Category: Culture

Anniversaries and jubilees are central to the formation of cultural memory¹ as “monuments in time”.² They, as well as the commemorative rituals performed on anniversaries, have important functions in the process of memory and identity building by contributing to the transmission, fixation and institutionalisation of identity-securing knowledge within collectives. The past is reconstructed in the present on anniversaries in a way that gives meaning and makes it relatable for the future: the “past” is, as Winfried Müller somewhat crudely puts it, “directed towards one’s own history”.³ This “dressing up” takes place through cultural practices of visualisation, which are simultaneously reinterpretations of the event to be remembered. They are practices of retelling and re-enactment, of medialisation and materialisation, of staging, performing and “curating”.⁴ Anniversaries and jubilees, says Peter Burke, “reconstruct history or ‘re-collect’ or ‘re-member’ it in the sense of practising bricolage, assembling fragments of the past into new patterns”.⁵ They order and structure the past, present and future and, thus, have a stabilising effect on society. However, they are characterised by ambivalence. This means that they can also have “a considerable potential for cultural change”,⁶ especially if they are understood as cultural performances⁷in the theoretical tradition of ethnological ritual research. In Erika Fischer-Lichte’s words, a performance is initially understood in very general terms as “a structured programme of activities that is performed or presented at a specific time and place by a group of actors in front of a group of spectators”.⁸These can be events of all kinds, such as “rituals, ceremonies, festivals, games, sports competitions, political events, circus performances, striptease shows, concerts, opera, dance, drama, artistic performances, etc.”.⁹ If such performances – such as commemorative rituals on the occasion of historical anniversaries – function as cultural performances, they become a “stage on which ideas and interpretations are made visible and vivid and can thus also be made available for social negotiation”.¹⁰ This is because these public event complexes are “temporally limited […] situations” in which “goods and values are spread out before an audience in a mostly highly condensed form”, reflected upon and confirmed or questioned.¹¹ Thus, cultural performances as “privileged moments of entry” are particularly suitable “for ethnographic investigations”.¹² Using the Berlin Schlossplatz debate as an example, the European ethnologist Beate Binder has made this concept extremely fruitful for ethnological urban research – even against the background of questions of memory culture and historical politics. To this end, she observed numerous cultural performances, such as information events, exhibitions, events, discussion forums, public meetings and protest events, and investigated their role in constituting Berlin’s urban space.¹³ This conceptual and methodological approach also proves to be insightful in the context of memory research, because it is precisely within the framework of anniversaries and jubilees that “the coexistence of competing patterns of interpretation in processes of change can be made visible”,¹⁴ because “the palpability and tangibility of these performances makes them an important venue for political and social conflicts”, according to Binder.¹⁵ The visualisation of a plural memory landscape should also be the goal of cultural anthropological memory research, insofar as the (national) anniversaries, which are usually choreographed and decreed ‘from above’, contribute to the homogenisation of the memory discourse and the legitimisation and consolidation of hegemonic structures. It is, therefore, important to understand anniversaries and jubilees as plural arenas in order to also make visible the counter-discourses and suppressed narratives that are produced by memory-cultural staging practices, especially by non-state actors.

Cultural commemorations of anniversaries, especially those of civil society institutions and actors, always have two central characteristics: on the one hand, they have a communal, identity-forming character, as do all social (especially ritual and/or event-oriented) events. Sociologist Regina Bormann writes: “They serve social self-expression, public reflection, sometimes also the design of alternative social courses of action. As collective designs, they serve to communalise, to create a sense of community, of ‘identities’”.¹⁶ On the other hand, the forms of cultural memory have an increasingly demonstrative and protest character, especially in the regions of East Central Europe. The cultural performances listed are, thus, also always to be understood as “political interventions in public space”, and are, therefore, simultaneously, “part of social critique”.¹⁷ Characteristics such as community building, the exercise of critique and the questioning of prevailing discourses and collective identity offerings come into play especially in times of crisis and upheaval, they have, thus, been described by Victor Turner as “phenomena of the liminoid”. Such phenomena can be identified – analogously to “phenomena of the liminal” that exist(ed) in pre-industrial societies – in complex, late-modern societies that are characterised by diversity, plurality and fragmentation:¹⁸

Liminiod phenomena emerge away from the central economic and political processes, at the margins, in the interstices and gaps of central institutions – they have a pluralistic, fragmentary and experimental character. [… they] are often part of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestos – books, plays, paintings, films, etc. that denounce the injustice, inefficiency and immorality of economic and political structures and organisations.¹⁹

Bormann has harnessed Turner’s concept of the liminoid for the study of urban experiential spaces. She describes the urban spaces marked (if not produced) by consumption and events as “zones of the liminoid”, i.e. as “stages of cultural performance where the possibilities and limits of society are playfully tested, explored, negotiated or discarded”, as places “where the existing can be examined and the new imagined”.²⁰ In the following, the performative production of such urban “zones of the liminoid” and their function as instances of social control with the potential for mobilisation and change will be examined based on selected cultural performances in the context of historical anniversaries in the Czech Republic. The focus of the study is the so-called Velvet Carnival in Prague, a commemorative event on the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” based on the Basel carnival, which is characterised by a highly socio-critical impetus and sees itself as a counter-hegemonic actor. It is founded on ethnographic research, particularly participant observation, photographic documentation, dense descriptions and media analyses of the commemorative events on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” in 2014.²¹

The discursive framing: The “Velvet Revolution” in the national culture of remembrance

Although the so-called “velvet” or “soft” revolution (sametová revoluce), which brought down the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1989, has a national holiday in both the Czech and Slovak Republics, this event remains a place of remembrance ‘from below’.²² According to historian Muriel Blaive, the “revolution” is even a “non-lieu de mémoire” politically and in terms of society as a whole, as it is neither suitable for creating myths and legitimising existing power relationships in terms of identity politics, nor for constructing an overall national sense of unity.²³ A central reason for this is a politics of memory that, on the one hand, interprets communism as a foreign implant, “as a historical distortion, an interlude, an aberration from the supposed natural past of national history, an ‘Asiatic despotism’ imported from the ‘East’”.²⁴ This is reflected, for example, in the research mandate of the national authority Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů – ÚSTR), “which is to address the legacy of the Nazi occupation and the dictatorship of the KSČ (Komunistická strana Československa – Communist Party of Czechoslovakia)”, as well as in the “research into the period 1938–1989, which is defined by law”.²⁵ The institute, thus, ranks the period of communism “among the other totalitarianisms of the 20th century”²⁶ and contributes significantly not only to externalising this period, but to telling it as a story of oppression by major enemy powers. This narrative is legally supported by the controversial “lustration laws”²⁷ of the early 1990s, which define the pre-complaint regimes as “unlawful and criminal”.²⁸ The laws are problematic in several respects: on the one hand, there is insufficient differentiation between “perpetrators” and “victims”, because they also pillory those people who did not necessarily belong to the regime’s henchmen, such as numerous members of the “grey zone”, i.e. people who were active in the official structures but, at the same time, supported dissent.²⁹ On the other hand, however, a number of communists from the nomenklatura have not been prosecuted at all. On the contrary, many of them are among the beneficiaries of privatisation. The lustration laws have not always been implemented, which means that a change of elites has not taken place in all institutions.³⁰ In addition, there has been the growing strength and entry into parliament of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy – KSČM), the successor party to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa – KSČ), a party that has so far not undergone any reforms and, to this day, clings to the legitimacy of the past regime, which was characterised by a gross disregard for human rights. This is an important reason why widespread resistance is forming on the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” on 17 November and a change in the politics of remembrance is being demanded. It is, therefore, not surprising that the majority of urban stages on this day are occupied by civil society actors – student initiatives, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), associations, artists and other memory activists – while the state is increasingly withdrawing from public space.³¹ The commemoration events, which are staged bottom-up by civil society actors, are, therefore, also and especially an expression of a political will to influence and a critical public.³² The occupation of public space and demand for a different politics of remembrance, for a “decommunization” (dekomunizace) of state and society, are important building blocks in this memory building. At the same time, the commemoration of the “Velvet Revolution” and the admonishing memory of the victims and crimes of the communist regime serve as a foil on which many other grievances in politics and society are made visible. These notably include the high level of corruption, discrimination against minorities, the power of the economic elites, problems of environmental pollution and, time and again, the political culture. The latter has been under particular rebuke since Václav Klaus replaced Václav Havel in the office of president in 2003 and even more so since Klaus’ successor Miloš Zeman took office (in 2013). Zeman is highly polarised: while he is popular among former communists, people in rural, structurally weak regions and those in precarious social milieus, opposition to him is forming especially in the intellectual academic urban milieu, which is also reflected in critical media coverage (especially in Lidové noviny [People’s Newspaper] and Mladá Fronta Dnes [Young Front Today]). The reasons for this are mainly Zeman’s populist and Russia- and China-friendly policies (at least until Russia’s war against the Ukraine), his vulgar and often tasteless political style and his broad support within the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM).³³ Moreover, criticism of the “lack of decency in politics” has continued to rise since the election of Andrej Babiš as prime minister (until 2021). Thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, up to 300,000 people have taken to the streets against the two office holders in Prague alone. Doing memory in the Czech Republic is, therefore, primarily associated with doing civil society and doing democracy.

Nevertheless, it should also be taken into account that only certain sections of society inscribe themselves and their interpretations in the urban (memory) spaces. On the one hand, the civil society actors belong to the successor generations of the “Velvet Revolution”, i.e. today’s 20- to 40-year-olds. They are often the children and grandchildren of former dissidents or the children of those young people (especially from the student milieu) who took to the streets in 1989 in their hundreds of thousands. On the other hand, many of them come from urban academic milieus. They are citizens who generally have a high level of cultural, social and, in some cases, economic capital: students from various disciplines and universities and their families, NGOs and civic initiatives, and representatives from the fields of culture and art. They are memory activists who are competent enough to take on the role of an authority regulating the state and the market, or are able to interpret the messages of the organisational elites ‘correctly’ and communicate them through their own networks.³⁴ Sections of the population who do not have such capital, count themselves among the losers of the system transformation and are politically more on the left or right fringe, on the other hand, are not represented or they have their own rallies and try to disrupt the commemorative events of civic initiatives. These are, for example, supporters of the KSČM and right-wing or extreme right-wing groups.³⁵

It has become clear that on the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” in the Czech Republic, large sections particularly of civil society are occupying the public space in order to remember the events of 1989, recall the crimes of the communist regime, commemorate the victims and criticise what they see as a failed politics of remembrance. On the other hand, they aim to draw attention to problems in politics and society, question claims to hegemony and demand participation in political decision-making processes. At the same time, in the sense of late-modern experience orientation, the actors are concerned to let doing memory and doing democracy take place in a unique event that appeals to all the senses – especially in order to mobilise the younger generations for their own interests. Thus, a diverse and colourful repertoire of (remembrance) cultural practices is spreading on the urban stages on the anniversaries: vigils, light chains and (open-air) exhibitions commemorating the victims’ experiences of violence and calling for “never again communism”; politically motivated street festivals, flash mobs, carnival parades and re-enactments; readings, concerts, panel discussions and theatre; protest events of all kinds, mostly demonstrations for but, above all, against members of the government, as well as radical right-wing rallies that extend to violent excesses by neo-Nazi groups.³⁶

These initiatives and events have been particularly prominent in recent years: the Sametové posvícení (literally “Velvet Church Fair”, usually translated as “Velvet Carnival” or “Prague Carnival”), founded by the academics and artists’ initiative FÓR_UM in 2012, an association of various NGOs whose members explicitly model themselves on the Basel Carnival and carry their causes into the centre of Prague in carnivalesque costumes. A more detailed description and analysis of these carnival-like commemorative and protest practices follows on the next few pages. It is also worth mentioning the all-day street festival Korzo Národní (Parade on the National Street) organised by the NGO Díky, že můžem! (Thank you that we can!), one of the most diverse and crowd-pleasing events initiated by a small group of students in 2014.³⁷

Other actions initiated by various NGOs and associations in recent years which have (had) a high mobilisation potential and have also received or experienced great popularity in the media were, for example, the re-enactment or “reconstruction of the velvet parade” ³⁸ of 17 November 1989 on the 10th and 20th anniversaries in 2009 and 2019 – actions through which the rebirth of civil society was to be re-enacted above all.³⁹ Once again, in 2014, the initiative Chci si s vámi promluvit, pane prezidente (I want to talk to you, Mr. President) initiated by Martin Přykril, a member of the Prague indie band The Prostitutes, caused a sensation by demonstrating against the incumbent president Miloš Zeman with their media-effective actions Červená karta pro Miloše Zemana (Red Card for Miloš Zeman) and Pochod na hrad (March on the Castle).⁴⁰ And to celebrate the 30th anniversary, the commemorations joined a long line of protests calling for the resignation of Miloš Zeman and Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who has been proven, inter alia, to have funnelled EU funds into his own pocket and worked in state security.⁴¹ All these actions have been attended by anywhere from about 10,000 (re-enactment of the 17 November 1989 demonstration on 17 November 2009) to more than 250,000 people (Demisi! [Resign!] demonstration on 16 November 2019) in recent years.

The Velvet Carnival will be the focus of attention in the following. Firstly, we will look at the actors and their practices and motives for shaping the anniversary. Then, this urban phenomenon of the liminoid will be examined in the context of larger processes of social transformation.

The Velvet Carnival as an urban zone of the liminoid

The Velvet Carnival can be defined as a ritualised cultural performance imported to the Czech Republic and adapted to local traditions⁴² as an invented tradition brought about by migration and globalisation processes, which in recent years has become an important part of Prague’s culture of remembrance ‘from below’. It was initiated in 2012 by the FÓR_UM initiative, which emerged from an interdisciplinary project by theatre scholars and performance artists on the topic of “Satire in Public Space”.⁴³ One of the initiators, the religious scholar and performance activist Olga Věra Cieslarová (*1980), developed the idea of transferring the Swiss custom, or individual elements of it, to Prague in the course of her research on the Basel Carnival and to establish a “Prague Carnival” in the context of the “Velvet Revolution” on 17 November.⁴⁴ According to Cieslarová when she started the collaborative project, there were no actions in the Czech Republic on the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” that were communal and promoted democracy. On the contrary, violent protests would increase on 17 November. Therefore, there should be an alliance of civil society initiatives (e.g. for the reappraisal of communist crimes or for equal opportunities and against discrimination), non-profit NGOs (e.g. environmental organisations such as Greenpeace or Extinction Rebellion) and artists from the fields of visual arts and music, who together open a public space for reflection, providing “a platform for a broad public discussion”.⁴⁵ The primary aim of FÓR_UM is to “support playfulness and creativity in the formulation of serious social and political issues” and to “raise awareness of social issues and values”,⁴⁶ for which the forms of satire and carnival are better suited than banners. “Following the Basel model”, the aim was to “support democracy in the Czech Republic with satire and art” and promote “free, creative and democratic citizenship”.⁴⁷ “Satire and the ability to reflect” are particularly necessary today because they are the “most effective defence against populism, demagogy and totalitarianism of all kinds”.⁴⁸

The participants develop their “subjects” in joint workshops every year, similar to the carnival cliques in Basel, and translate them into carnivalesque-satirical forms. The city provides vacant rooms for temporary use, which the participants first convert into workshops (dílny) where the “larvae” (masks) and costumes are designed and produced and the pamphlets are printed. Around 17 November, these will then become the “velvet centre” (sametové centrum), where readings, panel discussions and art performances will take place. The terms and theoretical programmes that FÓR_UM uses as a guide, as well as the forms of expression and practices that it employs, make the deliberate reference to various customary traditions, especially those of the Basel carnival, unmistakable: there are the themes, motifs or materials known as “subjects”, which are processed in a carnivalesque way and made available to the public for consideration. The “subjects” are transmitted via the communication medium of the “entertaining pamphlets”, as the organisers call their satirical-political information flyers and brochures, i.e. the political pamphlets that point out grievances in politics and society and call for them to be fought against. Then there are the masks, reminiscent of the “larvae” of the Basel Fasnacht, but also of the masks of the Comedia dell’arte and the Carnival of Venice, and costumes like those worn in circus arenas and jugglers’ performances. Some of the disguises look very professional, while for others their designers make do with simple materials, such as painting egg and shoe boxes or working with crepe paper, old bedsheets and (plastic) rubbish. The Middle Ages are just as present in the form of knight, executioner and clergy costumes as are abstract arts and artificial intelligences of the 20th and 21st centuries. Music, as in all well-known carnival, Fasching and Fas(t)nacht traditions, is an important element that accompanies the procession. The repertoire of genres at the Velvet Carnival ranges from Basel Guggenmusik and flute music to Latin American samba sounds, pop, hip-hop, Schlager and folk songs from the national and international music scene. Some “cliques” are led by individual musicians, others have an orchestra with them, and a few do without any musical accompaniment at all. This blend of elements from different customs points to the underlying hybridity of the Velvet Carnival. In addition to its outward appearance, it is also evident in its functionality: the Velvet Carnival is both an art and theatre production, it is a celebration and ritual, a party and event, an information and educational platform. This ambiguity in terms of form and function also reveals the impossibility of committing oneself terminologically to this kind of postmodern “custom”. If one were to follow the older German-language research on customs here, the German designation “Prager Fasnacht” would be preferable to the designation Velvet Carnival – especially since the Velvet Carnival is explicitly based on the Basel Carnival. Werner Mezger distinguishes between carnival and Fastnacht as follows:

In simplified terms, the two customs can be summarised in the following pairs of opposites according to their different manifestations: carnival versus Fastnacht, that is costume versus disguise, cardboard nose versus wooden mask, spontaneity versus ritual, frivolity versus melancholy or, to put it a little more pointedly, wine bliss versus beer seriousness.⁴⁹

However, if one takes a closer look at the cultural performance in Prague, such a dichotomy cannot be maintained, because elements of both categories of customs can be found, as well as elements from other traditions. Due to this bricolage-like composition and in view of the semantic charge of “velvet”, the translation “Velvet Carnival” seems to make the most sense.

Against the background of this initially general definition and theoretical positioning, the Velvet Carnival will be described in more detail based on concrete questions: Who are the civil society actors hiding behind the masks? What subjects are transported through them into the urban space and into the everyday lives of the masses? How are the subjects staged discursively and performatively? And how can the Velvet Carnival be placed in wider social contexts?

The Velvet Carnival took place for the first time in 2012. Six “NGO cliques” together with five artists created 150 masks on a volunteer basis, at a cost of just under 1,000 euros. One year later, there were already more than twice as many cliques and the costs amounted to over 11,000 euros.⁵⁰ At the beginning particularly, the carnival pioneers in Prague were also supported by artists from Basel, who assisted in the making of the “larvae” and accompanied the procession with their flute playing (which individual cliques from Basel still do today).⁵¹ During the period of my research in 2014, there were more than 15 cliques, 21 artists and 8 dramaturges who offered a cultural programme in the city for one month after the parade on 17 November. The costs, largely raised by sponsors, are said to have amounted to about 25,000 €.⁵²

In accordance with the Czech meaning of the word “Church fair” (posvícení), the logo of the carnival forms a place setting with a plate, knife and fork (Fig. 1). The geographical silhouette of the Czech Republic is depicted on the plate, reminiscent of a breaded schnitzel – one of the most popular dishes in the Czech Republic. The logo, thus, ironically alludes to the motif of celebration and pleasure, of eating and drinking before the (meatless) Lenten season, and simultaneously links it to the objectives formulated to bring grievances to the table. Every year, a new motto is added to the logo, which, as in Basel, reflects current discourses. The topics in previous years have included a failed culture of remembrance and commemoration (2012),⁵³ domestic government crises (2015),⁵⁴ Fake News (2017),⁵⁵ bee deaths and climate change (2019).⁵⁶ In the anniversary year 2014, 25 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the motto was “With humour for the enlightened schnitzel”.⁵⁷ The flyer was decorated with the likenesses of allegedly corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs preparing and eating a schnitzel. The A3-sized information leaflet, which announced all participating cliques with texts and pictures, said among other things:

We do not want to spend 17 November nostalgically laying wreaths, we want to celebrate freedom with creative and positive energy expressing our civic positions. […] We want to fight against what annoys and torments us for our and your enlightened schnitzel with weapons that are firmly rooted in our Czech essence – with hyperbole and humour!

This brief text summarises what the cultural performance stands for: on the one hand, it aims to create a civic alternative to common commemoration and protest formats and establish a counter-design to existing cultural practices of remembrance. On the other hand, the aim is to “fight” against grievances. However, especially against the background of increasing violence on 17 November in the streets of Prague (as well as in Brno and other larger cities), this struggle should be peaceful, creative, humorous and open to all. Indeed, the Velvet Carnival seemed friendlier, more open, relaxed and joyful than any of the commemorative events I attended on 17 November 2014 (as well as in other years). Nevertheless, attitudes were also very clearly expressed here and social concerns were called for with visible and quite confrontational and unsettling means (e.g. through the use of prisoners’ costumes). However, masks, puppet theatre, music, dance, confetti and especially the presence of lots of children among the participants and spectators contributed to the perception of this “velvet” performance as a colourful and friendly celebration. On the occasion of the milestone anniversary in 2014, 15 cliques took part, whose concerns can be roughly categorised as follows:⁵⁸ social justice and the struggle for recognition and participation; environmental and animal protection; and criticism of political decision-making processes and corrupt economic practices.

A number of NGOs and initiatives that advocate for the needs of disadvantaged families, especially children and young people, such as Člověk v tísni (People in Need), appeared with the slogan “Where to go with them?”. Or also: “Edudant and Francimor want to go to your school”, which called for the inclusion of children and young people with physical and mental disabilities in mainstream schools. The subject was staged as a small play that addressed negative prejudices against mentally disabled children anchored in society. The practices of discrimination were represented by a teacher who elevated “smart kids with high foreheads” and blond hair to the norm, while bullying those with red hair and crooked teeth (Fig. 2). The accompanying pamphlet, entitled “A weekday morning in the school street in an average Czech town”, featured a corresponding scene with two pupils and the headmaster of a mainstream school. The two boys Edudant and Francimor, one of whom suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and the other is of below-average intelligence, very fat and has dyslexia, dream of going to a mainstream school like “normal” children. But they fear that they are not “normal enough” and “too conspicuous”. An impression that comes true when the headmaster chases the two boys away towards a special school.

Another association, the Nízkoprahový klub Husita (Low-threshold Club Husita), founded by members of the Hussite Czechoslovak Church, again addressed the stigmatisation of children and young people from socially precarious family backgrounds in the Žižkov district of Prague, a former working-class neighbourhood increasingly affected by gentrification measures. The initiative’s flyer was printed with simple bird motifs, mainly doves, and the message “We are rushing to help” (in Czech: “We are flying to help”) and folded into a paper aeroplane. The activists wore bird masks in the style of commedia dell’arte and held oversized birds, reminiscent of vultures, on sticks in their midst. Another NGO pointing out state and societal stigmatisation and discrimination was Tosara (Romani: The Morning). Tosara is a very active association founded by students of Romany studies that provides educational and recreational services for children and young people, mainly from Roma families, who are affected by neglect. In 2014, the subject referred to the discrimination of Roma in educational institutions, the motto was: “They sent me to a special school because I’m Roma. Isn’t that stupid?” More than half of the children in special schools have a Roma background; in some regions Roma make up 80 % of the pupils in special schools. While the student performers wore simple eye masks and walked “voluntarily” in front of the university building made of white cardboard, the heads of the “special needs students” were completely covered with masks and the students themselves were chained to an upside-down special needs school.⁵⁹

Other NGOs and associations, in turn, addressed the increasing homelessness in the city (“Every city has the homeless it deserves”), inadequate rehabilitation measures for former prisoners (“The real prison starts when you’re out and nobody gives you a job”, Fig. 3)

or demonstrated for renewable sources of energy, against factory farming and for a (capital) city with sufficient green spaces and children’s playgrounds, markets, organic food shops and vegetarian or vegan restaurants. Still others denounced corruption and tax scandals, drew attention to discrimination against LGTBQ movements by the churches (“Even warm pigs go to heaven”) or autocratic regimes in other parts of the world. The latter included, for example, the protest movement Pražský Majdan (Prague Maidan), which emerged in September 2014 as a reaction “to the lax attitude of the Czech president and government to the situation in Ukraine”.⁶⁰ Under the slogan “We have a small tent – Maidan”, the activists critical of Moscow protested symbolically against Russia’s aggressive Ukraine policy within the framework of the Velvet Carnival: a yellow tent decorated with motifs of Ukrainian traditional costumes (so-called Vyshyvanka motifs) and the flag of the EU, and demonstrators with yellow and blue hair wreaths drove the Russian bear, alias President Vladimir V. Putin, before them (Fig. 4).

The NGO most directly related in 2014 to the event of the “Velvet Revolution” and remembering the repressive policies of the pre-transition regime was Političtí vězni.cz (Political Prisoners.cz), a digital oral history project “that aims to ethically capture and preserve the memories and life experiences of former political prisoners – eyewitnesses and actors of historical events that were meant to be forgotten”.⁶¹ The activists and researchers conduct mainly oral history interviews and make them available to the public on their website. In 2014, women and their children in the communist labour camps of the 1950s, for example, in the Vojna uranium mine, were the focus of the Velvet Carnival under the slogan “They were there too!”. According to Političtí vězni.cz, the history of repressed women, especially mothers, is a topic that is still taboo and has been insufficiently dealt with so far. The participants were dressed as female camp prisoners in grey suits and their heads covered with scarves; they rolled a red star with babies’ faces painted on it in front of them in a pram that resembled a cage (Fig. 5). The face masks or “larvae” gave an emaciated, injured and agonised impression. The group was accompanied musically by a trumpet player wearing a black balaclava. The pamphlets, written in Czech and English, were designed in the form of red postcards with the face of a sleeping baby on the front, and above some of them were moving quotes from interviews with imprisoned women or from their autobiographies. The writer Božena Kuklová-Jíšová (1929–2014), who was sentenced to twelve years in a labour camp in 1954, was quoted as saying: “We felt most sorry for the mothers who had left their children at home […] Maruška Zenáhlíková had three and served twelve years. With something like that, you could no longer even complain. And this suffering of women is not talked about at all today” (Fig. 6).

And on another one it said:

In the beginning, when they [the guards] came to the cells individually, they molested us. But when some of the women became pregnant, they were ordered to come in pairs. The women were in a dreadful situation. One was very afraid to tell her husband about the pregnancy. It was a struggle for values. To have an abortion was a great sin. But in such a situation, it was something else. Arrested mothers simply had their children taken away from them and in many cases gave them up for adoption, so that the woman concerned would never find her child again.⁶²

Although the Velvet Carnival was all about entertainment, parties and events, the critical impetus was omnipresent: dealing with the communist legacy and the crimes committed by the communist regime between 1948 and 1989; current corruption and distribution struggles; education policy, social discrimination and disintegration; environmental and climate protection – socio-political concerns that, with varying degrees of importance, are currently being expressed on the streets and made available for negotiation by civil society actors all over Europe and beyond. In contrast to other forms of protest and memorialisation in the Czech Republic in recent years, such as mass demonstrations (here the march on the castle in Prague or the red card against Zeman), which place a theme at the centre of the performance (in 2014 it was particularly Zeman’s political style), the Velvet Carnival makes it possible to bring different subjects into the public sphere and make a variety of grievances visible. It seems to be a suitable platform not only for NGOs that already have a high profile, such as Greenpeace, but especially for smaller initiatives that rarely attract media attention and do not have prominent advocates, for example, FÓR_UM with its cultural performance offers the opportunity to stage their own concerns on the urban stage. The Velvet Carnival gives socially marginalised people the opportunity to become part of a critical public sphere. By giving “oppressed” people space to occupy central and historically significant places in the city (e.g. Wenceslas Square, Charles Bridge and the National Street), it “contributes to the ‘empowerment’ of socially disadvantaged groups […]”.⁶³ The carnival does this by means of satire and the grotesque, with humour as a “weapon of the weak”,⁶⁴ by having the rulers – in this case Zeman, Putin and corrupt entrepreneurs – appear in the form of exaggerated, grotesque bodies made of papier mâché, wood, plastic waste or metal objects, and by reversing the roles between ‘above’ and ‘below’, between the hegemon and the oppressed (e.g. the Maidan drives the Russian bear before it). Alongside oppressive, serious subject productions, such as those of former political prisoners, a topsy-turvy world is brought onto the stage – very much in the style of François Rabelais (or in his reception by Mikhail Bakhtin) – and laughter is placed at the centre as a practice of resistance.⁶⁵

The Velvet Carnival is a hybrid, polyvalent phenomenon in a late modern society. First of all, it is an event to remember the upheavals of 1989, to commemorate the “velvet” end of the repressive regime under the rule of the Communist Party and the regaining of democracy. Regarding the how, i.e. the praxeological design of the anniversary, the initiators are concerned to distinguish themselves from conventional remembrance rituals, such as wreath-laying ceremonies, and to create new commemorative practices. This is done by explicitly adapting elements of the Basel carnival: such as socio-political subjects, masks and “larvae”, pamphlets, music, confetti and the parade. The commemorative procession is, thus, also and above all a carnival or Shrovetide procession that deals with social issues in a satirical way. In this function, it can be described as a tradition newly established by civil society actors, as a “hybrid new construction”⁶⁶ that is composed bricolage-like of different building blocks and that satisfies different needs and fulfils different functions. Humour and wit, satire and creativity as the guiding motifs of carnival and Fasnacht are linked here with the demand for unconventional, but above all peaceful rituals, especially against the background of the increasingly “aggressive demonstrations” on the occasion of the anniversary celebrations on 17 November. According to the initiators, they want to counter this development with something “cheerful”, “humorous” and “intelligently critical”,⁶⁷ they want to “transform anger into creativity”.⁶⁸ Here, FÓR_UM follows the global trend of recent years to replace confrontational forms of protest, violent ones at that, which often deterred interested parties and ran counter to mass mobilisation, with new, creative, playful and thus communicative and inclusive forms. Sonja Brünzels writes about this in connection with the often carnivalesque practices of the Reclaim the Streets movement – a movement that emerged in Britain in the 1990s as a reaction to the displacement of the population from the inner cities to reclaim public space creatively and with fun: “Carnival [is] initially inclusive – its pull is strong enough to blur boundaries between actors and spectators, above and below, good and evil. Protest, on the other hand, is confrontational and exclusive – it separates the good from the bad, the accusers from the accused.”⁶⁹

Secondly, the Velvet Carnival offers participating civil society initiatives the opportunity to articulate concerns and demands to the public in a media-effective way, to provide knowledge about social shortcomings and injustices – for example, in the school system, in relation to the social fabric, in (remembrance) politics and the economy – and to propose alternative life and social models (e.g. inclusion, sustainable economy). The cultural performances are, thus, on the one hand, the stage on which very different (interpretations) are staged and different collective identities are reflected and presented. Instead of identities “that cannot be fully lived out in everyday life”, it is more a matter of “exaggerations and expulsions of identity elements that are suppressed by hegemonic cultural tendencies”.⁷⁰ On the other hand, as a form of protest, they are a “resource of the powerless”,⁷¹ since they are about the creative occupation of public spaces. FÓR_UM sees itself as an important civil society actor with an educational and enlightening sense of mission, committed to not only “influencing civil society engagement” but also “spreading good humour”.⁷²

The “‘preparation’ phase” of the carnival in particular would help to “connect members of different social classes” and, thus, “help to cultivate civil society”.⁷³ It is about creatively participating in the shaping and negotiation of society. This cultural performance also fits into the global trend of appropriating urban spaces through creative action, helping to shape them and intervening in them through performative artistic acts.⁷⁴

Finally, the Velvet Carnival promises experiences and events, entertainment and pleasure: on the one hand, as an end in itself (“We create a good mood”), on the other hand, to generate positive emotions (“When people see this, they associate November with something good and valuable that should be protected”). The cultural performance on the occasion of the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” is a popular cultural event that promises an aesthetically pleasurable experience, which is also an important motive for mobilising the participants and the mass media. The satirical street parade, inspired by the Basel Fasnacht, is an event that promises to satisfy individual and collective cravings for fun and (self-)staging, for communalisation and identity. It is an event that, like any other, has to assert itself over and over again in the (media) public sphere and fight for its position on the civil society experience market, which is also a history market throughout (East) Central Europe in November.

The Velvet Carnival can, therefore, be summarised as a liminoid cultural performance that is characterised by hybridity, polyvalence and polyfunctionality. Liminoid because – to echo Turner – it emerged “in the interstices […] of central institutions”, has “a pluralistic, fragmentary and experimental character” and as “part of social critique […] denounce[d] the injustice, inefficiency and immorality of economic and political structures and organisations”.⁷⁵ However, the extent to which it can actually contribute to overcoming the boundaries of milieus and reach a large number of citizens must be critically questioned, as the actors are primarily members of the educated middle classes. Although a perception of the Velvet Carnival as an elitist event in the capital cannot be ruled out, the cultural practice of the carnival seems to be more accessible and open to broad sections of the population compared to wreath-laying ceremonies, panel discussions, demonstrations and the like.

1 Giving Mountains Names

This article does not aim to unravel the meaning of the names of any particular peaks and mountains; this is not a work of etymology or nomenclature. My goal is instead to uncover some clues as to the motivation for and purpose of naming mountains. Why must mountains be given names at all? And why (this is my second question) do they have the specific names that are familiar to us today and facilitate unambiguous communication? How did our mountain names make it on to maps and thereby become sacrosanct? I am interested in the (often curious) history of mountain names and not in their linguistic origins.

My questions appear so trivial that historians of Alpine exploration have hardly even registered their existence. They appear trivial to us today because mountains everywhere received their names so long ago in a process that is also familiar to us from other contexts—as per Hans Blumenberg’s famous definition of the modern age as the epoch that finally found a name for everything.¹ In the case of the mountain names, we can pin Blumenberg’s “modern age” down to a quite specific timespan: it was first in the nineteenth century that mountains, especially the highest peaks, received their names—apparently forever.

Indeed, naming goes back to the dawn of humanity. The Biblical myth of the first humans, as narrated in the second story of creation, depicts name-giving in a charming scene: God brings all the animals to the first human being “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Gen. 2:19, NIV). Bestowing names was—and is not—a task for God, it seems, but for humans—what we might, in modern diction, call a matter of culture: “So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals” (Gen. 2:20). This business of assigning names went on for a long time, of course, as we can well discern from the jittery activity of early Alpinists in the new field of mountain botany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Dozens, or indeed hundreds, of previously unheard, freshly devised names were found for and attached to newly discovered plants in accordance with Linnaean taxonomy. Rocks and minerals were given similar treatment, and why should the mountain peaks have been exempted? The more attention peaks attracted—as newly discovered individuals, so to speak—from all with an interest in the Alps, the more pressing the need to find appropriate names for them became.

The problem that arises here (and may not be entirely obvious to people nowadays) is captured evocatively in two scenes in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, and taking up this wildly popular yet oft-derided bestseller here affords me an opportunity to shed some light on my essay title, which may initially have appeared somewhat obscure. In the third chapter of Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning (called “In the Pasture”), the girl—das Heidi in German, grammatically neutral rather than feminine—is spellbound, shocked even, by the alpenglow on the rock faces in the evening the first time she accompanies the goatherd Peter to the higher pasture above her grandfather’s alm: “Look, look! the highest peak is glowing. Oh, the beautiful fire!” Heidi asks for an explanation, but Peter says only that “It is always like that, but it is no fire,” and that it “comes of itself.” Heidi cannot take her eyes off the wondrously illuminated mountains and cries out excitedly: “just this minute it is all as red as roses. Look at the snow and those high, pointed rocks! What are they called?” Peter’s answer is characteristically taciturn: “Mountains have no names.”² Before delving any further into the substance of this terse and initially rather peculiar-seeming answer, I will describe a second scene from later in this chapter that essentially mirrors this first one. Heidi directs the answer given by the goatherd Peter to her grandfather as a question: “But why have the mountains no names?” Her grandfather replies that they do have names and promises to tell her the name of a mountain if she can describe one to him so that he recognizes it.³ Heidi describes two mountains and her grandfather promptly tells her their names: Falkniss and Scesaplana⁴ (Illustration 1). So did the mountains “have names” after all? In this case, Spyri was a keen observer. The mountains the local population saw every day, the ones whose appearance was known and could be described, did have names. But the more distant mountains that were of interest to mountain travelers and Alpinists (the higher mountains, hidden from view by others in front of them) were mostly unknown (“Mountains have no names” as the goatherd Peter tells us!)—and this fact created an enormous problem for anyone trying to become oriented in the area.

2 Without Names, Orientation Is Impossible

One of the most thoughtful early mountain travelers, Hans Conrad Escher from Zurich (who we also know, not coincidentally, as a keen producer of unerring and meticulously labeled panoramic drawings⁵), pointed repeatedly to the importance of being able to “definitively name and label distant areas and mountains where one has never set foot” when orienting oneself in unfamiliar terrain and in the mountains.⁶ Escher highlighted in particular the problem of locations that were “hidden” from sight by perspective.⁷ He used the example of the Finsteraarhorn to illustrate this point, suggesting that this peak had “had the fate of being somewhat overlooked by our forebears, even though its true height is greater than that of all the surrounding peaks (as careful measurements have revealed) because it modestly hides in dark remoteness behind masses that more brashly catch the eyes of those accustomed to focusing only on what is closest.” Furthermore, Escher noted with fine irony, the peak had been “unconcerned” since time immemorial as to “whether it was noticed by the playful human race and adopted into the ranks of the most exalted and visible bodies or regarded as nonexistent.”⁸

The “playful human race” Escher spoke of had, however, recently become divided, for a previously unknown theoretical curiosity⁹ had taken hold of certain humans—“mountain travelers”—who were now attempting to ascend to precisely those summits in the high mountains that their forebears had previously avoided. A lack of geographical clarity endangered their endeavor. Prominent landmarks had not been surveyed and there were no maps of the “dark remoteness.” Designated names that allowed unequivocal identification of mountain peaks were unknown, and there were no locals who had sought and found routes to these high peaks. A case from the exploration of the Pyrenees provides a good starting point, although the story has not attracted much attention here in the Germanophone countries.

2.1 Mont Perdu: The Lack of an Overview

The diplomat and scientist Louis Ramond (baron de Carbonnières), a resident of Strasbourg, had been attempting to climb one of the highest mountains in the Pyrenees with an entourage of porters and guides since the 1790s. Modern measurements attribute a height of 3,355 meters to Mont Perdu (or Monte Perdido, which was located on Spanish territory back then and still is today). At the time, it was considered the highest mountain in the Pyrenees and referred to as the “Mont Blanc of the Pyrenees.” Ramond’s undertaking was complicated by a lack of information:

Nowhere in the entire surrounding area could anyone who knew of the mountain be found, much less someone who had already ascended to its peak and could have served as a guide. The unusual location of this mountain may have been part of the problem; it is visible only from a few locations and may well have gained its name from this very characteristic. As one enters the Estaubé valley, the peak can be seen poking up from above the walls of rock that surround the valley. As one advances into the valley, however, it soon disappears again.¹⁰

As is so often said, good advice is hard to come by. Two Spanish shepherds whom Ramond and his companions encountered along their way were unable to help. A smuggler (contrebandier) they met was familiar with clandestine routes through the mountains, but he had not ascended to the summit of Mont Perdu (what could he have hoped to find up there?). The disoriented men persisted, climbing over ice and rocks until they finally discovered two peaks, one of which must have been Marboré and the other Mont Perdu—but which was which? The guides, according to the report, “insisted on identifying the cylinder of Marboré as Mont Perdu and confusing both in this way.”¹¹

As this case of mistaken identities clearly highlights, local people bestowed quasi-magical names on prominent peaks protruding from mazes of high mountains, despite the fact that in some cases nobody had ever been up there, and these names were not yet affixed to precise topographical locations. With the locations not yet securely identified by names, hazardous cases of mistaken identity could arise. It was not by chance that Mont Perdu—i.e., Monte Perdido—in the Pyrenees became known as a “lost mountain.”¹² The syndrome of lost or hidden mountains (also addressed in Escher’s reference to the Finsteraarhorn’s “dark remoteness”) has a characteristic symptom: the molehill style of older maps. By depicting mountainous landscapes in a perspective view from a diagonal angle, they created panoramas that hid what was directly behind mountains from view (Illustration 2). This problem of perspective made it enormously difficult for travelers to orient themselves. This explains the switch from molehill maps to maps providing a complete bird’s eye view—to maps, in other words, that depict terrain as a satellite or the eye of God might see it—that took place so enormously rapidly and so curiously quietly in or around the year 1800.¹³ This shift not only represented a giant leap forward on the path toward objective knowledge; it was also a symptom of efforts to surmount the illusions created by the perspective of molehill maps. The successes of early Alpinism can be seen as sporting successes—as athletic achievements—but they should not be reduced to this (often unsatisfactorily narrow) perspective. They can and must also be regarded as intellectual achievements, as part of a struggle to gain an overview of previously unconnected knowledge.

2.2 Monte Rosa: A Dearth of Names

It is just such an aha moment (as we say today)—when bits of what was known before suddenly became connected in consciousness—that is preserved in the name of a striking feature in the Monte Rosa group (slightly to the west of the Lysjoch) that is still known today as Entdeckungsfels, the “rock of discovery.”¹⁴ In the summer of 1780, the mining entrepreneur Nicolas Vincent from Gressoney Valley in North Piedmont climbed to this point for the third time, having already reached it twice before with a group of chamois hunters (in 1778 and 1779). On both occasions, they had seen a glowing green valley to the northwest, behind massive glaciers, and identified it as the fabled Hohenlauben, which, as the legend had it, had been buried under glaciers to punish the wickedness of the shepherds.¹⁵ On their third visit to this lofty location with its impressive views, however, the daring mountaineers were struck by the idea—or they looked down from their high vantage point and discovered—that they were not looking at a mythical valley, but at the real Matter valley.¹⁶

This scene at the so-called “Rock of Discovery” has already brought me into the thick of my second story, which is about the discovery of the highest peaks in the Monte Rosa massif in the early 1820s. Ludwig von Welden, an officer from Württemberg in Austrian imperial service who had wound up in occupied upper Italy, took it upon himself (or was instructed) to link the network of triangulation points that French engineers had created from the Atlantic to the Savoy with the Adriatic network created by Austrian military surveyors that now extended as far as Sesia in Piedmont. The peaks of the Monte Rosa massif struck him as an eminently suitable target for advancing this endeavor.

In order to take measurements and make the connections needed to gain an objective overview of the mountains, von Welden naturally required clearly identifiable points, normally peaks—points, that is to say, that could be and had been named. In this respect, however, he had every reason to lament: “On my first journey to Monte Rosa in 1821, I already had the greatest difficulties orientating myself.” He perceived rightly that the problem lay in the “lack of proper names” that “such a large mountain range needs to be described.” Every major peak he asked for the name of on a circular tour lasting several hours was “Monte Rosa,” he continues, claiming that he “could get nothing else out of my guides.”¹⁷ When he asked people north of the massif for the name of the highest peak visible from the Matter Valley in the Valais, the answer he got was “Monte Rosa.” When he asked in the south, in the Piedmontese Valsesia or in Valle Anzasca, about the highest peak visible from there, he was given the same answer. “And yet,” as he noted in despair, “it was a completely different” peak, “maybe three or four hours from the previous one”: ¹⁸ “The entire massif stretching two hours from south to north and four hours from east to west was called Monte Rosa, and Mont Cervin was the first new name that appeared in this direction.”¹⁹ To come back to the wisdom of the goatherd Peter, the tall icy domes of Monte Rosa had “no names” (Illustration 3).

To bemoan a “dearth of names” ²⁰ was one thing. To resolve the problem by assigning names to the most prominent peaks in this extensive zone of high Alpine terrain was quite another. This was what von Welden accomplished, and names he invented and supplied reasoning for—Nordend, Zumsteinspitze, Signalkuppe, Parrotspitze, Ludwigshöhe, Vincentpyramide—have remained in use until the present day and can be found on maps in both Italian and German²¹ (Illustration 4).

At the very least, this story suggests two important insights:

One is that naming requirements clearly had a cultural dimension that differed depending on the groups people belonged to. The names needed by local people in the mountains were typically connected to their economic interests—their desire to survive and eke out a living—and that explains, for instance, why the ibex and chamois hunters knew and used names that were different from those used by the shepherds. For the same reason, the areas covered by ice and snow year round remained unnamed or, as Colonel von Welden lamented, named only in the vaguest terms.²² If the French anthropologist Marc Augé had not chosen to apply the term “non-places” to other phenomena of our times, it would have been a wonderful descriptor for the highest zones in the Alps before the advent of Alpinism.²³

The second insight related to the namelessness of Monte Rosa’s peaks and the ensuing naming campaign is that von Welden’s report plainly highlights the extent to which assigning names is a cultural gesture of dominion: names mark the end of the wilderness. “To equip the world with names means to divide up and classify the undivided, to make the intangible tangible, though not yet comprehensible.”²⁴ Recognizing (and explaining!) this early on, in good time before Alpinism took off, was the merit of such German intellectuals as Johann Gottfried Herder or Friedrich Schiller.²⁵ Naming things makes them usable. It marks them. It highlights them and makes them visible, so conspicuously so that Friedrich Nietzsche could muse on whether as-yet unnamed things can be seen at all: “As people are usually constituted, it is the name that first makes a thing generally visible to them.”²⁶ This can only hold true, of course, when names are unambiguously linked to particular entities—and when multiple entities (such as mountains) are not designated with one and the same name. This problem of surplus or repetitive names was likewise not infrequent in early Alpinism—alongside the problem of a dearth of names—and it could throw up severe and even fatal hazards for orientation. The problem can be illustrated vividly—as a sequel to the stories of Mont Perdu and Monte Rosa—in a third vignette. The incident I have in mind took place during an 1841 expedition to the Jungfrau.

2.3 A Chaos of Names—Too Many Names for “the Jungfrau” in 1841

A group of international researchers directed by Louis Agassiz, then a professor at the Academy of Neuchâtel, had been carrying out meteorological, glaciological, and geological studies on the Unteraar glacier for weeks in the summer of 1841 when they hatched a plan to ascend the rest of the way to the Jungfrau summit. The group of twelve men (six researchers and six guides, some from Grindelwald and others from the Valais) stocked up on provisions at the Grimselhospiz guesthouse and set off. Their route took them up to the Oberaar glacier and through the cols known today as Oberaarjoch and Grünhornlücke before they descended to a point on the glacier that they called Ruheplatz, “resting place”; today it is known as Konkordiaplatz. Only once they had progressed this far did the question arise as to which of the icy peaks was actually Jungfrau! According to a report by an expedition participant, the geology professor Eduard Desor:

A lively dispute over which summit was the Jungfrau broke out among the guides. The Valasian […] pointed to a summit on our right, claiming that it was at least the peak known as ‘Fraueli-Horn’ (the Valasian name for the Jungfrau); the other guides, especially Jakob [Leuthold] wanted to identify the highest summit on our left as the Jungfrau. They all put their own opinions forward vehemently. But when I was leaning toward the Valasian’s viewpoint, Jakob went into a rage, threw his load down onto the ground, and declared himself insulted at his knowledge of the mountains being doubted. He knew the Jungfrau even if he had not been up there, and he would leave us on the spot if we started climbing toward the poor summit proposed by the Valasian. We finally decided to follow our old Jakob²⁷ wherever he would lead us, as Agassiz suggested, and soon we saw that he was indeed correct and that the peak shown to us by the Valasian as the Frauelihorn was only a lower peak south of Mönch belonging to the Grünhorn massif. We gave it the name Trugberg [“deceptive mountain”], because of the confusion it had caused. But that Jakob knew the Jungfrau is proven by the flag fluttering on its summit.²⁸ (Illustration 5).

The disparaging name “Trugberg” has stuck to this day and taken its place on maps. It is a remarkable stone monument to the once so fluid and now petrified history of mountain names, and an illustration that name-giving always depends, among other factors, on power²⁹: the almost childish scene the guide Jakob Leuthold made—throwing down his pack, stamping his foot, and issuing verbal threats—hints at old animosities between residents of the Hasli Valley and the Upper Valais (as well as Jakob’s sheer bossiness) that are now preserved on maps for all time. It could have been acknowledged at the time that the issue was scarcely one of knowing or not knowing, of being competent or incompetent, but plainly a cultural misunderstanding: the inhabitants north and south of the Jungfrau area simply used the word Jungfrau to describe different peaks. Such practices created inevitable problems—a culturally determined “Alpine hazard”—when mountain travelers appeared on the scene with their pressing desire for unambiguous route descriptions.³⁰

3 A Surfeit of Names

3.1 Local Reason

The example narrated by our reporter, Eduard Desor, shows how difficult it was for mountain travelers to cope with this problem.³¹ Desor, too, participated in the ethnocentric game of “right” and “wrong” names even though he knew full well that people in different valleys used different names for one and the same mountain: “Practically every valley,” he acknowledged, “gives different names to the mountains visible from that valley. The Schreckhorn is called Lauter-Aarhorn in Hasle; even the Finsteraarhorn is known as Schwarzhorn in Upper Valais.”³²

The “dearth of names” that was the subject of so much and such verbose lamentation was thus complemented, rather paradoxically, by a surfeit of names that had already been described almost half a century earlier (on the occasion of a journey on foot through the Bernese Oberland) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, at that point still an unsung private tutor in Bern who would go on to become a famous philosopher. Hegel noted

that every valley gives names that are also found in other valleys to the surrounding mountains. There is thus a Lauterbronn Wetterhorn, a Schreckhorn, a Lauterbronn Jungfrau and Scheidegg; names that the Grindelwalders also give to certain mountains in their valley. […] If one has heard certain mountains that can be seen from Bern called by these names, and one asks about these same names in the valleys, one is shown a different mountain called by this name in every valley.³³

Hegel thus refers, entirely logically, to a view of “one face of that Jungfrau which is called thus in Bern.”³⁴

The problem to which Alpinist authors pointed to as “utter confusion” in the “nomenclature”³⁵ and “bewildering”³⁶ was, of course, both as widespread³⁷ as it was long-standing by this point. As far back as 1485, an official charged with establishing the course of the border between the Allgäu and the Tyrolean part of the Lech Valley had complained that he could not determine the names of the mountains, “presumably because the farmers at one end seem to call them something different than those at the other.”³⁸ Diligent comparisons of panorama drawings of the Bernese Oberland have shown that four names each were in use for Eiger and Jungfrau (and a whopping seven for Mönch!) in the decade and a half between 1775 and 1790 alone;³⁹ original drawings in which the names of peaks have been “crossed out and rewritten, or replaced with entirely different ones” again and again bear ample testament to the difficulties that illustrators of mountain panoramas faced. One nineteenth-century scholar noted that: “Some points bear two or three names alongside and on top of each other.”⁴⁰

None of this seems to have caused any major problems for the inhabitants of the Alps while the exchange of people, goods, and ideas continued along well-established routes. Eighteenth-century intellectuals—Enlightenment philosophers like Georg Christoph Lichtenberg or Justus Möser—anticipated subsequent developments and elaborated the concepts of local philosophy or local reason to explain the old state of affairs. They believed that provincial or local cultural ensembles could have their own coherent systems of logic and reason that ought not to be willfully vandalized by newfangled thinking (as Möser put it). Lichtenberg saw superstition as a kind of Lokal-Philosophie that could be quite logical within a specific cultural context.⁴¹ Möser considered examples from farming:

The forest might have to be protected in one place, while in another trees can be felled. Letting animals range in the forest might be destructive in one location but necessary for higher reasons elsewhere. Pigs might need to be herded, fenced in, or housed in some places, but could be turned out to range freely in others. Who could make a general ordinance for a forest or a district with general permissions and prohibitions without harming private property and the true purpose of every forest or of all a district’s inhabitants?⁴²

Möser pointed out, in defense of local reason, that it was “a general complaint of the current century” (the eighteenth) “that too many general ordinances” were issued and “too many things forced under one rule” in a fashion that stripped away the richness of nature (or, as we would phrase it today, of culture!).⁴³

The plurality of names that had emerged under the conditions of local reason could not continue to be experienced as a form of cultural wealth in the new “age of comparison” (as Friedrich Nietzsche called the modern era at the end of the nineteenth century)⁴⁴: they inevitably struck the mountain travelers and Alpinists of the new era as frustratingly confusing and dangerously chaotic—the results of the old local reason had become unreasonable in the context of the new era and its strivings.

3.2 Flitting Will’ o the Wisps

There were other reasons, too, for the unruly muddle of mountain names, although their influence may have been less significant. I will mention only three of these trends that flitted about like will o’ the wisps here, and I will treat all three with the necessary brevity: the historical game of intellectual fashions, irony, and simple linguistic misunderstandings.

A substantial number of the mountain names that are familiar to us today probably resulted from simple misunderstandings—misheard or mistranscribed, mistakes that went unnoticed at the time. The fact that the surveyors (whose work supplied the basis for the earliest precise maps, complete with their inventories of names) had to be admonished time and again to take care when noting down names hints at the extent to which such errors arose.⁴⁵ The issue was complicated further by the prevalence of dialects and according variances in pronunciations,⁴⁶ and the widespread skepticism of locals about surveying projects can hardly have helped surveyors to register names more accurately.⁴⁷ Even without such special circumstances to potentially complicate the situation, however, the risk of corruption—of misunderstandings that distorted names⁴⁸—was considerable. The practically grotesque situation of the notable (but also quite deaf) surveyor Peter Anich from Perfuß near Innsbruck can be taken as an apt symbol for the situation of every surveyor and recorder of names. The unfortunate Anich lost his hearing quite early on, “and finally became so deaf that one had to shout every word slowly and clearly, directly into his ears, if one wanted him to understand.” Furthermore, a contemporary reported:

His deafness caused him more than a little trouble (as can easily be deduced) in his geometric work, especially because of the many names of the places he measured and the rivers and districts he described. He had to research all these special words by asking the inhabitants repeated and persistent questions they could only answer with loud shouts, and he often understood the answers poorly.⁴⁹

This organic hearing loss is only a particularly drastic example of what we might call the “cultural deafness” of the mountain name inventory takers. And they may have been particularly confused when misunderstandings were played with systematically, as it were (if this apparent contradiction can be tolerated momentarily). When we think about it, irony is, in fact, just such a systematic game which plays with misunderstandings: one says something—and means quite the opposite. The principle of ironic naming has long been acknowledged by research into place names,⁵⁰ and early mountain travelers (in the final decades of the eighteenth century) encountered it, too. David Herrliberger commented that the Rheinwald valley in Grisons was a “dreadful wilderness and a horror-filled place where one could freeze to death in the hottest summer. But it is called Paradise,” he registered with astonishment, attributing the name to an “inverted way of speaking.”⁵¹ Sigismund von Hohenwart was annoyed by the “ridiculous” name of “garden” for a spot in the Alps around Reichenau an der Rax because he could hardly conceive of “a lonelier and more horrible spot” than “this wilderness.”⁵²

These were admittedly examples of detectable irony—of what we might call “regulated irony.” It is, however, likely that there are many more cases to which we remain oblivious in retrospect. Hundreds of names that have found their way onto maps and into guide books describing Alpine tours must have resulted from the desire of local guides to satisfy the hunger of mountain travelers and Alpinists for names (“What is that peak up there called?”) and, at the same time, to put one over on them in a field where the competence of locals was beyond doubt. Mountain travelers—and we modern historians—were left with only inklings that mischievous inventions of names on the part of the locals must have played a prominent role. Some early Alpinists clearly suspected at times that a “clash of cultures” with a clandestine dimension was underway in the middle of Europe. Anton von Ruthner distrusted the name Herzogshut [“duke’s hat”], for example, musing that “one or another flamboyant discoverer of similarities” must have come up with it.⁵³ Friedrich Simony believed that some names “justified” the suspicion “that here, as so often, a son of the Alps who did not treat the naming of peaks scrupulously” had “improvised” a name that would be better extinguished; it was known, after all, “that the most seasoned guides were also the most inventive christeners of mountains.”⁵⁴ Carl Gsaller, too, registered the significant role played by “rogues and jokers” who served “lies” up to urbanites curious to discover what mountains were called.⁵⁵ (Illustration 6)

The locals in the Alps were not the only ones who played with the names of mountains; citizens beguiled by the thrilling early nineteenth-century fashion for Alpinism engaged in such games, too. Early on, complaints arose that “strangers” (as we hear from Switzerland) had “taken the liberty of giving mountains names in their texts” that differed from the established names, “which could eventually lead to a muddle.”⁵⁶ The imposing ridge above the northern Monte Rosa glaciers overlooking the Rhône valley was once simply called—like everything else in the neighborhood, as von Welden had already complained!—“Monte Rosa.” It was christened Silberbart [“silver beard”] later on and finally received the name by which it is known today and designated on maps: Lyskamm⁵⁷—and absolutely nobody can say how it came to be thus. Attentive contemporary observers did note some suspicions from which we can glean insights into the mysterious workings of the naming scene. In 1806, Escher described his puzzlement over the unexplained question of how Jungfrau had gotten its name: “The current name of this Jungfrau [”virgin“] with a heart of stone does not seem to have been known to our rugged forefathers, although they could hardly have missed this imposing edifice.” Instead, the mountain had been known as Großhorn [lit., “grand peak”]—“a typical name,” Escher commented, “that nobody wants to hear much about now.” He mused that the “more chivalrous new world” must have given the old Großhorn “the poetic name of Jungfrau” and, to top it all, gone on to “plant” Mönch [“the monk”] next to her “as a triumphant and dangerous neighbor” where previously the “inner Eiger” had stood. Escher also mentions the example of Mont Blanc in the western Alps and its “promotion from a cursed mountain [Mont Maudit], as the locals had called it, to a white mountain.”⁵⁸ We can also recall another prominent example from the eastern Alps: the romantic and mysterious name Venediger [Venetian] seems to have displaced the older and more practical-prosaic name Sulzbacher with ease, again in the late eighteenth century.⁵⁹ Escher, a watchful observer of the latest trends in the Alps, noted in 1806 that the “muddling and confusion of names” was “getting out of hand” and specifically added that people were “playing with it”; “the names of the mountains and their celebrity” had to “tolerate revolutions,” as Escher put it, mainly because “the sweeter world of the present time generously bestows nicer names on things.”⁶⁰ It is a testament to Escher’s astonishing clear-sightedness that his cultural diagnosis of the history of mountain names could still be confirmed in the mid-twentieth century with reference to tendencies both “to exaggerate splendor”⁶¹ and to evoke the sentimental-folkloristic ambiance of “the glow of the Alps and the poetry of Alpine roses” to borrow a phrase from Gottfried Keller.⁶²

4 The Mountain Names Are (and Become) Established

Alas, this entire wild history of lacking and superfluous mountain names was soon no longer of interest to anybody: people recalled neither the fashionable jesting that seemed so arbitrary (but was driven by powerful undercurrents of the times) nor the “revolution” of names to which Escher had drawn attention. In 1885, a young doctor of medicine, Emil Zsigmondy, published a handbook on the hazards of the Alps that became a near-instant classic. Although it dealt with rock falls and slippery grassy slopes, avalanches and treacherous cornices, glacier crevasses, weather conditions that could change in the blink of an eye, darkness that could descend suddenly at night, and the dangers of overconfidence in mountaineers, there is no mention of the challenges names presented for earlier Alpinists. That missing or confusing mountain names had ever complicated or even precluded proper orientation, and that the originally chaotic “nomenclature” (as Alpine historians soon called it) had initially been among the greatest “hazards of the Alps”—that had already been entirely forgotten by 1885.⁶³ Otherwise thoughtful and renowned nineteenth-century historians of Alpinism, such as Ludwig Purtscheller or Eugen Guido Lammer, did not acknowledge that the confusing profusion of names had been a source of fatal danger within a generation or two before they were writing⁶⁴—and that clarifying and resolving these problems consequently ought to be seen as one of the most significant contributions to the original aims and purposes of the Alpenverein [Alpine Club] and specifically to its goal of making “traveling” in the Alps “easier.”⁶⁵

That such a considerable portion of the history of Alpinism was simply “forgotten” can surely also be seen as an indicator that this chaotic naming phase was regarded as something of an embarrassment. A second indicator for an evidently insatiable urge to impose instrumental rationality⁶⁶ on the landscape of the Alps can be seen in the curious belief that the motley muddle of names that had ultimately arisen in quite a disordered fashion could be ordered following the all-too-simple principle that names were either “correct” or “wrong”⁶⁷—although it ought to have been plain for all to see that chance had played a huge role and that opportunities to influence the literature had been unevenly distributed, with those who could not write and publish in Alpine media having little hope of launching new names. Carl Gsaller from Innsbruck was able to boast that he had proposed two hundred “correct” names within the space of a few years in one limited area alone (in the areas around Karwendel, Stubai, and Mieming),⁶⁸ and he developed a method of his own for such “rectifications,” as he called them.⁶⁹ It expressly included a strategy to ensure that proposed “rectified” or “correct” names would find acceptance. Gsaller called this the principle of “literature names”⁷⁰—and what he meant by this was simply that new names mentioned in descriptions of an Alpine area subsequently spread as if of their own accord “with the help of streams of tourists” and soon also entered the “common parlance” of locals.⁷¹ Gsaller, whose style is otherwise very dry, underscored his point with a lively description of a rather revealing scene: During their surveying work in the Stubai Alps in 1863, the Alpinists and scientists Ludwig Barth (von Barthenau) and Leopold Pfaundler (von Hadermur) had climbed a snowy ridge that the locals knew by only one name, Wilder Pfaff [“wild parson”]. But now, we read, “as they sat on the narrow icy ridge, a need for specialization arose, and they named the lofty seat they had taken Pfaffenschneide [‘parson’s blade’], the culmination point of the [previous] Wilder Pfaff became Zuckerhütl [‘little sugarloaf’], and the last ice block on the east of the ridge became Oestlicher Pfaff [‘eastern parson’].”⁷² These names, Gsaller reports with pleasure at seeing his method of establishing nomenclature confirmed, “went from mouth to mouth in Stubai until most people believed they had always spoken thus.”⁷³

This is one pithy takeaway from the story of how the name Zuckerhütl was invented in 1863 out of the clear blue sky. The other illuminating aspect of the story is that the two inventors of the name reported that they had invariably heeded the naming expertise of their “best guides, especially the chamois hunters.”⁷⁴ In this case, that was certainly not what had happened, but their inventions exuded the comforting “Alpine roses” mood that is seemingly so irresistible to us all, thus practically guaranteeing their success.

The act of giving names is, as we know, accompanied by a thrill of clandestine pleasure. This pleasure shimmers revealingly through many accounts of the act of name-giving—and becomes all the more visible when it attempts to hide behind a semi-troubled conscience. The pioneering Alpine explorer and monk Placidus Spescha, writing in 1812, noted that he had, because he was “so unfamiliar with the names of the mountains,” been compelled to furnish “the same with an invented name” and that his “lack of knowledge” had made it necessary for him to “christen the highest mountains.”⁷⁵ More often, admittedly, the paradisaical pleasure of giving names and lording over nature (with the “borrowed” authority visible in the biblical story of creation) was indulged exultantly—and with elaborate ceremony, too, where aristocratic-baroque manners still held sway, as during the first ascent of the Großglockner in 1800: the Apostolic Field Vicar Sigismund von Hohenwart, who had initiated and organized the entire enterprise, gave a speech in front of the new hut below the Glockner, just ahead of the glacier, in which he called on the expedition’s financial backer, Count Franz Xaver of Salm, the prince-bishop of Gurk, to propose a name for the hut and the surrounding area. Salm, who is described as having been “uncommonly merry,”⁷⁶ came up with the name Hohenwarte [lit., “high observatory”] and had liberal quantities of Tokaji wine served to the party—wine that “peasants” from the parish of Heiligenblut had carried up the mountain in barrels with great effort.⁷⁷

Other naming initiatives will not have been celebrated with quite the same degree of ceremony, but the sense of pleasure felt by sons of Adam with less exalted status is also impossible to overlook. The names Warte [“look-out point”] and Freudenhöhe [“joyous height”] that the theology student Valentin Stanič bestowed upon points on the mountain Hoher Göll documented the pleasure he felt at reaching both points.⁷⁸ Colonel Ludwig von Welden’s Monte Rosa survey yielded the names Signalkuppe [“signal dome”] and Zumsteinspitze [“at the stony peak”], Nordend [“north end”] and Vincentpyramide [“Vincent’s pyramid”], Schwarzhorn [“black mountain”] and Parrotspitze [“parrot peak”] and finally even Ludwigshöhe [“Ludwig’s summit”], named for von Welden himself.⁷⁹ The well-read mountaineers who made the first ascent of Großvenediger must also have been pleased by their name choices (Schaurige Vorhalle [“spooky antechamber”], Bleidächer von Sulzbach [“lead roofs of Sulzbach”] and Türkische Zeltstadt [“Turkish encampment”]), which were clearly inspired by Romanticism⁸⁰ (Illustration 7). The person who first visited or climbed a mountain was generally seen as entitled to choose a name for it—or, to put it more accurately, naming rights were seen as the prerogative of those who discovered gaps on the map in need of names.⁸¹

Nobody will be surprised to hear that this old right of Adam was sometimes constrained by bureaucratic corsets—as, for example, when the name of the Simony peaks (in the Venediger group) was chosen at a meeting of the Austrian Alpine Club in 1865 or when the name Dufourspitze [“Dufour peak”] was chosen to replace von Welden’s Höchste Spitze [“highest peak”] on Monte Rosa in 1863 by no less an institution than the Swiss Federal Council.⁸² Legal niceties aside, the names that mattered in the end were always the names printed on maps.⁸³ Maps bear witness to the names that were established—in the double sense of being discovered and of becoming established and being perceived as definitive, sanctioned, and unchangeable (Illustration 8). The name “Trugberg” on the map of the Jungfrau area is a remarkable (albeit hardly remarked upon) monument to the process of rectifying, establishing, standardizing, and canonizing mountain names. It is also a reminder that countless hundreds of other “deceitful mountains” bore names that were extinguished to create a uniform nomenclature—in a process that undeniably bore imperialist traits.⁸⁴ This brings Möser’s lament from the final decades of the eighteenth century to mind and his point that enforcing a single uniform rule on everything would rob local culture of its “wealth.”⁸⁵

5 Celebrating Names

When we speak of sanctioned (and essentially: sanctified) names—of a canon of names, a names dogma, and even, as is conventional, of christenings—we know (and we can feel) that we are moving in an exalted cultural sphere, in a space marked by ceremony and a rarefied cultural ambiance that is actually rather surprising. Initially it may have seemed that the world of mountain names was smoothed out for purely rational reasons, especially to satisfy the need for secure navigation on mountain routes. But on closer inspection, it transpires that mastering the new world of names demands a courageous look into depths of the soul—a somewhat unexpected imperative. I would like to demonstrate this briefly—all too briefly! —with reference to three issues: a change in how views were perceived, the gesture of pointing, and the transformation of mountains into mountain faces.

To imagine that past travelers experienced views as we experience them today—with a feeling of panoramic expansiveness and a sensation that the world is lying at our feet—would be to deceive ourselves. “Views” seem to have become one of our highest cultural values in these complex and changing times (as evidenced by modern-day holiday apartment brochures!), as gaining an overview has become progressively more difficult. The accounts of the mountain travelers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries allow us to recognize that they were not only surprised to find that the views from above could reward them for the difficulties of ascents, but that they also knew or at least had some inkling that this had not always been thus. Looking down into the depths and into the far distance (when people dared to do it at all) had been characterized (and mostly: prevented) for thousands of years by fear of the bottomless void, horror, and a bad conscience—it was regarded as an impudent appropriation of the perspective of God. Looking into the distance had to be learned, with difficulty,⁸⁶ and this emancipation process eventually led to preliminary investigations into the psychology of views undertaken by, for example, Hans Conrad Escher, who wrote in 1808:

What is it that drives some people to the breakneck endeavor of climbing to heights that do not seem to be made for their element and that offer the tired traveler nothing more to savor than a chance to look down on their fellow human beings for a moment and to domineer over a wide area! There must be something magical in this looking down, in this dominion wielded from above!⁸⁷

The experience of wresting pleasure from views is thus a cultural achievement of modern times, but another experience followed hot on its heels: recognition that this pleasure could be boosted by knowledge, specifically knowledge of mountain names—or, to look at this the other way around, recognition that the pleasure to be had from views was much reduced when one could not recognize the mountains by name. Reports of ascents in the eastern Alps from the mid-nineteenth century are full of laments about the lack of interest and knowledge shown by guides in relation to names⁸⁸ (in complete contrast to Swiss guides!): “As a result,” Anton Ruthner complained about his view from Similaun in 1842, “I lost more than half the pleasure of this view”[!].⁸⁹

Tourists were mocked from quite early on for their interest in names (on Mount Rigi, for example) and described as recipients of “a list of the names of all the mountains in front of them that they use to while away time and satisfy an idle kind of curiosity” even though “every nomenclature” only weighed down “one’s memory with superfluous verbiage.”⁹⁰ Nevertheless, an entire literary genre emerged around this time that assuredly does not belong among the pinnacles of German prose: seemingly unending and scrupulously precise descriptions of views from particular points were prepared that named all the mountains visible from each point and went on for many pages. In 1840, Peter Karl Thurwieser spent almost eight hours on Ahornspitze in the Zillertal Alps writing down names for his panorama. The resulting description stretches over almost six pages in print,⁹¹ and Anton von Ruthner’s literary panoramas describing the likes of the Wildspitze or Wiesbachhorn each take up seven printed pages.⁹² These texts were the product of disciplined, methodical work with maps and binoculars. Ruthner sharply criticized an alternative “sanguine” (i.e., more hot-blooded) approach driven by “an excited mood”⁹³—the author’s enjoyment and his reward ought, he believed, to come from the satisfaction of matching names and silhouettes and thereby making them accessible to the world, since they were now identified and could be pointed out.

The old gesture of pointing with an outstretched arm and outstretched hand, and perhaps also an outstretched index finger, took on an entirely new meaning once a canon of “established” names existed. Anthropologists long attributed a significant place in the cultural development of humanity to this pointing gesture.⁹⁴ With this development, however, the openness of gazing into the distance and receiving challenging and stimulating input was suddenly channeled into a narrow and mundane equivalence between a mountain pointed out and a name heard: “And that one up there is the ‘Watzmann.’” Numerous depictions of this pointing gesture—especially in prestigious locations—remind us of its new but nevertheless also quasi-iconic status (Illustration 9).

Another picture genre inspired by the “established” canon of names also took off and enjoyed success: the mountain faces that were so enormously popular—especially as postcards—from the 1890s onward. It was inevitable that depictions would be produced that took mountain names literally and showed Jungfrau as a virgin and Mönch as a monk, and such images duly circulated from 1870 onward, at the latest.⁹⁵ Emil Hansen, the artist who subsequently called himself Emil Nolde, gave this trend enormous impetus⁹⁶—it has survived, at any rate, until the present day. One can disagree on whether these images merit criticism as shallow bourgeois representations of the sublime (the “majesty of the mountains”⁹⁷) or praise as ironic commentary on the sanctity awarded to the mountain nomenclature ⁹⁸ (Illustration 10).

6 Shaking the Dogma

In this latter view, the mountain faces could be seen as part of an entire series of mostly recent, or indeed current, attempts to unseat the dogma of the “rectified nomenclature”—and I would like to mention these attempts briefly in conclusion because they shed light on the stability of a cosmos of mountain names that has largely existed only since the nineteenth century.

It is impossible to overlook the attempts to correct names based on modern political ideologies and critical reappraisals of history. Mountain huts have been renamed (the Wolayersee Refuge in the Carnic Alps, for instance, which was previously known for eighty years as Eduard-Pichl-Hütte⁹⁹) and so have routes (Cyprian Granbichler Weg instead of Titzenthaler Weg¹⁰⁰). The “Démonter Louis Agassiz” campaign striving to have the Agassizhorn in the Bernese Alps renamed (because Agassiz, the Swiss glacial science researcher, was also a proponent of scientific racism), has thus far not achieved its objective. It is, in any case, somewhat doubtful that simply extinguishing a name from memory is productive (even a name that has become offensive!)—and drastic language (“history exorcism” or “history as a feelgood zone”) has recently been used to draw attention to this problem.¹⁰¹

Bestowing names has always been a gesture of dominion. Names chosen for political purposes made this especially obvious—and in the hothouse of late capitalism, the nexus between names and power is also too conspicuous to overlook. The planned sale of two peaks in East Tyrol in 2011 (Große Kinigat and Rosskopf) by the Austrian Federal Real Estate Institute (Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft, BIG) attracted considerable attention—especially as rumors quickly grew that the mountains would be given new names by their purchasers for advertising purposes.¹⁰² The sale and renaming of these mountains did not go ahead in the form originally planned (not least, presumably, because of the protests and the objections raised in political committees), but efforts to block the village of Prägraten from selling another mountain, the Mullwitzkogel¹⁰³ in the Venediger area, were unsuccessful, and the village authorities resolved to rename the mountain Wiesbauerspitze after its purchaser, the sausage maker Wiesbauer, in 2007.¹⁰⁴ Such developments should not engender any surprise;¹⁰⁵ the advertising sections in mountaineering and hiking journals have been filled with creative deployments of mountains as ideal advertising spaces from their very beginnings¹⁰⁶ (Illustration 11).

A third source of motivation to alter names also deserves a brief mention and may rear its head more often in the future. It could be seen—rather disparagingly—as tinged with the rosy glow of Gottfried Keller’s rosy cliffs and Alpine roses, but we ethnologists would call it a folkloristic trend—a conscious resurrection and re-adoption of local or regional cultural traditions that have been submerged for some time. A grassy mountain in the Kitzbühel Alps had acquired some significance in the early phase of ski tourism in Alpbach Valley. After the Munich student Rudolph Joel was buried by an avalanche and lost his life there in February 1909, a stone cairn was erected locally in memory of the tragic accident. This must had led to the name “Joel” subsequently being applied to the mountain as a whole and eventually also making its way onto maps. When a commemorative bronze plaque was affixed to the restored monument two years ago, however, a second name appeared alongside that of Joel—Ackerzint—which seems to have re-emerged from local memory.¹⁰⁷ If the tour reports I see on the Internet are indeed an accurate reflection of usage, this old/new name is now gaining ground and becoming increasingly popular (Illustration 12).

Such observations and the stories gathered here suggest to me that the tangled history of how mountain names became established could be an additional key to understanding the processes underlying the opening up of the Alps—not least because rational and irrational elements are so closely intertwined and the characteristics of purposeful and instrumentally rational action are covered in a patina of sepia or even obscured by dark shadows of fairy-tale proportions. While people are prone to dismiss names as mere sound and smoke, as devoid of deeper meaning, the cultural history of our mountain names shows us that quite the opposite is true.

Introduction

Authenticity¹ and cultural heritage are two multilayered, challenging concepts central in a field of discourse that the involved actors engage with in very different ways. Whether in relation to the work of cultural historical and ethnological museums, the valorization and recognition of monuments, performances in the form of customs and rituals, or the chimera (both problematic and successful in equal measure) of “tradition” or “the traditional society,” the question of how cultural heritage is constructed and functions is a recurrent theme in the history and practice of the related disciplines of folklore studies, cultural anthropology, and European ethnology and has also been highly productive in public discourse. Following the adoption of the UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), scholars and even the general public have devoted more attention to questions related to cultural heritage. The field of Critical Heritage Studies² emerged as a result of the increasingly intensive appraisal of origins and implementation of the associated programs as well as their direct and indirect effects on the sites and practices accorded heritage status. This interdisciplinary field addresses the communities and discourses linked to these sites and practices by posing questions about the actors and power structures involved and about value creation and conflicts; it examines the construction of identities and processes of inclusion and exclusion as well as modes of location, appropriation, and instrumentalization.

Amid a range of heterogeneous stances on “cultural heritage,” there are two discernible fundamental approaches associated with different actor groups. One view is essentialist, rooted in the assumption that cultural heritage is intrinsic and needs only to be accorded recognition. The other is constructivist, perceiving cultural heritage as the product of discourses, attributions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion. In this latter view, the awarding of heritage status and the preceding phase of reflection and discussion is constitutive for heritage—cultural heritage, in this perspective, is what has been intentionally designated as such. Recognition itself creates heritage, which unfolds its own dynamism from the moment of recognition onwards.

These two perspectives in turn underlie two very different approaches to understanding and interacting with cultural heritage that frequently collide, resulting in mutual incomprehension and a need for “translation.” On one side of the divide, actors champion “their” tangible or intangible cultural heritage as valuable, important, and unique, stressing that its very existence makes it worthy of protection. Critical voices on the other side of the debate, which most commonly come from academic circles, instead tend to highlight the evolution and manufactured nature of cultural heritage, pointing out how contingent it is and how it has been shaped by underlying power structures and value creation processes and subjected to political influences and instrumentalization.³

The question of authenticity is highly significant for both camps. The former assumes that it is in possession of authentic matter and authentic performances; in other words, this position perceives objects and actions, everyday (“common sense”) certainties, and familiar social realities as inherent, taking them largely for granted. The opposing camp questions authenticity and deconstructs what is perceived as authentic, viewing this as primarily a product of discourses and processes of communication and authentication.

This essay appraises the potential of actor-network theory—i.e. the comprehensive analysis of networks involving people, things, discourses, and translations—for paving a route to the middle ground between these camps and opening up a fresh perspective on cultural heritage. It considers various forms of cultural heritage including the role of museums and intangible aspects of heritage and focuses in particular on the role played by things themselves.

Cultural heritage as reflective practice

There is no unambiguous definition of Kulturerbe [cultural heritage]; even the simple comparison of this term with its counterparts in other languages (French patrimoine, English heritage)⁴ suggests just how complex and open this field of discourse is. A lack of conceptual clarity is particularly evident in the broad area of needing to find ways of distinguishing general forms of passing on, continuing, acquiring, and updating cultural techniques and objects (in ways for which the categories of socialization and appropriation seem suitable) from those forms of cultural expression and objects that are perceived in a specific way and have been especially designated as cultural heritage. A process of reflection is decisive for the latter, and while this often (although not necessarily) coincides with feelings of uncertainty and fears or experiences of loss, it may also mark a transition from daily performance to reflective reinterpretation, a transformation into representational forms,⁵ and processes of museum-ization or heritage-ization. These processes of reflection and the associated production of knowledge have been described many times.⁶

They are supplemented by cultural heritage transmission practices that frame cultural heritage as needing to be explained and register altered perceptions regarding phenomena as cultural heritage as evidence of a developing new consciousness. In fact, the importance of fostering a new awareness of heritage is often expressly spelled out in metatexts, especially in those dealing with programmatic objectives. It is visible, for example, in hopes voiced that popular narratives that have been “saved” from oblivion in the nick of time might again become meaningful to people in their daily lives,⁷ in the countless objects in museums that have survived an intermediate stage of falling into disuse and being discarded, in the securing of ruins that are to be made accessible because they are seen to represent developments in cultural history, in the “revival” or “purification” of cultural performances, and even in completely new inventions based on components cobbled together from other practices.⁸ These reflective productions of what is then designated as cultural heritage are connected with the contingent selection of what is included and excluded. A defined and definable image of a specific cultural heritage is created through this process—an ideal starting point for the application dossier that (politically motivated) cultural heritage programs generally require.

This process of reflection, however, fosters different perceptions of cultural heritage in different actors—as remarked on above—that are also deserving of attention: reflection strengthens some actors’ sense that their own cultural heritage and practices are special, but the flip side of this coin is that knowledge production (i.e., scholarly reflection) tends to emphasize the contingent and manufactured nature of cultural heritage.

Authenticity and authentication

The concept of authenticity—the tacit assumption or stated presumption of “genuineness,” “originality,” and “provability”—is a core formula conveying legitimacy on museums and on tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The problematic and dazzlingly multifaceted character of the discourse on authenticity, which spans a range of concepts from proof of material continuity to the authoritative determination of “correct” interpretations, has been discussed many times,⁹ as have the difficulties associated with the perception of authenticity. Judging whether something is authentic requires a definition of authenticity, but such a definition is ultimately the result of communication processes—what is authentic depends on what being authentic has been negotiated to be. At the same time, the concept of authenticity always requires an opposite pole, inauthenticity, and thereby also encompasses the neighboring discourses on forgery, copying, and reinvention.¹⁰

Three examples will serve here to outline the problematic nature of authenticity. The first of them is the cathedral in Regensburg, which is included in the town’s UNESCO World Heritage site. Work on the Gothic incarnation of the cathedral began in the thirteenth century and, in principle, has never been completed. The spires—a central element of the cathedral’s present appearance—were only added in the nineteenth century. During this same period, some baroque elements were removed to restore the cathedral’s “pure Gothic style.” To this day, the Dombauhütte [cathedral workshop] is continually replacing the building’s substance. The restoration work now uses a significantly more durable limestone in place of the greenish sandstone used at the beginning (Illustration 1). While the site of the building can be described as authentic, the building substance itself is only partially authentic, to the extent that authenticity refers to the original medieval material. The form of the building follows earlier models, and the craftsmen in the cathedral workshop use historical techniques to some extent. The cathedral is, finally, also authentic as a building that changes its shape again and again, one that spans multiple epochs and is always being reworked in some way. It is clear that “authenticity” can refer to very different aspects.

Knowledge pertaining to authenticity is typically expert knowledge that changes and is reinterpreted during its transmission. This expert knowledge and the performances and objects evaluated, however, need to maintain compatibility with other forms of knowledge. Imagine if the performers at one of the now highly popular “medieval fairs” spoke Old High German or Middle High German—whichever corresponded to the period being depicted. They might come very close to an authentic performance, but most visitors would be utterly incapable of decoding it. What happens instead is that visitors regard the specially invented artificial language used on such occasions as authentic, a language which makes liberal use of “-ey” (Gaukeley [amusements], Sauferey [drinking] etc.) and is peppered with quaint words and phrases largely motivated by Early New High German.¹¹ The expectations of the general public are not infrequently centered around depictions in pop culture including films and books. Silke Meyer has shown this for the film “Braveheart”¹²: the hero—a “genuine Scot”—wears a kilt, even though the film is set in a period (the thirteenth century) when kilts did not yet exist in this form. The kilt in the film serves as a symbol to authenticate the protagonist as a Scottish freedom fighter. Authenticity here can be understood as an interpretive framework of the kind defined by Erving Goffman, one that that facilitates the categorization and interpretation of observations. But these examples also show how disparate scholarly and public discourses often are and how “popular authenticity” can take on a life of its own, developing its own frameworks for evaluation depending on social contexts.

My third example, the Japanese Nō theater masks in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, are displayed in an isolated context with lighting that has an auratizing effect. While these masks are technically originals, decisive elements are lacking here because of their extreme decontextualization and the elaborate stagecraft deployed in their aesthetic presentation: the costumes that go with them, for one thing, but even more significantly the dimension of performance, of the masks’ appearance on stage. Because so much cultural complexity is omitted here, the presentation of the masks is inauthentic in spite of their status as original objects.

In all of its dazzling facets, authenticity appears to be a phenomenon which can only ever be attested for partial aspects, and its perception also appears to depend upon the observer. Despite the problematic nature of the concept, however, authenticity (or the pursuit of authenticity) represents a point of orientation for metacultural action, for example finding the “correct” way to display an object in a museum or to conserve one, but also—for groups that are “bearers” or “carriers” of cultural heritage—striving to find the “correct” way of executing a cultural performance. While authenticity may defy any analysis that seeks to move beyond partial aspects, what we can describe quite well are the processes and practices of authentication, the strategies, in other words, deployed in attempts to mark objects or performances as authentic.¹³

Museums as destroyers and producers of authenticity

Museums seem to be on quite solid ground with the narrative of authenticity; the aura of authentic objects is, after all, the bread and butter of their very existence. However, objects become entangled in a dynamic process of decontextualization and recontextualization during their museumization. Objects entering the inventory of a museum are removed from the contexts in which they formerly functioned—as utilitarian objects or as status symbols, as ceremonial or religious items, or as objects that had already reached an interim stage of becoming outmoded and being discarded.¹⁴ At the same time, these objects undergo an intensive process of knowledge production: they are cleaned, inventoried, conserved, researched, and finally—should they belong to the exclusive two to five percent of the inventory destined to be exhibited—placed on display in permanent and special exhibitions, in which curators order the arrangement of these objects to illustrate the narrative they have chosen (or created). As all this goes on, spatial and argumentative connections form that did not exist before the objects entered the museum and curators designed the exhibition (Illustration 2). The ordering of objects in a museum does not reproduce a “natural” or “original” situation: objects are contextualized in new ways that reflect the narratives of the museum, the relevant exhibition, and the curators. Karl-Heinz Kohl coined the provocative slogan “context is a lie” (“Kontext ist Lüge”) to describe this phenomenon.¹⁵

The other side of this picture, however, is that arguments proceeding from objects are often epistemically effective, considerably more so than text-based modes of knowledge transmission. Just as historians do not reproduce historical events but rather interpret sources and develop historical narratives, exhibitions do not simply display objects and illustrate events, but select and arrange objects to create relationships between them and integrate them into broader narratives and arguments. Just as the recognition of cultural heritage involves an aspect of invention, museums are constantly creating new knowledge in this process. It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that museumization destroys authenticity by nullifying functional relationships and fragmenting the cultural integration of objects. This is, of course, not to suggest that the history of these artifacts is brought to an end. In fact, the reverse is the case: a new chapter opens in the “biographies” of the things that are now artifacts held in museums and stored or exhibited in various ways. Taking up the bon mot of objects as slow events, one might say that new episodes are beginning. Museumization also includes a process described by Gottfried Korff, with reference to Walter Benjamin, as “auratization.”¹⁶ Being incorporated into a museum designates an object as special, but also makes it a proxy for others, giving it a representative character and thus an additional role complementing its individual immediacy and uniqueness.

The mechanisms of deauthentication are flanked by processes of authentication, the most notable of which are forms of verification, knowledge production, and knowledge formation. In contrast to the oft-voiced invocation that exhibits should be permitted to “speak for themselves,” in general the individual objects on display do not actually say very much on their own. The role of proving their authenticity, or more often of attesting it, typically falls to the accompanying texts and narratives (Illustration 3). Considering the intensity of the struggles over knowledge formation at times, it can perhaps be concluded that what is described as genuine and made the focus of research counts as authentic. Authenticity is produced by the scholars and curators who concern themselves with it and mark it as such in exhibitions. But perceptions of authenticity are also induced by other factors: the museum building, for example (objects that have entered the museum are more likely to be seen as “genuine”), the exhibit labels, and the display cabinets that not only provide protection but also signify the presence of protected objects that merit a closer look.

Agency and the disciplining of things

While authenticity appears to be a multilayered process of negotiation and attribution as well as an interpretive framework, the objects viewed within this framework are not arbitrary; objects distinguished by particular material qualities, the places where they were found, or modes of acquisition are evaluated differently from others, and in this a kind of agency of things can be seen to be at work.¹⁷ Whether one should go so far as to inquire into whether objects have “power” or are capable of “doing” is debatable, since “doing”—as opposed to just behaving in a certain way—is always linked to intentionality. Stories attributing agency to objects are, however, rife in popular narratives and myths, in everyday perceptions, and in religious contexts. The (European) concepts of fetishes, of relics—sacramental or magical objects—that were used in manifold ways in the past are still quite popular, for example, with esoteric shoppers today. That the world views of many indigenous societies take the agency of material things for granted can only be mentioned in passing here.

It could, of course, be argued, from a constructivist point of view, that it is discourse which produces attributions of supernatural potency or spiritual essences to things. From the perspective, however, of the actors themselves—of pilgrims bringing healing holy water home from Lourdes, for example, or of computer users cursing or pleading with machines as though these were autonomous entities with their own intentions—material things do appear capable of acting independently, and often enough subversively; at least in cases like these, the boundaries between things simply having behavioral characteristics and having the power to act seem rather fluid.

The power relations that can be observed between people and things are, indeed, not always unilateral or unambiguous. A passenger in a car that rolls over in traffic accident is not part of a discourse or an attribution, but embedded in the behavior, the materiality of the technical machine. Museums, too, are stages upon which conflicts between people and things play out. These conflicts are normally not visible for visitors—but conservators are all the more keenly aware of them. Colors change in shade, varnish darkens, fibers disintegrate and dissolve, thatched roofs rot—museums are usually intent on suppressing the actions of things and represent spaces characterized by efforts to discipline things—both materially and discursively.

How things produce authenticity

When authenticity is considered to be the result of negotiations carried out and attributions made by people, things appear as largely passive, as no more, at most, than nuclei around which discourses can crystallize. But approaching authenticity from a vantage point that does not rule out the idea of things having agency throws up a new question: how do things themselves produce authenticity and contribute to discourses and processes of attribution?

Things “act” by existing and being perceived, interpreted, and integrated into functional contexts, by having an appearance and characteristics that prompt people to act differently or to commence an action in the first place (affordance). People produce and modify objects, and objects in turn influence and shape people: they support identity, acting as extensions of the human body and as media which facilitate social exchanges.¹⁸ Actor-network theory¹⁹ (ANT) is analytically useful, as it facilitates the examination of human and non-human actors and their reciprocally entangled relationships. Because the scope of this article does not allow for a more in-depth exploration of ANT’s theoretical ramifications, two examples of such networks serve to illustrate this approach here:

The first example is the phenomenon of the “movie star” that emerged in the wake of the nineteenth-century invention of cinematographic film. Precursors are identifiable in stage acting; the initial introduction of film as a medium merely changed acting techniques and ended the simultaneity of acting and watching, but it also provided new forms of representation—changes of perspective, close-ups, special effects, and the like. The emergence and evolution of the “movie stars” subsequent to film’s introduction can be understood as a social process, but also as one determined by technical aspects—cameras, lighting, cutting, projection—in other words, by things. Technical innovations—like the advent of sound film—have always been accompanied by changes in acting techniques and audience reception.

Museums as institutions form another example of such a network. The history of museums illustrates how objects have been marked, valorized, and revalued and how exhibits have been arranged, presented, and received by visitors in ways that are linked with various discourses and social processes. These discourses cannot be investigated in isolation, however, as they are always bound up with things—with the artifacts collected, the exhibits placed on display, the cabinets protecting them, and the buildings housing them. In a way, these things “create” professions and actors of their own: curators, conservators, guards, and visitors to the museum. Museum history is usually written as the history of collectors and institutions, of an interest in the exotic and its presentation—as, all in all, the outcome of discourses. ANT, however, foregrounds the complex entanglements of human and non-human actants. In the case of museums, this means the relationships between exhibits, display cabinets, labels, buildings, curators, visitors, politicians, conservators, security guards, and so on. What is ultimately of interest are the negotiations and translations that are constantly taking place between things and people forming performative networks that are constantly changing in ways that can include the active removal of objects from the network.²⁰ How could networks like this now be interrogated to discover more about how things produce authenticity? A first example revolves around an object that cannot be decoded without ambivalence due to a lack of available sources. The second example takes up the question as to how material things unleash discourses.

Weltmuseum Wien (Vienna World Museum, formerly Wiener Völkerkundemuseum, the Vienna Museum of Ethnology) holds an object that is widely known as the “Penacho”²¹. It consists mostly of feathers and gold ornaments connected to a supporting frame. The object acquired the appellation “Moctezuma’s headdress” in the context of the discourse which crystallized around it, but this attribution to the Aztec ruler Montezuma II (c. 1465–1520) is unproven. It has left traces in inventories from the sixteenth century onwards, and the interpretations in exhibition catalogs have varied—so its history is attested by further objects. Both its exact provenance and its precise function before it was brought to Europe are unclear, but the feathers and the techniques used in its construction confirm its Mexican origins. The Penacho is a good example of an object which is non-decodable in the absence of sources and consequently amenable to being interpreted in new ways and embedded in changing discourses. The description of this object—back in the colonial era—as “Montezuma’s featherwork crown” clearly served, for example, to boost the museum’s renown. While the museum’s curators increasingly questioned this attribution in the twentieth century, postcolonial activists adopted it in their repatriation demands, elevating the Penacho to a national symbol bearing witness to the injustice of Spanish pillaging.²² How can such an object that lacks a clear provenance and function—one that in its ambiguity defies authentication in the sense of having an attested history²³—successfully generate authenticity in a way that transcends the ebb and flow of discourses? In this case, the pure existence and materiality of the object, the contingency of its appearance, its components, and the techniques used in its making draw visitors into dialogue with it and constitute its singularity. The productions of knowledge proceeding from such properties are—along with the capacity of exhibits to engage the senses and emotions of visitors—core components of the presentation of objects in museums.

Things can bear witness to historical cultural practices—independently of any claims to them advanced by contemporary societies or nations seeking to bolster the narrative of their origins by integrating these practices into their own historiographies. Given the fact that historical borders of settlements and territories often diverge from modern state borders, relicts in the landscape can acquire great political brisance by allowing for claims that a particular group occupied a given stretch of land “first” and can stake legal claims to it. This can be observed, to give two examples, for the native peoples of North America and for Armenian claims to territories within modern Turkey, where churches, ruins, and stone crosses (khachkars) have been systematically destroyed to undermine such claims. The simple existence of objects can become problematic, things themselves can become unsettling and disturbing actants, and their destruction can be pursued in order to effect shifts in person-thing-networks.

Similarly, the remnants of villages near the Czech-Bavarian border have an impact which can be attributed to their sheer existence. Deserted following the deportation of the German-speaking population after the Second World War and the creation of exclusion zones behind the Iron Curtain, they conserved cultural memory. After the lifting of the Iron Curtain, these sites and their material evidence bore witness to earlier settlements in the area in a fashion that has led to an intensive renegotiation of history²⁴ that must now be inscribed into the history of Czech Republic, the region, and Europe’s collective memory.

The ability of things to accumulate various modifications, appropriations and attributions of meaning within themselves—and in this sense to form a kind of palimpsest—also creates their polyvalent and ambiguous nature. The Selimiye Mosque in North Nicosia in Northern Cyprus is a prime example (Illustration 4). Both its history as a Gothic cathedral and its history as a mosque are inscribed into its materiality in a way that makes it impossible to unambiguously classify the structure in regard to national, ethnic, or religious cultural heritage. Instead, it embodies an entangled cultural history that could be allowed to take on a bridging function as shared cultural heritage, or rather as cultural heritage forming part of a shared history, although such an outcome currently appears remote considering the present political situation in Cyprus and recent nationalist attempts at appropriation.

In all these examples, the roles played by things are far from passive. Embedded into person-thing networks, they have the power to unleash, amplify, or curb discourse, and things can also authenticate further things, sites, and historical events. Pursuing questions of authenticity would be pointless without these material and cultural effects, and authenticity can neither be attested nor transmitted in their absence. At the same time, however, attempts to appropriate things and attribute significance to them in a manner that seeks to eliminate ambiguity rather than to shine a light on the multi-layered and open-ended meanings of objects is problematic because it precludes a comprehensive approach which could highlight shared cultural heritage.

Cultural heritage as a network

The difficult question as to whether agency is attributable to things is a point upon which ANT is vulnerable to criticism.²⁵ The concept of the agency and, indeed, the waywardness of things is, nevertheless, a fertile one, both because of the insights it affords into how the meanings of things can extend beyond their current status in a discourse²⁶ and because of the way in which it allows us to investigate how things and people influence each other reciprocally. In the context of the relationship between cultural heritage and authenticity, paying more attention to networks and to negotiations between people and things offers a promising way forward. When the authenticity of things and practices is subjected to analysis within the framework of Critical Heritage Studies, the diagnoses reached are often somewhat skeptical and unsettling. The processes surrounding the transmutation of objects into cultural heritage are forms of metacultural action and inevitably produce something which is new. Their character is more creative and productive than it is declarative; recognition of heritage often sparks profound changes, and the question tends to rear its head quickly as to how exactly the heritage celebrated is “authentic.”

Essentialist approaches to cultural heritage that take its existence to be a given and perceive its character as fundamentally non-discursive remain problematic; neither of these assumptions can be confirmed, but both feature regularly in public and political discourse. At the same time, these very attributions—these yearnings for what is “original,” “genuine,” and “unique”—are themselves part of the phenomenon of cultural heritage and merit attention in that context. The essentialist view of cultural heritage cannot only be seen as that portion of heritage which should be deconstructed, or whose adherents should be persuaded of the error of their ways, but as an aspect of cultural heritage which is constitutive for and inherent to the phenomenon.

From a perspective which examines networks between people, things, discourses, and translations, authenticity can be understood as the result of negotiations between people and things and as a consensus reached between various actors and institutions. This does not free us from needing to critically examine processes, power relations, and value creation, but it allows for a broader definition of cultural heritage as a complex and fluid network of people, things, discourses, translations, and institutions that constitutes itself depending on the situation through the interactions of the various actors involved. This can usefully supplement the deconstructivist perspective on cultural heritage which researchers (with their strong focus on processes of “heritage-ization” and valorization) typically apply with a perspective that allows for more thorough consideration of material aspects.

Thinking of cultural heritage as a network also has interesting consequences for the categories used to describe it. The distinction made between tangible and intangible cultural heritage has long been in the sights of critics who see it as problematic and have pointed out that both forms of heritage are far more intertwined than has been reflected in the implementation of cultural heritage programs to date. While the older UNESCO world cultural heritage program was primarily related to the material substance of heritage, the criteria repeatedly referenced aspects addressing intangible heritage.²⁷ The more recently defined criteria for intangible cultural heritage expressly encompass the objects intangible heritage draws on—the tools used in crafts, for example, or the accoutrements used in customary practices—although the main emphasis is on knowledge, social practices, and performances, these are unimaginable without their material “coalition partners.” Numerous museums, especially open-air museums, have also been moving beyond their traditional mission—the preservation of material evidence of the past—in recent years and are now concerning themselves to a greater degree than before with the museumization of intangible cultural heritage like historical craftsmanship or cultivation methods.

The background to how this distinction between tangible and intangible cultural heritage was discursively produced in the first place during the long conceptual history of cultural heritage—from the first cabinets of curiosities and movements to protect historical monuments all the way up to the UNESCO conventions and EU programs—would merit an investigation all of its own, not least because this background also supplies the context in which the discipline of ethnology developed. The rigid corset of conventions, procedures, and institutions which now exists in the heritage sphere—a Foucauldian dispositif if ever there was one—will hardly permit more holistic approaches to tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage in the near future. But from an analytical perspective, the investigation of networks between people, things, discourses, and translations can be profitably integrated into the continuing development of the idea of cultural heritage, into “doing heritage” and into heritage management—all the more so if it is also oriented towards current approaches to fostering participation and knowledge transmission.