Sublime Sahib: white masculine identity formation in big mountain climbing

ABSTRACT This article explores western big mountain climbing practices in the Himalaya as ‘secular’ processes of identity formation with historical roots in Victorian efforts at sublimation. Such practices necessitate a series of social, embodied, and psychical distinctions structuring (and structured by) a white, western masculine identity. Looking to news and video documentary narratives by and about the late Swiss mountaineer Ueli Steck, this article works to situate big mountain climbing discourses as relevant to the academic study of religion through the notion of the sublime and its relationship to secularisation (broadly construed). It also situates big mountain climbing discourses in terms of contemporary postcolonial and critical whiteness scholarship on social identity. The notion of the subliminal is both the descriptive goal of many climbing pursuits, and also the means of denying the white masculine identity forged through such processes. Making use of critical social theoretic lenses as offered by both Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-François Bayart, big mountain climbing is shown as a space of white masculine identity formation supported by various appeals to ‘sacred/profane’ distinctions – both embodied and discursive. Through these distinctions, in big mountain climbing, colonial contact’s impact on structural realities makes possible a salient white masculine identity that is forged and disavowed through twin confrontations with the land and the indigenous peoples inhabiting it.