Mourning Glaciers: Animism Reconsidered through Ritual and Sensorial Relationships with Mountain Entities in the Alps

Abstract

The transformation due to climate change of the high Alpine mountains is intensifying. A real disruption in the perception of this milieu and in the ways of interacting with it is ongoing, as evidenced by recent funeral ceremonies organised for disappearing glaciers. The investigation and documentation of the alternative interactions with mountain entities, such as glaciers, is challenging the very existence of the “Great Divide” that modernity has supposedly created between humans and non-humans. Through ethnographic observations and semi-directed interviews, the conducted study uncovers in the Valais Alps and in the Mont Blanc massif the hidden relationships developed with their environment by high-mountain people, such as glaciologists, mountain guides, or crystal hunters. It shows how they relate with specific glaciers or rock walls, listen to them, see them as living and dying, and build up new attention schemes and forms of attachments. It, therefore, allows a first characterisation of what may be akin to a form of animism in a Western context, reputedly naturalistic.