Revering, Navigating, and Conquering Bolivian Glaciers in an Age of Dispossession

Abstract

This article considers how European mountaineers, Bolivian elites, and Aymara communities perceived mountains, glaciers, and one another in the final years of the nineteenth century at the height of a campaign to dispossess Indigenous communities’ land and determined Aymara resistance. To do so, it takes a microhistorical approach, focusing on the interactions among Aymara community members, members of the Sociedad Geográfica de La Paz, and British mountaineer Martin Conway and his Swiss guides during Conway’s 1898 climbs in the Cordillera Real. Each of these groups was devoted to glaciated mountains, but in different ways and for diverging purposes. While Aymaras revered mountains as powerful ancestral deities, paceño geographers valued them as sites of marketable resources. For foreign mountaineers, glaciated peaks were sites for adventure, conquest, and profit. Divergent approaches to mountains and glaciers led to conflicts between foreign mountaineers and Aymara community members rooted in deeper disputes over race, gender, and nature.