Abstract
Historically, the discipline of mountaineering and its literature has tended to emphasise hegemonic narratives of conquest and competition. Within this, a notable exception is Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (2011). Shepherd offered a relational vision of kinship with the mountains and emphasised presence over pursuit of a goal. Her work has become visible in recent years due to a growing cultural awareness of our interdependence with the rest of nature.
Our research addresses how, as women working with people and mountain environments, we might contribute to emerging, and less anthropocentric narratives. We highlight embodied arts practices which are ecological in their approach. As an exemplar, we describe our collaborative work on ‘Into the Mountain’, a site-relational performance in the Cairngorm mountains, the area that inspired The Living Mountain. This project expanded upon Shepherd’s writing to further explore our bodily and experiential relationships with mountain environments.
We draw on interdisciplinary arts practices—haptic and somatic-based facilitation from dance and performance contexts, ecopsychology and outdoor education. This intersection of approaches allows a flexible and interconnected way of being in the mountains, and working with each other. Both mountaineering expeditions and performances require close collaboration between people. However, performances like the one we describe call for a relational field that expands more widely to include not only performers and audience, but also the more than human. They invite and make conscious a deep resonance with the ephemeral but potent experience of immersion in the mountain environment. This kind of relational, ecological praxis offers the possibility of subverting orthodox narratives of conquest and competition in mountaineering.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Natasha Lushetich, Kate Bell and Joe McManners for their insightful comments on the manuscript and all the women who contributed to and created the wider Into The Mountain project.
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Kenyon, S., Kerr, M. (2023). Into the Mountain: Challenging Hegemonic Discourses of Mountaineering and Expanding the Relational Field. In: Hall, J., Boocock , E., Avner, Z. (eds) Gender, Politics and Change in Mountaineering. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29945-2_12
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