Paper short abstract:

While peaks and glaciers are falling apart in the Alps, human communities attached to them are forced to accept the loss of their milieu and to craft new ways of relating with it, through a greater attention to sensorial experiences, invented (micro-)rituals, and renewed aesthetic perceptions.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of global warming, glaciers retreat is accelerating, and rocks collapses are multiplying in the high mountains. This geological collapse is disrupting the Alpine landscape and leading to another collapse, that of the perception of these mountains. At the same time, other forms of relationship to them, such as the recent funeral ceremonies for vanishing glaciers, are emerging. Socio-cultural transformations, which concern the imaginary, emotions, aesthetics, and sensitive and ritualised practices in the face of these collapses, are in process.

People who share a sensitive and affective relationship with the mountains of the Mont Blanc range and the Valais Alps: guides, crystal diggers, glaciologists, mountaineers, huts keepers, photographers, artists, etc. express feelings of loss and sadness, but also develop new forms of interrelationships with the mountains and with specific places/beings as ways to mourn disappearing landscapes and to move forward.

The observation of tangible situations of interactions, such as (micro-) rituals, with specific entities like glaciers and the documentation of the changing aesthetic perceptions of a mountain which is disintegrating show that the beyond the emotions of loss, sadness, melancholia, anger, or so-called “solastalgia” (Albrecht 2005), follow strong commitments toward adaptation, in terms of practice but also of perception and relationship. The modernist divide between the humans and their environment sometimes give place to other entanglements with the mountains, with for instance more direct relationships that can be related to what is at stake in the discussions around “animism”.