Mountain threnody: hillwalking and homecoming in the Scottish Highlands

Abstract

Beginning with the tracing of the colonial histories of mountain summiting and collecting, and concluding with peripatetic memorial acts of homecoming, I walk-along with two groups (hillwalkers and homecomers) in the Scottish Highlands as they each negotiate absence and memory, freedom and belonging, in increasingly nuanced and subtle ways.

In the first half of the dissertation, I draw upon ethnographic research I conducted with hillwalkers, tracing the ways in which popular summiting practices and their representations can draw strongly upon the objectification of mountains as interchangeable summit-objects to be classified, conquered, and collected. I describe the ways in which these practices can perpetuate the erasing and obscuring of the memories, ontologies, and mountain-relationships of pre-modern (mainly Gaelic) inhabitants. These initial critiques are then further complexified by the intimate stories of resistance, resonance, and familial-care invoked by various informants and their stories.

The second half pivots to Trans-Atlantic homecomers who are drawn to these same Scottish uplands in search of traces of their ancestries and a sense of existential belonging, with a particular focus on sacred clan mountains, such as Ben Cruachan for the McIntyre clan. While walking and participating alongside my informants in their memorial ceremonies and ritualized walking practices, I simultaneously invoke questions around mountain agency and volition, applying an animist framework to a field which has until now largely declined to engage with such possibilities.

The result is a complex interweaving of seemingly contradictory intentions and temporalities played out among the footsteps of myself and my informants, with the materialities of bone and stone reminding us throughout that landscapes are not given to us a priori, but are perpetually being inscribed, evoked, and sometimes even erased.