Water in Mountainscapes. Converging Nature and Culture

Chapter 24: The Changing Faces of Water and Ice: Alpine Traditions and Environmental Transformations in the Anthropocene

Author: Elisabetta Dall’Ò, CMCC

Starting from field research conducted in the Western Alps, this contribution will analyze the role of water in its sociocultural relationship with Alpine communities. This chapter will explore in a historical and ethnolinguistic perspective the environmental links and imaginaries that connect water, in its solidified forms of ice and snow, with the communities and cultures settled in Alpine territories.This contribution draws on a long experience of ethnographic research over the last 10 years (2014–2024) in the French-Italian Mont Blanc area (Graian Alps) aimed at identifying the social and cultural impacts of climate change and the Anthropocene on mountain communities. From “extreme events” to the loss of ecosystems, from the gradual disappearance of glaciers to the dramatic consequences of floods or prolonged droughts, water, whether in its liquid form or in the solidified form of ice, has always been a central element—for better or for worse—for humanity and cultures in every age and latitude. In the context of fossil-based capitalism and the Anthropocene, water has been secularized and commodified, reduced to a technical and marketable resource, obscuring its relational, social, and cultural dimensions historically present across societies.This chapter will explore the environmental links and imaginaries that connect water, in its solidified forms of ice and snow, with the communities and cultures settled in Alpine territories from a historical and ethnolinguistic perspective. From Alpine legends that associate the devastation caused by glacial advances during the Little Ice Age with the mythological figure of the “dragon,” to the current challenges of energy-intensive artificial snow production (snow mining) that threaten the sustainability of Alpine skiing in the Anthropocene.