How does one conduct an anthropology of rock climbing? Hasn't it already been done? Adrenaline-junkies and nature-lovers are well studied subjects. Yet I have scoured the internets and journals, very little of the published content on the matter seems to grasp the world of rock climbing, the climbers, the rocks, the... well everything.
Perhaps it is a too big attempt to do such a thing. How would one even go about this? I'm not sure, but I will attempt.
I am convinced that rock climbing is an all-encompassing culture in it's own right. It is a world-view that changes and evolves yet joins and mould the practitioners. I wish to explore this world from an anthropological perspective. What does that mean then? An anthropological perspective. I will treat rock climbing, not as an activity, but as a cultural expression. A tribe of practitioners with in a multiplicity of other tribes. Exploring rock climbing would be just as exploring Khoi-San or Tagbanua, there are no clear demarcations where the rock climber starts and i.e. swedish-ness ends. There are no clear dividers. There are, however, different ways of being in the world, or what is referred to as ontology.
This will not be an armchair exploration of old days. "The rock climber like Cliff Bars, and says 'crushing'" That says very little about a culture. Just as saying "all white people like smooth jazz" doesn't say very much.
Instead I want to do this as an experiment. To approach rock climbing through various methods, to situate, compare, network, philosophise and experience.
Lines, by Tim Ingold: There is an interesting book about the anthropology of lines. This is probably an overstatement, it's interesting to the very nerds of anthro tribes. But it challenges us to understand lines in a new way. I will not go through the book here but I would like to think about lines and rock climbing.
What are lines in rock climbing? Well to start, they are vertical paths up rock faces, to get from the ground or starting point, to the anchor or top-out. You will often hear climbers talk about "that's a beautiful line" which requires both a trained eye to appreciate and an sense of bodily awareness of how some of the move might feel, for the bespoken to relate.
Yet there are many more lines. Lines that climbers follow, sometimes unknowingly, that reinforces and helps to navigate the identity experience. I want to explore three different lines and how they play an important part in shaping a certain ontology among some friends of mine.
Macro-lines: We normally drive 1 hour 20 min to get to our local bouldering site, Kjuge. It's a drive along a specific line, a road that crosses the landscape. This line would look very different not just from above but temporally moving along it had we decided to drive somewhere else. The different markers along the line are given attributes by us as we pass by them time and time again. This little town means this long, or now it's no more high-way, along this part it's always foggy etc. To someone not going bouldering this line would most likely be very uninspiring, but to those who venture it with a destination in mind the line carries meaning.
Meso-lines: These are the line by which we travel in the forest where the boulders are scattered. Along paths dotted out in guide-books the different boulders are marked and named. For a climber many of these names have evocative attributes. When they (we) walk along the lines (paths) the names ring familiar, become ways of navigating the forest. The names also conjures up feelings, some problems we like to do, some we fell on, other with an almost mythical difficulty for most. Again, the lines we navigate by are very different from those who do not come to the forest to climb. When climbers shout out "see you over at Ferdinand" it makes very much sense and the line to follow there is often implicit. The same utterance to a non-climber would probably create vast amounts of confusion.
Micro-lines: So we are back to the initial lines. Where the climb comes in. The trained eye and embodied experience can spot it and feel it, dream about it, want to explore it. Where most other just see a rock, climbers see a line and sequence of movements, a potential of exploration. Yet it is a line that is essentially created from a enculturated response. In other words, the "line" is not there until the climber is. Or is the line always there even if no one thinks of climbing it?
To get in terms with these questions, I will attempt to follow up this in the future with an Actor-Network Analysis. It sounds heavy, it's not. The basis of this analysis is that even non-human objects can be social. Rocks can be social! They help create the social network in which climbers live. Without the rocks, the community wouldn't exists. But there are determined ways of integrating the rocks into the social. Manners, ethics, physiological and technical dimensions enter into the vast web of connections. These will be future topics for investigation.
