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Paper short abstract

Water’s forms shape mountainscapes intensely. Its flows call for a post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic understanding of the ways in which water emerges, expands, contracts, and lingers among the human and nonhuman. What does it mean to narrate from the perspective of water’s forms?

Paper long abstract

Water’s forms shape mountainscapes intensely. From glaciers to permafrost to rivers and the molding of landscapes, water in mountain terrain has affected humans through its beauty and utility. It has inspired narratives that have contributed to an attractive imagistic infrastructure which entices visitors. And humans have enlisted it in the development of an appealing physical infrastructure that accommodates these visitors. Such narratives and infrastructure have projected a false sense of acquiescence and human control over water’s forms. This has become increasingly salient through ecological crises that have laid bare its ability to rapidly or gradually exert its own forces, contrary to human desires. What does it mean to narrate from the perspective of water’s forms? And how does one approach the naming of water’s forms, whose multiplicities and movements defy nomenclatures and demand continuous description?

The flows of water’s forms over, under, and into each other at various elevations throughout the mountain environment call for a post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic understanding of the ways in which water emerges, expands, contracts, and lingers among the human and nonhuman. The earth and air of mountain terrain both shape and are shaped by water’s forms. These and the anthropogenic plastics and metals of human interventions are elements essential to narrating the force of the contaminations that have deepened the nature-cultural entanglements of water’s forms in mountainscapes. I examine these emergences through the lens of empirical research in the mountainous environments of Tirol, Austria and the North Caucasus, Russia.