Session Abstract

In 1949, Fernand Braudel wrote,

"To tell the truth, the historian is not unlike the traveller.  He tends to linger over the plain, which is the setting for the leading actors of the day, and does not seem eager to approach the high mountains nearby.  More than one historian who has never left the towns and their archives would be surprised to discover their existence.  And yet how can one ignore these conspicuous actors, the half-wild mountains, where man has taken root like a hardy plant...?" (Braudel, 1995 [1949], 29). 

In the intervening decades, many historians have responded to Braudel’s challenge to examine the role of mountainous landscapes in human history, illustrating how this once-neglected landform played a vital historical role.  This panel examines a wide range of lived experiences in mountainous settings in the modern era, including those of mountaineers, scientists, tourists, engineers, farmers, and state officials.  However, we endeavor to examine global mountains not as a mere stage for human action, but as “conspicuous actors” in their own right.  As the varied papers on this panel illustrate, mountains are a singular “place” that have inspired a diverse range of often contradictory interpretations, or “stories.”

This panel proffers a comparative approach to mountains, examining the role of two transnational mountain chains, the Alps and the Andes, in discourses about modernity and material projects to render mountain landscapes suitable for modern needs.  As the separate papers on the panel indicate, these uses were wide-ranging and often at odds.  Mountains were sources of production and objects of consumption; they were sought out as sites of adventure and feared as sources of immense destruction; they were celebrated as nature in its purest, most sublime form and lamented as irrational, barren landscapes.  Taken together, these papers suggest that since the nineteenth century, mountains have served as a projection screen of sorts for the construction of narratives about modernity across the globe.  In short, global human-mountain interactions both reflected and gave rise to the tensions that epitomize modernity.  South American and European cultures paradoxically sought to render mountains materially useful and less dangerous, while also maintaining their aesthetic beauty and separation from civilization, in both material and discursive terms.  The papers on this panel show that for all their monolithic mass, mountains constitute a dynamic and contested landscape in which moderns sought to create a more “elevated” form of modernity.