Please note the change of date for this week's seminar.
An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Kat Hill (Environmental Humanities Fellow 2023; Birkbeck College, University London)
Simple Shelter: Mountain bothies, modernities and the environment
As he sat in Corrour bothy in August 1928, D. E. Strand from London scribbled a few lines of poetry, a slight misquote of John Davidson’s The Last Journey. Deep in the Cairngorms, along the old mountain pass of the Lairig Ghru, he reflected on walking and wilderness, and he wrote:
alone I climb
The rugged paths that lead me out of time –
Bothies, former cottages and abandoned dwellings now restored by a charity called the MBA, are at the heart of a culture of hiking, storytelling, environmentalism, and wilderness, a culture sitting at intersecting tensions in the modern world. Does engaging in activities like using bothies promote a community that is connected to the environment? Who is included in this community, who might be excluded? And does the love of ‘simple shelters in remote places’ deepen relationships to places and pasts, or simply reinforce problematic divisions between human and non-human worlds.
My talk, based on the trade book I am writing, examines the significance of bothies and the communities they create, in conversation with the historical contexts, the cultural landscape of the bothy, and the environmental challenges our contemporary world faces. I consider whether the temporality of the bothy space, that looks back and is intertwined with different temporalities layered around a place, offers helpful ways of thinking about human and nonhuman entanglements, or whether the temporary escapist withdrawal from the world represent temporal rupture. The small-space encounter of the bothy might offer a different ontology of apprehension, a way of seeing writ small, large issues of environmentalism and climate crisis. But the contested, debated dwelling perspectives present in bothies in also suggest how bothy culture might exclude other understandings and actors, and other readings of the landscape. Finally, this research turns to questions relevant to environmental philosophy and ecopolitics about the good life, sustainability, and justice. To use Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, what capabilities do we need for flourishing human and beyond-human worlds? Bothy culture, with its specific moral codes and values, raises many questions about what sustainable worlds might look like in the modern world.
Click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2