Los imaginarios geográficos de Sierra Nevada (siglos XVI-XIX): Modelos de representación y prácticas espaciales en la circulación global del conocimiento de la montaña

Resumen

Mountains are the most striking landforms of the earth. Throughout history, they have always held an important place in Western geographical imaginations. They represent spaces where forces of nature, power of reasoning and impulse of fantasy meet together. Mountain chains have never quit stirring attraction in the bosom of science, philosophy, culture and religion, representing multilayered processes of signification. This interest has responded to different aims, which, in turn, have been conveyed by different representations and narratives, echoing the most negative and enriching aspects of mountains. Hence, fascination with mountains has appeared through both scientific perspectives and subjective approaches. Thereby, the concept of mountain has been defined by the connection between the physical form of the world and the human imagination. It is a category of collective thinking that translates an idea of our image of nature, constituting a unifying concept of multiple meanings within scientific knowledge and symbolic understanding of territory. Studies on mountains across social and human sciences have sought to integrate discourses of European science with modern issues, as travel, and with cultural systems and aesthetic languages. These studies have consolidated the possibility of addressing a physical and material study object from a hermeneutic perspective by disclosing the metaphors that have been used in human relations to geographical high places. Sierra Nevada has also constituted an important geographical area in which a wide range of imaginaries, of unquestionable relevance in the current management of the Betic Mountain, have been shaped. However, humanities have usually overlooked the formation and potential of the Massif¿s geographical imaginations. While the historical knowledge of the Sierra has been studied, and many iconographic materials related to the Massif have been showed in public exhibitions, the symbolic formations of its geographical imaginaries have not been investigated yet. Metaphors, images, rhetorics and narratives that shaped these mountain interpretations, global contexts and discourses from which they arose, and historical interconnections produced between them have not been analyzed within the most recent debates of Cultural Geography. This thesis attempts to fill in that gap. The dissertation explores the collective imaginations created from the Sierra Nevada geographic conditions. It aims at analyzing the meanings of its imagined geographies from the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century. It presents, examines and discusses the different interpretations through which the Sierra has been scientifically studied, symbolically understood and corporeal experienced throughout modernity. In order to do so, the dissertation studies the representations and narratives by which the imaginations have been conveyed in diverse printed forms. It illustrates the origins of local and foreign historical visions of Sierra Nevada, and their effects in the present management and exploitation of the Betic Mountain. In order to contextualize and interpret the multiple perspectives on the Sierra, the thesis sets out a comparative study between the Sierra Nevada models of representations and spatial practices, and those renderings and narratives employed in the comprehension of other high mountain areas. Against the theoretical framework of circulation of knowledge and ¿travelling landscapes¿ through printed forms, this research explores the transmission of different modes of knowledge of foreign mountains to Sierra Nevada. The dissertation aims to show how the Sierra became an important space of reception of the geographical imaginations shaped in the Alps, the Pyrenees and other mountain chains, emerging as a site of relocation and reinterpretation of rhetorics and representations of Western high mountain. From this hypothesis, the thesis investigates of what these narratives, metaphors and models of representation consisted, how they were formed, and how they circulated in time and space to be adopted and transformed in the historical understanding of Sierra Nevada. After the presentation of the state of the art and objectives in Chapter one, Chapter two provides some theoretical considerations. It explains the concept ¿geographical imaginations¿, and outlines the most relevant changes of the idea of landscape occurred in Cultural Geography. It also summarizes the significance of representation, and methods used for its analysis, in discipline approaches since the 1980¿s. Finally, this chapter presents the social contribution of the research considering current problems with the Sierra Nevada management and its surroundings. Chapter three functions as a hinge section. It presents the Sierra Nevada physical and natural features so as to think about its geographical particularities in the symbolic formation of its imaginaries. This introduction also reflects on recent cultural visibility of the Sierra through three major exhibitions held in Granada in the years 1960, 1995 and 2009 as starting points of the research on the Betic Mountain geographical imaginations of the past. The chapter discusses the objectives of these exhibitions, as well as its reception by locals. Chapter four examines the foundational imaginaries of Sierra Nevada. It discusses how the Sierra was interpreted as the border space of productive areas in the region local communities¿ collective imaginations in medieval times. Then, by studying ways of knowing the mountain from the 16th century until the Enlightenment, this section focuses on the Sierra as a territory of essential natural resources for locals¿ ways of life, who conceptualized the Massif as an abstract geographic space of ¿wonders¿. The metaphors of the Massif as a mountain of wonders will be reappearing in its subsequent interpretations throughout modernity. Thus, the chapter seeks to highlight the early social and economic importance of different assessments of the Betic Mountain, rooted in pre-scientific understanding of its natural resources and its geographical context. Chapter five analyzes popular imaginaries that turned Sierra Nevada into a natural space of legend and a place with religious connotations. This section also aims to emphasize the historical importance of the Massif¿s pre-scientific visions, based on its materiality and its geographical features. Likewise, it points out the social and intellectual significance of these interpretations in later ways of conceptualizing the Sierra. Chapter six focuses on foreign collective imaginations of Alpine evocation shaped by British travellers during the first half of the 19th century. Through the analysis and cultural contextualization of images and narratives of Sierra Nevada appeared in British travel accounts, this section shows how the aesthetic patterns, conventional narratives, and romantic myths of high mountain landscapes, previously employed in the symbolic acquaintance of the Alps, travelled across time and space through different cultural media, and were reinterpreted in the descriptions of Sierra Nevada. Thereby, the chapter discusses how the Sierra was imagined as a sublime and picturesque landscape of Alpine evocation, thus carving out the iconic landscape of Granada, Sierra Nevada and the Vega. Chapter seven examines the scientific models of representation of Sierra Nevada during the course of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Through the study of images and narratives published as a result of scientific expeditions to the Massif by Spanish and foreign geologists and botanists, this section shows how methodological procedures, scientific practices and rendering models of foreign mountain chains, as the Alps and Pyrenees, shaped by the regulation of European geographical sciences, were transmitted to the Sierra Nevada. Through their application to the Sierra, these models, procedures and theories contributed to the definition of the first modern scientific knowledge of the Massif¿s nature. Chapter eight studies narratives and renderings shaped by the act of climbing the Betic summits by both local and foreign mountaineers. It investigates the circulation of ways of interpreting the European high mountain as a geographical space of conquest through alpinism appeared in the second half of the 19th century. By analysing accounts and images of early non-scientific expeditions to Sierra Nevada, this chapter discusses the comprehension and reinterpretation of the masculine rhetoric that sustained the rise of Alpine mountaineering in British modern society. Chapter nine also focuses on Sierra Nevada physical exploration, but in this case through the practice of hiking carried out by local associations. Based on the analysis of hiking reports and photographs, the section examines the circulation of educational discourse that nourished this practice of mountaineering in both the Alps and Spanish mountains, especially in the Sierra de Guadarrama through the example of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Considering the participation of several members of the Institución in the rambles to Sierra Nevada, this chapter argues whether the Betic Massif, as in the case of the Guadarrama, was conceptualized as a collective geographical space with educational purposes. Likewise, the chapter explores the interweaving between masculine rhetorics of sport mountaineering and narratives of local hiking. Finally, Chapter ten outlines the general conclusions of the issues and debates set out throughout the thesis, and presents the final discussion. This section also draws the recent effects of the geographical imaginaries in the present media representation of the Sierra, focusing on its recent development and its current canonical image within tourism and winter sports.