Ecologies of Falling in Yosemite National Park

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Notes

1 The term is intended to align the theoretical approach here developed with the cybernetic theory of Gregory Bateson (1972).

2 ‘Grammar’ here is best read in the Wittgensteinian (1953) sense, in which the practice, in relation to which a linguistic rule gradually forms, is understood as integrated into that rule's character. An analysis of grammar, in this regard, is a study of performativity, grammar being situated within the ‘language-games’ that perform it.

3 See Mike Osborne (2009) for a detailed investigation of the relationship between water, light and granite in the Yosemite landscape.

4 For an overview of the geological character of rock falls in Yosemite, see the documentary film Nature Notes Episode 10 - Rock Fall (2012).

5 The sport of bouldering has become increasingly popular in Yosemite Valley in the last ten years. See Ness (2011a) and (2011b).

6 See Ness (2011a) for a detailed account of a fall taken by an elite boulderer.

7 The concept of landscape immersion has been developed in the non-representational literature of cultural geography. See Nigel Thrift 2000.

8 In Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), an ‘actant’ is a source of action that may or may not be human. Neither subject nor object, actants become decisive forces in the inspiration, organization and structuring of the events of human social life by virtue of their membership in an assemblage or network. See Latour (2005); see also Jane Bennett (2010: 8-10).