Topographic Imaginaries

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ID: 322107
2026
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Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines some of the historical contexts that have given rise and led to the propagation of what today are common mountain tropes and stereotypes. This requires a close look at the social and political motivations that propelled lowlanders—sometimes neighbours, sometimes distant outsiders—to (re-)produce in their literary works, philosophical treaties, encyclopaedias, and travelogues a series of mostly negative characterizations (often wholly imaginary) of people in upland regions. Ultimately, this has resulted in the reduction of a global cacophony of human and more-than-human mountain lifeways to a limited, malleable, and therefore rhetorically effective set of seemingly universal archetypes of otherness. This chapter will trace this sociopolitically motivated mountain-making from its first written attestations in Bronze Age Mesopotamia along some of its most-well trodden pathways of transmission and reception in west Eurasian knowledge traditions. The chapter concludes with a call to take a critical stand towards grand narratives that require otherness, often those of mountain societies, to generate historical dynamism, and for mountain archaeologists to ask a wider range of questions of highland lifeways than traditional adaptive paradigms have steered the discipline towards.
Reference Key
openalex_W7170054969 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Claudia Glatz
Journal Oxford University Press eBooks
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197608005.013.0050
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197608005.013.0050
Keywords Keywords not found

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