The Mountain and Colonial and Postcolonial Territoriality
The Mountain and Colonial and Postcolonial Territoriality
Chapter 6 focuses on the place of "mountains" in the colonial project. In the first place, the colonial power optimized its occupation and control of the territories it had claimed by identifying and mapping all the landforms that served as natural ramparts and obstacles to free movement. Second, it circumscribed populations judged singular from the start, using the mountain environment as a social indicator and as a vehicle for naturalizing the peoples encountered there. The category of “the mountaineer” proved, once again, to be useful for this purpose, for qualifying both local people living in the mountains and mostly Western mountain climbers who were to promote oropolitics in the Himalayas, the Caucasus and the Andes.
Keywords: cartography, borders, colonization, Tsarist Empire, Indochina, South-East Asia, Caucasus, Berbers, Himalayas, Oropolitics
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