Berg, Kultur, Modeme: Volkskundliches aus den Alpen (review)

Raised in the mountainous Vorarlberg region of Austria, Bernhard Tschofen brings ample personal experience to the landscape he examines in this rich study of the notion of "the Alpine." An assistant professor at Vienna's Institute for Volkskunde, an innovative curator who has initiated as well as contributed to numerous exhibitions on folklife and popular culture, and an experienced mountain climber, Tschofen combines here the worlds of intellectual discourse with the keen eye, ear, historical depth, and cultural competence of a modern, "native" ethnographer. His scope embraces everything from the British travelogue to mountaineers' shopping habits as evidenced in the trash left by the side of the hiking path, from death notices of alpine botanists to the military vocabulary employed in early 20th-century mountaineering equipment.

Berg, Kultur, Moderne: Volkskundliches aus den Alpen (Mountain, Culture, Modernity: Folklore Matters from the Alps) roughly covers the time span from the 1870s to the present. "The Alps are the focus, modernity is the horizon" (p. 37)—this is how Tschofen characterizes his study. While the region of Western Austria (Montafon and Silvretta) provide a good deal of the primary material used, the interest lies not in reconstructing a historical reality but rather in understanding how "pictures and imaginations took shape, were received and interpreted" (p. 38). Tschofen is not interested in fashioning a definitive case study, for the "history of interest in things alpine is not a regional matter, but rather the trace of modernity within the region" (p. 39). To achieve this goal, synchronic snapshots are elucidated against a larger, diachronic backdrop. The book is structured in five parts with 11 chapters, and the opening chapter juxtaposes the different paths of Alpine imaginings and their associated discourses. He opens with the English mountaineering pioneers who "invented" climbing rather than fearing the imposing mountains. They brought a new sensibility and a different language to the landscape than the indigenous population who had their eye on modernization and industrialization, and who supported the growth of Austrian urban Alpinists. The latter founded mountain climbing clubs and built an infrastructure of paths and huts, not for alpine dairy fanning but, rather, for leisure purposes. (The history and role of the Austrian national Alpine club weaves through this book as a topic as much as a major source of data for the entire study, without, however, narrowing the scope of this much more broadly conceived work.) A second chapter acknowledges related scholarship and discusses the logic behind the book's organization.

Part 2 is entitled "Explorations" and brings together a chapter laying out the argument informing the whole study, a chapter on the voluntary associations devoted to the Alpine and the kinds of themes and agents that operated within them, including the impact this had in the public sphere, and a chapter on Alpine flowers, their role in the "leisure discipline" of botany and the impact this had on everyday aesthetics. The spectrum of symbolic associations is particularly poignant here, including (American) webpages searching for the lyrics of "Edelweiss" (from The Sound of Music) as well as the expression of national pride using Edelweiss emblems after a World Cup ski race victory by an Austrian.

"Equipment" is the title of part 3. It explores not only the equipment and clothing of humans intent on conquering a mountain or, in the case of folk and tourist costumery, exhibiting themselves in Alpine manner, but also the "outfitting" of the mountains themselves with technology. Mountain railways, funiculars, and ski lifts render the symbol of nature at its most extreme simultaneously into one of the most technologized landscapes. The fourth part, "Practice," sheds light on how Alpine images are realized in visual arts, their impact on movements to foster, protect, and ultimately consume the Alpine, and how images are brought to life in touristic endeavors. The brief, yet sharply worded, conclusion makes patently clear that at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, even the most critical discourse on the Alpine cannot help but...