The Mountaineer
The Mountaineer
The Other in the Heart of the Nation, or Its Emblematic Figure?
Chapter 3 focuses on the people inhabitant the mountains as defined according to the modern, scientific way. It focuses on the making of a social and political stereotype – the mountaineer – in the context of the making of modern societies and nations. In many cases such as Switzerland, Italy, the Balkans, and Scotland, the images of mountaineers has been a major political issue in the construction of a national imaginary from the nineteenth century.This chapter explains how the category “mountaineer” happened to point at, first populations living in the mountains, second mountain climbers using the reference to mountains as a mode of social distinction. Regarding the first group, it details the stereotypes at work in discourses on the nation : the brutal, thieving, bellicose mountaineer; the proud, hard-working, obstinate, and courageous mountaineer; backward communities; etc.
Keywords: mountaineer, social stereotypes, nation, identity, Highlander (Scotland), Alpini (Italy), Switzerland, Balkans
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.