- 1 We note, however, that the critical and radical approaches have very similar aims, since “French-st (...)
- 2 Colette Guillaumin was a pioneer in France with her analysis of “race” relations (1972). More recen (...)
1This new issue of JAR/RGA explores mountains from a radical perspective. Radical approaches constitute a major strand of research in the social sciences, but remain under-represented in work on mountains. The term “critical” is also more common in the literature, with the Innovation en Territoire de Montagne (Innovation in Mountain Territories, ITEM) LabEx group, for example, describing itself as “bringing together a number of research groups in the social sciences and humanities with the aim of developing and revitalising research on mountains from a critical standpoint” (Fourny, 2018, p. 7). While the critical approach encompasses the radical one, Cécile Gintrac (2012) recalls Marx’s words in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.” Radical thinking thus “sets itself the task of revealing the hidden forms of domination and exploitation” by looking beyond appearances to unearth root causes (Wacquant, 2011).1 The degree to which we are conscious and aware of these hidden forms varies, but radical approaches aim precisely to reveal the relations of domination that run through societies in a structural, systemic manner. Although these social relations of class, gender and “race”2 can be thought independently of one another, Black Feminist theorists (bell hooks, 1981; Collins, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989) have analysed them as being interconnected. Other social relations, despite playing a structuring role in societies and generating other systems of oppression such as ableism, heterosexism and ageism have been little explored. This intersectional approach makes visible, in a precise and contextual way, the asymmetric dynamics between dominant and dominated groups – dynamics that can evolve as situations and interactions change. The dominant/dominated dialectic is a complex relationship; the boundaries of the social groups in question are constantly shifting and being redrawn, and these groups are themselves pervaded by internal forms of domination. This necessarily plural perspective enables us to understand majority norms, which reproduce a dominant order and are imposed to the detriment of delegitimised practices, experiences and groups. It highlights the material dimension of these processes (material conditions of existence, relations of exploitation, and the concrete experience, including bodily experience, of domination), without overlooking their symbolic dimension (the imposition of hegemonic narratives that exclude certain social groups, and efforts by otherised and minoritised groups to produce counter-hegemonic narratives).
2Our call for papers thus focused on three broad topics: first, analysing the process of minoritisation in mountain areas from the point of view of minoritised people; second, understanding modes of resistance to discrimination and exclusionary discourses (Spivak, 1988; Scott, 2009); and third, exploring the spatial dimension of relations of domination (Harvey, 2010). It drew a particularly strong response from early-career researchers: two of the contributors defended their master’s dissertation in 2023 (Emma Bardou and Myriam Ribert), one is studying for a PhD (Daphné Velay), two others defended their PhD thesis in 2024 (Quentin B. G. Drouet and Sarah Bachellerie), and a further three received their PhD in the past eight years (Anne Barrioz, Delphine Moraldo and Gabrielle Saumon). Our invitation to explore the plurality of power relations and relations of domination in mountain areas, including in terms of racialisation, appears to have struck a chord with the next generation of researchers, who are comfortable with “the sub-field of the racial question” (Bouzelmat, 2019). Gabrielle Saumon, for example, in an intentionally theoretical article that provides a useful opening to the issue by setting out a clear, rigorous framework for research objects that are regularly disparaged, revisits her PhD thesis on rural gentrification through an intersectional lens. She presents a reworking of her research on the Rocky Mountains (USA) that includes additional “strata” on top of the class relations that were her initial focus. Revisiting her work from this angle enables her to take a critical look at her own stance as a researcher and, as such, to build on her analysis in terms of racialisation, whiteness and cisheteronormativity. Four of the eight articles in this issue address “race” relations, whether as expressed through racial essentialism that invisibilises the lives of Black people in the mountains, but is challenged by the genre of Affrilachian literature (Harrison), ethno-racial profiling that produces and activates, in a performative sense, the Alpine border (Velay, Chassouant and Malbrunot; Bachellerie), or through the whiteness that permeates imaginaries of the “wilderness” (Saumon).
3The research materials explored in this issue have been collected and analysed using qualitative methods (seven articles draw on interviews) that document the lived experience of relations of domination, and in the case of three articles, using quantitative approaches (Bachellerie; Drouet and Barrioz; Mercklé, Moraldo, Datchary and Tudoux) that identify these relations of domination by analysing data. For example, the analysis of gentrification in Alpine resorts is based on comparing data on changes in socio-occupational categories, the numbers of second and primary homes, and property prices (Drouet and Barrioz). In their choice of methods, the researchers reveal their efforts to adopt a sympathetic stance towards minoritised groups. Sarah Bachellerie, for example, opted for participant observation of the solidarity movement supporting migrants at the Franco-Italian border, free discussion and sharing moments of daily life with her interviewees in order to prevent the reproduction of epistemic violence, to avoid reactivating police-related trauma among migrants, and to allow her to see the effects of the border on these people despite being protected from them herself by the privileges of her whiteness and nationality. The authors’ reflexive stance regarding the influence of their various social positions on their research thus represents another tool for analysing relations of domination.
4Eleven of the fifteen contributors are women, and while most of them are from the academic sphere, this is not exclusively so, with one of the papers coauthored by two health professionals (Camille Chassouant and Léna Malbrunot). This coproduction of knowledge with actors working on the ground is characteristic of the radical approach, which seeks to break down the barriers between academic circles and activists, but is much more widespread in North American research (see Salomon Cavin et al., 2021). These collaborative methodologies demonstrate a form of political engagement by researchers, who take on the task of producing politically situated knowledge, from a feminist perspective (Rose, 1993), and aim to help combat the social inequalities they analyse and to influence public policies when the research shows that these are a contributing factor.
5Class relations are a major focus of the authors, in the tradition of radical Marxist approaches, as exemplified in geography by David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, and cited in two articles (Drouet and Barrioz; Bardou and Pelenc). Gender, which is linked to other relations of domination, is addressed in almost all the articles, either in passing or in a more developed form. These articles reveal that decisions taken by young health professionals, particularly women, about whether people in migration situations require medical care, tend to be challenged more by the police than those taken by older male doctors (Velay, Chassouant and Malbrunot); that female shepherds and refuge wardens face specific forms of violence due to the sexism that is also present in the mountains (Ribert, Bourdeau, Crouzat, Andrade and Dodier); that women have been erased from the narratives shaping the imaginary of the wilderness, which is associated with male adventurers (Saumon); and that literature can help to blur (or even invert) gender relations by portraying Black women who discover a form of freedom and power in the mountains (Harrison).
6While two of the eight contributions present research conducted in the US (Harrison; Saumon), the issue retains a Franco-Alpine focus, with the other six analysing sites in France, mainly in the Alps: the sole exceptions are an article concerning the Haute-Ariège region in the Pyrenees (Bardou and Pelenc), and another comparing two refuges, one in the Alps and the other in the Pyrenees (Mercklé et al.). None of the articles explore mountains in the Global South, even though the call for papers suggested the use of case studies to explore forms of minoritisation in the context of tourism (for example in the Maghreb or South-East Asia), and despite a number of journal issues in recent years having shown the value of postcolonial approaches in rethinking tourism (Boukris and Chapuis, 2016; Boukris and Peyvel, 2019). This gap suggests the need for an issue dedicated to post/decolonial issues in mountain areas – in the (former) metropolises and colonies, and in the Global North and Global South – that addresses the racist representations inherited from colonisation, and the way in which social relations are still marked by coloniality in mountain societies, with a view to advancing the decolonisation of knowledge about mountains and contributing to efforts to de-Westernise and break down barriers within critical thinking (Borghi, 2020; Robinson, 2006).
7Based on the topics addressed by the authors, three kinds of mountain emerge from these articles: a mountain of recreational activities, a mountain associated with ordinary living (via work and access to housing), and a mountain of mobility, including the forced mobility of migrants over national borders. The mountain of recreational activities features in most of the articles, including instances in which people are putting their lives on the line, since having to cross the Alps as someone with irregular status in the eyes of the state can lead illegalised immigrants to adopt recreational habits as a strategy for going unnoticed. Practising outdoor sports or activities can also be understood as an everyday, ordinary way of living, or even as a way of asserting one’s identity – as with hunting by African-American characters in fiction (Harrison) – but remains characteristic of a certain cultural, economic or environmental capital (Mercklé et al.; Saumon). Working in mountain pastures (Ribert et al.), living year-round in a place that relies on tourism or having to leave it due to a lack of affordable housing (Drouet and Barrioz; Bardou and Pelenc), and caring for bodies (Velay et al.) or controlling them in the mountains (Bachellerie), also involve confronting recreational practices.
8While all of the articles complement one another, due to close connections between their methods of analysis and fields of research, but also the mountain-related imaginaries, representations and practices they present, there are also natural pairings between them.
9We will begin with the pair consisting of the articles by Gabrielle Saumon and by Anthony Kwame Harrison. The first article emphasises the effect of the normativity of the white bodies expected in outdoor recreational spaces on mountain spaces and their imaginaries. A hegemonic norm fosters spatial representations and contributes to the invisibilisation of groups that are effectively minoritised in recreational activities, such as racialised, LGBT, and working-class people. The second article analyses three short stories by African-American authors, written between the 1980s and 2010, that depict the lives, both singular and ordinary, of people who identify and/or are perceived as Black in the Appalachian mountains. These fiction writers place at the heart of mountain spaces the experiences and lives of Black people who are not traditionally associated with these spaces, but tend to be assigned to urban localities. The mountains explored in these two articles play a central role in multiple relations of domination and struggles of both a symbolic (representational) and material nature.
10The articles by Emma Bardou and Jérôme Pelenc, and by Quentin B. G. Drouet and Anne Barrioz, examine the impact of local tourism and real estate development policies in the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively. For the purposes of capital renewal, tourism actors in the Vallées d’Ax region are drawing on the “transition” argument and banking on taking their facilities upmarket in order to attract and appeal to affluent urban clients. The transformation of these areas, based on the dominant imaginaries of what an attractive tourist environment for the wealthy should look like, conforms to the agenda of the “conceived space”. This clashes with the “perceived space” of permanent residents, creates precarious working conditions, and weakens opportunities for socialising, collective organisation and appropriation of the territory (as seen in the disappearance of local markets and festivals, and fewer meeting spaces). The marketing-based arguments being promoted are enabling continued pursuit of a tourism model, even though this has been wrung dry, to the detriment of the less well-off, who are struggling to live in the area and find housing. Access to housing in tourist areas is also a central question in the article by Drouet and Barrioz, which identifies major socioeconomic inequalities and disparities in access to housing. Policy decisions favour tourists and residents of second homes at the expense of workers and people on modest incomes, leading to a socio-territorial reconfiguration characterised by “altitudinal” gentrification and the forced movement of year-round residents further down the valley. The authors describe this as a “social downhill ski slope” – a slippery descent for the households with the lowest levels of capital. The privileges of the view, the panorama, the sunshine and the altitude reflect unequal social relations: the upper valley is increasingly elitist, and access to amenities in the Alps is becoming a marker of class. These two articles also highlight the impact of forced migration, for example in cases where people have to move because they are unable to establish a foothold in the housing market.
11The contributions by Pierre Mercklé, Delphine Moraldo, Caroline Datchary and Benoît Tudoux, and by Myriam Ribert, Philippe Bourdeau, Emilie Crouzat, Victor Andrade and Hermann Dodier examine the distinctive positions of recreational activities in the mountains, and the tensions between groups who use the alpine space in different ways (as hikers, shepherds and refuge wardens). The first group of authors, who are mainly sociologists, explore the sharing of mountain areas that are very close to urban centres and theoretically accessible to all, but highlight distinctive logics through the imposition of practices that are seen as more legitimate than others, and the maintenance of an elite cultivated by the wealthy and educated classes. Privileged actors use their position of domination to shape spaces to their liking and to marginalise practices that are perceived to be less legitimate. Both articles show that the relations of domination identified on the valley floor and in towns are also present in the mountains, including in refuges, where tensions often come to a head (as expressed, sometimes crudely, in visitors’ books or by those working in pastoral activities). The fear of conflict with dominant tourism actors sometimes leads minority actors to adopt strategies of discretion and self-censorship in order to protect their economic activity. While the mountains are associated with a “change of scenery” and “a sense of freedom” (Ribert et al.), they do not erase relations of domination. No mountain space, from small towns such as Ax-les-Thermes or Revel to the valleys, is free from power relations and conflict.
12The articles by Daphné Velay, Camille Chassouant and Léna Malbrunot, and by Sarah Bachellerie analyse how people in a situation of forced migration cross the Alpine border. The first of these papers focuses on the provision of medical treatment, care and support for groups that are made vulnerable by migration conditions and police targeting. The securitarian and humanitarian rhetoric adopted by the state tends to make migrants victims, and to hold them responsible for their hazardous journey through the mountains. But these authors show that it is the border itself that produces and accentuates the dangers for migrants. The unconditional right to healthcare is not systematically applied, since access to a health professional remains at the discretion of the police, who, despite having no proven medical expertise, decide whether or not treatment is necessary. The specific conditions of the high mountains (such as prolonged exposure to the cold) are, however, associated with a number of illnesses and complications that are not immediately visible, and require expert medical assessment. The second article also highlights the performativity of the border in the racial profiling and racialisation at work. The border does not produce similar effects for everyone: while it is easy to cross for desirable social groups, such as those in the socio-occupational category of “senior managers and higher intellectual professions”, who are expected to be tourists, it can be a life and death ordeal for undesirable groups identified as being from the “Global South”. Borderness plays an active role in the way elected politicians and the police look at people on the move. This article interrogates the regimes of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility in mountain spaces, which are produced by coding and categorising gazes on bodies based on a socio-racial order. Both of these articles also identify strategies of resistance to relations of domination that are exacerbated in this territory due to strong political pressure.
13Overall, the articles explore the dynamics of domination – Bachellerie examines assignation, Bardou and Pelenc dispossession and exclusion, Ribert et al. folklorisation, Saumon minoritisation, Velay et al. making a victim and repression, and Harrison exclusion, and seven of the eight articles discuss invisibilisation – affecting social groups that are described and categorised based on their unequal social desirability and the unequal distribution of their capital, which are mentioned in five of the eight articles. The papers in this issue might be seen to suggest that the weight of these determinants and social assets is insurmountable. However, in line with radical approaches, and in particular work in subaltern studies, which focuses on the capacity for action of minoritised groups and their allies, a number of articles highlight tricks, methods of circumvention and adaptation strategies (Drouet and Barrioz) and resistance to the majority order and norms. Anthony Kwame Harrison highlights the role of literature in making visible the trajectories of African-American people in the Appalachian mountains, thereby producing and stimulating other narratives and imaginaries. The genre of Affrilachian literature – a portmanteau of “African-American” and “Appalachian” – illustrates the close links between Black people and these mountain territories, deconstructing the dominant images that associate whiteness with wilderness, or outdoor activities with white, upper-class, heteronormative men, as analysed by Gabrielle Saumon. Other strategies are also described. People in a situation of forced migration may resort to “passing”, i.e., attempting to evade the ethno-racial profiling of the police by crossing the Alpine border in the guise of a tourist (Bachellerie), or by appropriating certain places in the mountains for another purpose, for example by using snow cannon storage huts for shelter (Velay et al.). With regard to support for minoritised groups, Daphné Velay et al. describe the care provided by volunteer medical teams as a response and form of resistance “to border violence”.
14Analysis of the spatial dimension of social relations appears to be central to the research presented in this issue, with the authors showing the different ways in which dominant social groups appropriate mountain areas both symbolically and materially, at several different levels. The classic high/low opposition is revisited in the light of relations of domination: the development of high-altitude resorts, linked to winter tourism, is favourable to wealthy groups, while those with more modest resources have to go further down the valley to find housing (Drouet and Barrioz). The appropriation of mountain areas close to towns and cities, but also of spaces that are increasingly higher and further away from the valley bottom, is once again to the benefit of well-off city dwellers who pursue activities such as hiking. The relations of domination between the latter and the people who work in the mountains are particularly exacerbated in these isolated locations, as demonstrated by the sexism – more open when hidden from view – faced by female shepherds in alpine pastures (Ribert et al.) and by female refuge wardens (Mercklé et al.). These articles also show how tensions come to a head in certain types of places, frequented for different purposes: mountain passes in border areas such as Montgenèvre (Velay et al.); lakes close to towns and plains, which are frequented by both working-class men who fish there, and by wealthier climbers who swim in them; refuges, which are appropriated based on a logic of distinction, with less wealthy hikers pitching their tents around them while the more affluent and well-educated take over the interior, displaying social contempt for those who do not follow practices considered to be legitimate (Mercklé et al.); and the huts used by shepherds, who try to prevent walkers from accessing these spaces by marking them with fencing, gates and “keep out” signs (Ribert et al.). In its inclusion of domestic, personal spaces, in the tradition of feminist geography, this issue opens up interesting avenues for rethinking social relations in the mountains at the micro level.
15Finally, the related sections feature two texts, one by Cristina Del Biaggio in the “Mountains in Fiction” section, looking at Switzerland, and one by Mari Oiry Varacca in the “Transitions” section, on tourism alternatives in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. They complement the research presented in this issue by showing the effects of dominant models (capitalism and patriarchy in both cases) on individuals and local groups that are quietly resisting imposed norms, in their own way, through everyday practices and shared projects. In line with radical approaches that advocate a reflexive stance on sources, methods of data collection and ways of communicating research, in order to hear and make heard the voices of the voiceless, the first text explores how literature, in the form of the narrative of fictional characters, can make visible the relations of domination that continue to mark social ties in alpine valleys, and the second completes a sound postcard, thus proposing an exploration of sound as a different way of both doing and disseminating research.
16It is therefore clear that the democratisation of mountain areas – as a source of tension, relatively contained or even hindered by the legitimated uses of the dominant classes, and the spatial dimension of the social relations involved – remains fertile ground for analysis from a radical perspective.