Mountain Ontologies: The Challenge of Universality and Diversity

Since the eighteenth century, the notion of mountain has become central as a universal category aiming at providing a reliable account of the nature of the Earth’s crust and surface at the world scale. However, despite this ontological trend in modern science, no consensual definition of “what exactly a mountain is” has ever been adopted in academia. During the last decades, the growing will to take into account alternative ontologies has led many scholars to be more attentive to the plurality of social representations of mountains, some of them invoking the need to decolonize science.