Conference : "Mountains and innovation: What we can learn from global history"

During international symposium "Mountain regions, territories of innovation", Jon Mathieu (Professeure d'histoire, Université de Lucerne, Suisse) will give a lecture :

 "Mountains and innovation: What we can learn from global history"

Since the dawn of time, mountains have demonstrated a willingness to innovate“, states a recent prospectus of the Laboratory of Excellence ITEM in Grenoble. The present lecture tries to give a feedback to that statement on the basis of an emerging global history of the mountains. It starts out with the question how research on the past can sharpen our sense for future developments. The second section concerns the global and ecological turns in mountain perception during the so called Rio-process since the 1990s (UN Agenda 21 with a mountain chapter). The third section broadens that perspective and touches upon various religious impulses in non-western attitudes to upland areas. All in all, these voices on mountain issues sum up to a bewildering diversity, as shown in the fourth point. Global history can offer some methodological advise to find one’s way through the mountain haze.