Aconcagua
272 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:01 Nov 2011
ISBN:9780816529506
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Aconcagua

The Invention of Mountaineering on America’s Highest Peak

The University of Arizona Press
Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the Americas and the tallest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. Located in the Andes Mountains of Argentina, near the city of Mendoza, Aconcagua has been luring European mountain climbers since 1883, when a German ge-ologist nearly reached the mountain’s summit. (A Swiss climber finally made the ascent in 1897.) In this fascinating book, Joy Logan explores the many impacts of mountaineering’s “discovery” of Aconcagua including its effect on how local indigenous history is understood. The consequences still resonate today, as the region has become a magnet for “adventure travelers,” with about 7,000 climbers and trekkers from all over the world visiting each year.

Having done fieldwork on Aconcagua for six years, Logan offers keen insights into how the invention of mountaineering in the nineteenth century—and adventure tourism a century later—have both shaped and been shaped by local and global cultural narratives. She examines the roles and functions of mountain guides, especially in regard to notions of gender and nation; re-reads the mountaineering stories forged by explorers, scientists, tourism officials, and the gear industry; and considers the distinctions between foreign and Argentine climbers (some of whom are celebrities in their own right).

In Logan’s revealing analysis, Aconcagua is emblematic of the tensions produced by modernity, nation-building, tourism development, and re-ethnification. The evolution of mountain climbing on Aconcagua registers seismic shifts in attitudes toward adventure, the national, and the global. With an eye for detail and a flair for description, Logan invites her readers onto the mountain and into the lives it supports.
Joy Logan is a professor of Spanish and Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Recuperating Bodies, Recovering Texts
1 “They All Want to Be Indiana Jones”: Travel Literature and Modernity
2 No Longer the Lettered City: San Martín and the Touristic Imagination
3 Indigenous Identities: The Mummy, the Mountaineer, and Re-ethnification
4 Fashioning Adventure: Creating Mountaineering in the 1980s
5 Local Heroics: Militarisms and Democratizations
6 Matters of Life and Death: Mountain Guides, Nation, and Memorialization
7 The Dream Weaver: Performing Gender, Adventure, and Mountaineering
8 Plaza de Mulas: Memory, Musealization, and the Global 196 Conclusion: Final Debriefs

Notes
Works Cited
Index
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