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The Power of Mountains: Toward a More-Than-Human Theory of Terrain
October 13, 2023 at 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
One of the most notable features of Indigenous opposition to open-pit mining all over the world, from the Americas to Australia, is the perception that extractivism threatens not only local territories and ways of life, but also mountains, rock formations, or bodies of water that have the capacity to sense, feel, and act.
A growing literature has shown how these perceptions about sentient landscapes unsettle the modernist dichotomy between animate and inanimate matter and challenge the corporate view of the planet’s terrain as made up of inert matter available to be obliterated for profit.
Join UBC Professor of Anthropology Dr Gaston Gordillo as he discusses “the power of mountains” and the capacity of large rock formations to affect human experiences, with the overall goal of examining how mountains, and in general, terrain, are always “more” than what humans make of them.
