European University Institute Library

Skiing into Modernity, A Cultural and Environmental History, Andrew Denning

eng

no index present

Skiing into Modernity

electronic resource

dictionaries

899276702

Andrew Denning

Sport in World History, v.3University Press

A Cultural and Environmental History

This book argues that from the moment that skiers took to the Alps of central Europe, around 1880, the interaction between skiers and the Alps proved transformative: the Alps modernized skiing, and skiing modernized the Alps. The unique terrain of the Alps demanded that skiers alter their equipment and their practice of the sport. In the process, skiers elaborated an ideology called “Alpine modernism” that synthesized the Romantic devotion to nature with the modernist celebration of speed, technology, and spectacle. As a result, Alpine skiing was uniquely attuned to the twentieth-century age of mass culture, and the sport of skiing both formed and reflected that era’s democratization, commercialization, and obsession with leisure. Alpine modernism was so enticing–and skiing was so lucrative–that businesses and governments transformed the Alps to appeal to skiers. Alpine skiing became the basis for a burgeoning leisure economy, and tourism interests developed a transportation and accommodation infrastructure across the Alps to render the tourism industry profitable and reliable. This economic modernization affected the environment in important ways while, paradoxically, undermining the sport’s Romantic appeal. Before they came into contact, both skiing and the Alps were backward and peripheral; as a result of their interaction in the twentieth century, each became at once modern in both material and ideological terms and also central to European concerns–to the delight and chagrin of Alpine skiers.--, Provided by publisher