Killing dragons: religionisations in the Alps

ABSTRACT This article shows how the discursive use of religionisations – the interpretation and positioning of an object in a religious semantic – becomes a central strategy in the evaluation of mountaineering and climbing. Starting with the French Revolution and the consequences of its appropriations of nature, the article shows how evaluations of mountaineering endeavours use religionisations (a sacralising of different aspects of mountain culture) as a legitimising strategy. Contrasting with these affirmative religionisations, the article moves on to more critical evaluations of these religionisations, such as it is used in the debate about the ‘right’ way of approaching mountains, for instance in debates about ‘wilderness.’ In such debates, ‘Religion’ is used to distinguish between the usual and the unusual, the constitutive outside of the spaces and value systems we normally inhabit. Applying the Foucauldian notion of ‘apparatus’ to the data of Alpinist discourse, ‘Religion’ becomes a ‘boundary-object’ in a system of reference allowing for the evaluation of identities.