold, eds., Colonial Switzerland: rethinking colonialism from the margins (London, 2015), pp. 29–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Zimmer, ‘In search of natural identity’, pp. 637–8.

77 Armiero, Marco, ‘Nationalizing the mountains: natural and political landscapes in World War I’, in Armiero, Marco and Hall, Marcus, eds., Nature and history in modern Italy (Athens, OH, 2010), pp. 231–50Google Scholar; Armiero, Marco, A rugged nation: mountains and the making of modern Italy: nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar; Lee Wallace Holt, ‘Mountains, mountaineering and modernity: a cultural history of German and Austrian mountaineering, 1900–1945’ (Ph.D. diss., Texas, 2008); Keller, Tait, ‘The mountains roar: the Alps during the Great War’, Environmental History, 14 (2009), pp. 253–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Keller, ‘The mountains roar’, p. 254.

79 Armiero, ‘Nationalizing the mountains’.

80 Pandit, Maharaj K., Life in the Himalaya: an ecosystem at risk (Cambridge, MA, 2017), pp. 163–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guyot-Rechard, Bérénice, Shadow states: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962 (Cambridge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Armiero, ‘Nationalizing the mountains’, p. 235.

82 Ibid., pp. 238–9.

83 Schrepfer, Susan B., Nature's altars: mountains, gender, and American environmentalism (Lawrence, KA, 2005)Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., quotation at p. 2.

85 Wigen, Kären, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji mountaineering and the quest for geographical enlightenment’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 31 (2005), pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Shiga Shigetaka, quoted in Wigen, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps’, pp. 10–11.

87 Tracy, ‘The physiology of extremes’, pp. 651–6; Jong-Heon Jin, ‘Paektudaegan: science and colonialism, memory and mapping in Korean high places’, in Cosgrove and della Dora, eds., High places, pp. 196–215.

88 Scott, James C., The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.

89 Ibid., p. 325.

90 Ibid., pp. 51–4.

91 Braudel, The Mediterranean, p. 34; Scott, The art of not being governed, p. 329. See also Mathieu, Jon, ‘The European Alps – an exceptional range of mountains? Braudel's argument put to the test’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 24 (2017), pp. 96–107, at pp. 96–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Scott, The art of not being governed, p. ix. For a critique of Scott as excessively environmentally determinist, see Shneiderman, Sara, ‘Are the central Himalayas in Zomia? Some scholarly and political considerations across time and space’, Journal of Global History, 5 (2010), pp. 289–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 For a sensitive critique of Zomia as insufficiently attuned to internal variations, see Michaud, Jean, ‘Editorial – Zomia and beyond’, Journal of Global History, 5 (2010), pp. 187–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Scott, The art of not being governed, pp. 282, 324.

95 Ibid., p. 11.

96 Especially Scott's near namesake, James George Scott, an administrator in colonial Upper Burma, whom he cites approvingly on multiple occasions throughout The art of not being governed.

97 Scott, The art of not being governed, pp. 105–16.

98 Ibid., p. 335.

99 On north-eastern India, see Baruah, Sanjib, Durable disorder: understanding the politics of northeast India (New Delhi, 2005)Google Scholar.

100 On the optics of drone warfare, see Gregory, Derek, ‘From a view to a kill: drones and late modern war’, Theory, Culture & Society, 28 (2011), pp. 188–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Ahmed, Akbar, The thistle and the drone: how America's war on terror became a global war on tribal Islam (New Delhi, 2013)Google Scholar.

102 Constantine Cavafy, ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ (1914), quoted in Scott, The art of not being governed, p. 98.

103 Debarbieux and Rudaz, The mountain, pp. 29–33.

104 For example, Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps, p. 24.

105 Bigg, Aubin, and Felsch, ‘The laboratory of nature’, p. 315; Hansen, The summits of modern man, pp. 120, 136, 153.

106 On the concept of ‘orders of time’, see Hartog, François, Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time, trans. Brown, Saskia (New York, NY, 2015)Google Scholar.

107 Debarbieux and Rudaz, The mountain, pp. 72–88.

108 Ibid., p. 72.

109 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 8.

110 Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple modernities’.

111 Hansen, Peter H., ‘Modern mountains: the performative consciousness of modernity in Britain, 1870–1940’, in Daunton, Martin and Rieger, Bernhard, eds., Meanings of modernity: Britain from the late Victorian era to World War II (Oxford, 2001), pp. 185–202, at pp. 186–8Google Scholar.

112 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 117.

113 Ibid., pp. 269–70.

114 Taylor, Joseph E. III, Pilgrims of the vertical: Yosemite rock climbers and nature at risk (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 57–8Google Scholar.

115 Ibid., p. 17.

116 A pertinent example is his reading of The playground of Europe as the archetype of ‘narratives of secularization and disenchantment’, and prescription ‘to recognize our multiple modernities and provincialize’ the likes of Stephen: Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 11.

117 Bayers, Imperial ascent, pp. 75–97; Davis, Into the silence; Hansen, Peter H., ‘Vertical boundaries, national identities: British mountaineering on the frontiers of Europe and the empire, 1868–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 24 (1996), pp. 48–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Peter H., ‘The dancing lamas of Everest: cinema, orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan relations in the 1920s’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), pp. 712–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

118 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, p. 7.

119 Roche, Clare, ‘Women climbers, 1850–1900: a challenge to male hegemony?’, Sport in History, 33 (2013), pp. 236–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 Schrepfer, Nature's altars, pp. 67–95, 101–25, 181–207.

121 Hansen, The summits of modern man, pp. 172–4; Isserman, Maurice and Weaver, Stewart, Fallen giants: a history of Himalayan mountaineering from the age of empire to the age of extremes (New Haven, CT, 2008), pp. 424–7Google Scholar; Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, pp. 6, 223; Ortner, Life and death on Mt. Everest, pp. 217–47.

122 On anthropologists’ use of practice and performance as a means of mediating between systemic constraints and individual autonomy and change, see Ortner, Sherry B., ‘Theory in anthropology since the sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1984), pp. 126–66, at pp. 144–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

123 Reidy, ‘Mountaineering, masculinity’, p. 174.

124 Wigen, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps’, p. 24.

125 Klein, Kerwin Lee, ‘A vertical world: the eastern Alps and modern mountaineering’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 24 (2011), pp. 519–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, p. 7.

127 Klein, ‘A vertical world’, pp. 531–2.

128 See especially Hansen's play on Shahid Amin's words, asking ‘must literates always exemplify a code when they speak?’: The summits of modern man, p. 146.

129 Ortner, Life and death on Mt. Everest, pp. 23–4.

130 Ibid., p. 8.

131 Ibid., p. 35.

132 Freedgood, Victorian writing about risk, pp. 99–131.

133 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, p. 250.

134 Ibid., pp. 180–1.

135 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 273, passim.

136 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, p. 214.

137 Ortner, Life and death on Mt. Everest, pp. 22–3.

138 Ibid., pp. 5, 20, 185.

139 Wigen, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps’.

140 Logan, Joy, Aconcagua: the invention of mountaineering on America's highest peak (Tucson, AZ, 2011)Google Scholar.

141 Ibid., p. 8.

142 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (2nd edn, Princeton, NJ, 2008)Google Scholar.

143 Debarbieux and Rudaz, The mountain, pp. 152, 167–92.

144 See, for example, Michael S. Reidy on British imperial efforts to ‘[reorganize] global environments both horizontally and vertically’ during the nineteenth century: Reidy, ‘From the oceans to the mountains: spatial science in an age of empire’, in Vetter, ed., Knowing global environments, pp. 17–38, quotations at p. 18.

145 Logan, Aconcagua, p. 90.

146 Ibid., p. 224.

147 Isserman and Weaver, Fallen giants, pp. 398–453.

148 Mathieu, Jon, ‘The globalisation of mountain perception: how much of a western imposition?’, Summerhill: IIAS Review, 20 (2014), pp. 8–17, at pp. 13–14Google Scholar. See also Schrepfer, Nature's altars.

149 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, pp. 259–77; Isserman and Weaver, Fallen giants, pp. 437–8.

150 Alfred B. Fitt, quoted in Isserman and Weaver, Fallen giants, pp. 293–4.

151 Næss, Arne, ‘Modesty and the conquest of mountains’, in Næss, Arne, Ecology of wisdom, ed. Drengson, Alan and Devall, Bill (Berkeley, CA, 2008), pp. 65–7Google Scholar.

152 See, for example, Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle, ‘A portable world: the notebooks of European travellers (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries)’, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010), pp. 377–400, at pp. 377–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Phillimore, R. H., Historical records of the survey of India, v: 1844 to 1861: Andrew Waugh (Dehra Dun, 1968), pp. 146–7Google Scholar.

153 Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Berlin, 1924); see also della Dora, Mountain, pp. 162–3.

154 Macfarlane, Mountains of the mind, pp. 22–65; della Dora, Mountain, pp. 139–64; Guha, Sumit, ‘Lower strata, older races, and aboriginal peoples: racial anthropology and mythical history past and present’, Journal of Asian Studies, 57 (1998), pp. 423–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simpson, Thomas, ‘Historicizing humans in colonial India’, in Sera-Shriar, Efram, ed., Historicizing humans: deep time, evolution and race in nineteenth-century British sciences (Pittsburgh, PA, 2018), pp. 113–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

155 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 302.

156 Robin, Libby, Sörlin, Sverker, and Warde, Paul, eds., The future of nature: documents of global change (New Haven, CT, 2013)Google Scholar, especially Robin, Sörlin, and Warde, ‘Introduction: documenting global change’, p. 11; Carey, Mark, ‘The history of ice: how glaciers became an endangered species’, Environmental History, 12 (2007), pp. 497–527CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

157 Hansen, The summits of modern man, p. 148.

158 Taylor, Pilgrims of the vertical, pp. 2, 6, 277.

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

160 Della Dora, Mountain, p. 164.

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’.