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This paper has been presented at the SIEF ethnography and folklore studies conference 2025 in Aberdeen. For the panel "Unwriting mountain worlds: beyond stereotypes and anthropocentrism". I decided to pre-record reading my paper and present it with a 22. minute video edit of my fieldwork in the summer 2024. Within the context of the global climate crisis, mourning rituals concerning ecological loss, or future ecological loss of a landscape have gained attention in the last couple of years. In 2019, Iceland held the first glacier funeral for the dead glacier Ok. Almost at the same time, people in Switzerland went on a funeral march to the Pizol glacier. Since then, glacier funerals have been spread globally with the intention of raising awareness for the global climate crisis. Death and commemorative rituals are in this context a powerful manner to do so. A part of the rituals remains pre-dominantly Western and are for a big part copy-pasted around the globe. For example, the text from the plaque in Iceland got translated into Spanish and placed on the remains of the Ayoloco glacier in Mexico. The performed rituals are usually held for other humans and projected on a landscape. Although I understand the benefits, I find both aspects also problematic. First, the predominantly Western-eurocentric rituals, like wearing black, imply a colonialist dispersion of commemorative ritual across the globe. A “one funeral fits all” approach is rooted in a capitalist funeral industry. I claim for rituals emerging in and with a mountain. Characteristics of, and relations with the mountain are essential in this process. Second, the sheer projection of rituals for humans on a mountain keeps up the widespread Western idea that the human stands above nature. I know these points are not the intentions of glacier funeral initiators’, and I am grateful for and inspired by what they do. But my motivation for this paper derives from the mentioned concerns and lead to the following questions: Regarding a potential “one funeral fits all” tendency which is based on predominantly Western-Eurocentric rituals following a universalist “One-world-world” view, how could and why should rituals for mountains and glaciers operate as counter-perspectives on this tendency? Considering (future) ecological loss, how can features of ontological design provide methods to emerge commemorative rituals in, with and from a dying landscape, in this case the “dying” Hochvogel mountain?

type	research exposition
keywords	ecological grief, ecological loss, mountains, performance, end of life care, more than human worlds, Design research, design, artistic research, glacier funerals, Climate Change, climate crisis, Anthropocene, ontology, ontological pluralism, ontological design, ethnography, mountain climbing
date	25/06/2025
last modified	25/06/2025
status	in progress
share status	public
copyright	s†ëf/\n sch/\efer
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	British English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3773141/3773142

name	stefan schaefer SIEF Unwriting Mountain Cultures paper
copyright	stefan schäfer
license	CC BY-NC-SA
usages	video

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/\/\o\/ing \/\/i†h /\/\ount/\ins. de\/eloping co/\/\/\/\e/\/\ora†i\/e ri†uals in coll/\bor/\†ion \/\/i†h †he "dying" hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†ain (last edited: 2025)

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