A Palimpsest of Mountain Geographies

Abstract

The decolonial turn of scholarly activities experienced recently in the Global South requires re-writing of concepts and ideas that were considered dogmatic in western science, but that changed now due to novel insights provided by indigenous and traditional ecological knowledges. So, as in many geographic inquiries, the search for transgressive disciplines with convergent, integrative approaches favors the consilience with which we now know about mountainscapes.The writing of a textbook on mountain geographies, thus, is never a new work. It always develops from earlier versions of ideas and concepts that are now illuminated with different lights. This is the reason why palimpsestic terms of socioecological implications include layering, superimposition, suppression, and oppression. The dynamic work of theorists of mountain science is presented as a primer of mountain geographies because of the need to incorporate the nuanced layers of new discoveries that need to be superimposed, by necessity, on the current state of knowledge. Similarly, this change in conceptual and practical epistemes, demands the suppression of dominant paradigms, such as those developed with colonial and postcolonial tenets, allowing for debunked themes to subside under the new and popular schemes that shape the understanding of mountains without the hegemony of power relations, avoiding oppression of alternative viewscapes.The chapter separates mountain ontology into different dimensions, starting with the pioneering dimension, followed by the human, physical, spiritual, biogeographic, and conservationist dimensions. In the end, epistemological dimensions grapple with transgressive and transdisciplinary montology