The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment

by Peter H. Hansen

Overview

The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights.

Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings.

Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674047990
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/14/2013
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Peter H. Hansen is Professor of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Two: Discovery of the Glacières

By 1800, it was widely believed that Windham discovered Chamonix and Mont Blanc. Ebel’s guidebook to Switzerland found it unbelievable that “this valley, so singularly interesting, in which one sees the highest mountain in the old world, remained entirely unknown until the year 1741.” The view that Windham had discovered Chamonix was so prevalent by the 1820s that a skeptical Markham Sherwill interviewed inhabitants and looked for archives in Chamonix with the assistance of Ambroise Paccard, the son of Doctor Paccard. They found bundles of parchment in a trunk covered with spider’s webs and dust that “appeared as old as the Priory itself.” Records included the deed that gave ownership of the valley to a Benedictine Priory in 1091, a code of laws that permitted settlement in exchange for payment of dues, charters for public fairs and markets, and reports of many ecclesiastical visits. In 1634, the Savoy Senate permitted horned cattle in the valley for “grazing on those mountains which, by the industry of the peasants, had been cleared of their forests.” Despite this longer history, Windham is still, centuries later, sometimes still credited with “discovery.”

The discovery of Mont Blanc has served as a foundation myth in narratives of mountaineering and modernity. Windham’s curiosity is said to lead to scientific research in 1760s, exploration of the mountains the 1770s, and the ascent in the 1780s. In these linear narratives, before Windham is a vacancy awaiting the assertion of individual will and curiosity, the abandonment of self-restriction which ushered in modernity. More recently, scholars have complicated the notion of any singular “culture of curiosity” by investigating diverse languages and sensibilities of curiosity, wonder and marvels that took a variety of forms.

Windham’s visit to Mont Blanc is an example of “making up discovery,” the process by which “discoveries are made up in the course of making the disciplinary histories of specific scientific practices.” Discovery is not an individual, heroic event but a complex process of negotiation within social networks that results in a retrospective attribution. Discussing examples from the 1660s to the 1840s, Simon Schaffer has shown that none of the ostensibly individual discoveries may be isolated into an unambiguously single-authored event, and “it is impossible to find a criterion for discovery apart from the local practices of contemporary research communities.” Indeed, the attribution to Windham or Martel of the discovery of Mont Blanc was the result of particular communities recognizing what counted as success during a series of dynamic economic and political changes in the Alps

Table of Contents

1 Beginnings 1

2 Discovery of the Glacières 30

3 Ascent and Enfranchisement 61

4 Who Was First? 90

5 Temple of Nature 118

6 Social Climbers 149

7 Age of Conquest 180

8 History Detectives 212

9 Almost Together 245

10 Bodies of Ice 275

Abbreviations 305

Notes 307

Acknowledgments 365

Index 369

Editorial Reviews

[Hansen] focuses on the relationship between climber and mountain, the ropes that link humankind to the natural world, and how people have defined themselves through the summits they have ‘conquered.’ Nowhere is Hansen better than when he details the complex and varied meaning of the first successful Everest summit. Climbing, for Hansen, is an ascent into the clouds of ideas and images, and nature, as much as humans, is at the center of his quest.

Choice - R. W. Roberts

No one writes more interestingly about mountains and mountaineering than Peter Hansen. He is one of the best cultural historians of mountaineering out there.

Stewart Weaver

Peter H. Hansen has long been known to specialists in the field of climbing history as a tireless researcher, subtle theorist, and compelling storyteller. The publication of The Summits of Modern Man brings him to the summit of mountaineering scholarship.

Maurice Isserman

In this treatise on peak bagging and its post-Enlightenment significance, Peter Hansen unearths stories with a crampon-like grip. We meet star summiteers such as Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, who both ascended Mont Blanc in 1786; nineteenth-century 'golden age' alpine mountaineers like physical scientist John Tyndall; and Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on Everest. But with today's retreating glaciers, Hansen reminds us that the idea of what it means to 'conquer' nature needs reconfiguring.

Nature

[A] marvelous book...The Summits of Modern Man handily dispels rosy visions of the past...putting the lie to the contention that mountaineering was a once noble, principled pursuit that has only recently deteriorated.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Colin Dickey

In this wide-ranging and subtle cultural history of climbing, Peter H. Hansen explores our evolving relationship with the rocky heights. At the center of this (beautifully presented) study is the paradox that mountaineering, the ultimate team pursuit, has been mythologized as an individualistic contest.

The Scotsman - Michael Kerrigan

[A] learned and complex analysis of 'multiple modernities' as seen through the prism of mountaineering… One of the most revealing accounts of the Everest expedition that I have read.

Times Literary Supplement - Adam Thorpe

In his monumental work on mountaineering Peter Hansen explores the intricacies of climbing and theorizes on the act's social and psychological significance. The book under review is a serious engagement with men and mountains from the vantage points of social history, eco-critical theorizing and cultural geography...The Summits of Modern Man is a phenomenal achievement; it links facts, figures, and theory into one powerful and intriguing tale of the trekkers who ventured in to the vertical heights of mountains in search of solitude and victories...The Summits of Modern Man is not just another book on mountain climbing. It is an inquiry into the making of the modern world.

The Hindu - Murali Sivaramakrishnan

In this treatise on peak bagging and its post-Enlightenment significance, Peter Hansen unearths stories with a crampon-like grip. We meet star summiteers such as Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, who both ascended Mont Blanc in 1786; nineteenth-century 'golden age' alpine mountaineers like physical scientist John Tyndall; and Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on Everest. But with today's retreating glaciers, Hansen reminds us that the idea of what it means to 'conquer' nature needs reconfiguring.

Nature Lib