Paper short abstract:

Climate change narratives have often brought together people leaving at high-altitude with people living at high-latitude. On the basis of ethnographies from the Himalaya and the Alps that can be set in dialogue with those of the circumpolar North I explore the social and cultural life of the cryosphere.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change narratives have often brought together people leaving at high-altitude with people living at high-latitude. Proximity to ice formations affected by rising temperature and vulnerability to changing weather pattern impacting livelihoods are some of the most striking common denominators. These and many other related phenomena suggest that the notion of cryosphere, which is often used in the natural sciences to refer to areas of the world where water is in the solid state, can be looked at anthropologically and cross-disciplinarily in a variety of ways. In this paper I present ethnographies from the Himalaya and the Alps that can be set in dialogue with those of the circumpolar North to explore the significance of local knowledge, cultural constructions of risk and community action in contexts that are particularly vulnerable to climate change related hazards.