In this episode, Jason König and Jonathan Westaway interview Lachlan Fleetwood about his research on Himalayan history.

Lachlan is a historian of science, empire, geography and environment. He completed his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge in 2020, and has subsequently held research fellowships at University College Dublin, Yale and Munich. His first book, Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya, was published by Cambridge University Press in May 2022. The book examines ‘exploration and imperial knowledge production in the Himalaya during a period when scientific practices evolved alongside the realization of the true scale of the mountains’ heights’, with a special focus on the interplay between science and empire.

Lachlan sketches out for us some of his fascination with early 19th-century Himalayan history. This was a period when new ideas about altitude were developing very rapidly. The podcast explores changing patterns of Western interaction with local populations, culminating in the final confirmation of Everest as the highest mountain the world in 1856, and the end of East India Company rule in the Indian subcontinent in 1857. Just 50 years before, Western scientists had believed that Chimborazo in Ecuador was the highest mountain in the world, and claims about the height of the mountains of the Himalaya had been widely doubted. We examine the emergence of the idea of measuring and comparing a mountain’s altitude as a way of knowing mountains. This was a Western scientific approach that replaced other cultural approaches to high places and overwrote indigenous ways of understanding mountain spaces. So this is a story about when and why we decided that altitude above sea level is something that should make some mountains matter more than others.

We discuss some of the challenges and frustrations involved in doing science in the mountains in this period, for example through malfunctioning or poorly designed equipment. Lachlan also talks us through some of the many first-person accounts of the difficulties involved in surveying or collecting geological specimens in border regions, for example on the border with Tibet, where there was a constant risk of conflict with Qing border officials. We also discuss the importance of indigenous brokers and intermediaries in the production of scientific knowledge, and the relationship between western and indigenous conceptions of mountain landscapes.

Finally, Lachlan looks ahead to some exciting new possibilities, including a future project on notions of habitability and uninhabitability in 19th-century Asia. He also reflects on the way in which studying the long history of mountains can help us to see that many of our current ways of thinking about geographical space are not as inevitable as they appear. Looking to the past, to understand how our ideas about mountains developed, can help us to question some of the things we take for granted in our approach to mountains, and perhaps open up space to think about our engagement with mountain environments differently in the future.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

You can follow the project on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social

To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)

In this episode Jonathan Pitches and Jason König interview Simone Kenyon about her work as a practice researcher, performer, artist and producer.

We focus especially on her work as the choreographer and artistic creator of the place-sensitive performance piece Into the Mountain, inspired and informed by the lyrical and embodied prose of Nan Shepherd’s 1974 book, The Living Mountain. Building on six years of preparatory work Into the Mountain drew on the input of nearly 100 women, many of whom reside in the Cairngorm area, and merged guided walking practices with choreography, and a 22-piece choir singing a newly composed piece.

The episode begins with some discussion of Simone’s early experiences of walking and mountains growing up in Bradford, West Yorkshire and then in the Lake District.

We then discuss some of Simone’s earlier work on a range of outdoor walking art projects, for example her project in 2006 The Pennine Way: The Legs that Make Us with Tamara Ashley, and the way in which that helped to shape her conceptions of walking as an aesthetic practice.

The bulk of the episode then focuses on the Into the Mountain project. Simone talks about the influence of Nan Shepherd on the project and about her engagement with the bodily routines of climbing and mountaineering in her choreography. We discuss some of the practices and methodologies that lie at the heart of the project, for example the dance practice of ‘Body Weather’ and the way in which it helps to challenge conceptions of the separation between body and environment. Simone also talks about some of the practical challenges of the project: for example, negotiations with landowners in the Cairngorms.

Finally we look ahead to some possible future projects, and future prospects for rethinking human relationships with mountain landscapes and engaging with mountain communities in Scotland and beyond.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

You can follow the project on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social

To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)

In this episode, Jason König and Jonathan Westaway interview Alexandra Cotofana about her work on the mountains of Romania.

Alexandra is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of Xenophobic Mountains. Landscape sentience reconsidered in the Romanian Carpathians, (2022), and co-editor of Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape (2022).

The episode begins with a discussion of Alexandra’s experience of growing in the Carpathian mountains in Romania, and with some reflections on the challenges of doing ethnography in a community you are close to.

We then turn to Alexandra’s Xenophobic Mountains book. Alexandra starts by explaining the concept of sentient and xenophobic landscape. She contextualises it in relation to recent developments in anthropology and in the humanities more broadly which question the dominance of rationalising, western modes of thought, and ask us to ‘take other world views seriously’, including notions of the agency of landscape and other non-human entities.

We then go on to talk about the way in which those ideas apply in Romanian history. We discuss the stories that circulated around the crash of an Israeli Defence Force helicopter in the Romanian mountains in 2010, where the mountain was said to have caused the crash. We talk among other things about how those ideas are paralleled in other cultures and how they have been shaped by the experience of occupation and resistance in Romanian history. We also discuss how the prevalence of these ideas in the mountain regions of the country can help us to understand the rise of right-wing nationalism that has had international prominence recently in the Romanian presidential elections of 2025.

Alexandra discusses future plans for a history of mountain huts in Romania and the way in which they have been intertwined with national discourse throughout the 20th century and beyond. The podcast ends with some final reflections on why it is an urgent priority to understand the entanglement between mountain communities and nationalist discourse better.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

For a version of our podcast with closed captions and transcript please visit this link.

To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)