Rock climbing as lithic ethnography: Animacy, aesthetics, and deep time

Abstract

What does it mean for scholars to engage rocks ethnographically? And how is ethnography redefined back by an encounter with lithics? Although rock has long lingered in the background of sociocultural research, it is only recently that ethnographers have begun to foreground the geologic, often in conversations about extraction and extinction. But how do everyday practices of knowing and caring for rocks and lithic places articulate with what some call the “geologic turn” in the humanities and social sciences? In this article, I propose the term “lithic ethnography” to encompass research in and around cultural anthropology that is attentive to aesthetic, linguistic, and material/body practices of human–rock intimacy across scales. I showcase rock climbers as paradigmatic figures of a lithic ethnography, as they demonstrate what it can mean to privilege movement and correspondence over static form or identity and to try to forge relations—however partial—with lithic material.