Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss storytelling and writing as more than human practices. Taking the manifold relationships between humans and mountains in Switzerland as a starting point, I follow the questions of who has the right to tell a story resp. who is telling stories to whom.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss storytelling and writing as more than human practices. As a central aspect of my PhD project, I am looking at the manifold relationships between humans and mountains, especially in the Swiss Alps, focusing on narratives that emerge in and influence these relationships. Scientific, literary or everyday practices lead to a variety of different relationships: listening to the mountain, trying to understand how it is changing, feeling it, reading its signs, searching for its secrets, looking at it from a distance, living with it, using its resources, controlling its movements, taking care – who is telling a story to whom? Narrative practices are not exclusively human, they are part of the world: the living and the things leave traces and tell their stories. From these non-human articulations, humans derive incredible details and connections about rock strata, animal grazing, plant growth, the sound of glaciers, earth energies. Humans learn to decode mountain worlds and their stories, and can reconstruct entire bodies, long epochs, or powerful events, but they also form intimate relationships, tacit agreements, and detailed knowledge sharing within these worlds. Who has the right to decide what a story is and what it is not? What determines its value and who tells it? By focusing my attention on the relationships that unfold in mountain worlds, on the practices of approaching, paying attention and paying heed, I follow the material-semiotic signs that come together in mountain storytelling and ask how human and non-human narratives connect.