According to the author, “Among us, there is no sex!” was the oft -heard lament from the “frigid” Homo sovieticus decrying the absence of sex in Georgia. The author is seemingly searching for traces of another kind of sex, a kind of sexual sociability, a purely elective, “play” form of sex, pursued entirely for its own sake and unencumbered by any connection to biological reproduction or marital obligation.3 This is a kind of sex defi ned by absence (it seemingly doesn’t exist in Georgia) and alterity (it is normatively quite alien to Georgia). But if “sex” is meant as sex decoupled from biological reproduction, then sex has indeed been relatively absent from Georgia. In a recent article titled “Kartuli Mama-p’ap’uri Seksi” (Georgian Ancestral Sex), Aleko Tskhitishvili asks the following question: “was there ever sex in Georgia, or not?”1 But what is sex? The Georgian term seksi is a recent loan from English, inheriting many of the ambiguities of the English word sex.2 If “sex” (seksi) is defi ned in terms of its prototypical biophysical referent, (heterosexual) vaginal intercourse, potentially leading to pregnancy, then, Tskhitishvili argues, of course there has apparently been a lot of sex through the ages in Georgia, given the large number of Georgians alive today. So far they have not been raised for mountain regions which sum up to a fifth or a quarter of the global land surface.

At the end of this succinct survey on the globalisation of mountain perception we ask ourselves: How much of it should be considered a western imposition? And would it be possible to (re)construct a non-western geneaology of the phenomenon? Such questions are at the heart of the ongoing debate on global history. The first personality is quite unknown even to experts, whereas Humboldt and the Earth Summit are famous in various contexts.

The first section focuses on a book by the Swiss humanist pastor Hans Rudolf Rebmann (around 1600) the second one deals with the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (around 1800) and the third one takes up the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992.

How and why did this historical construction come about? I will try to give some clues to an answer very selectively by presenting three examples ¬¬from several centuries. There are mountains scattered on all continents, and it takes some imagination to bring them together and to see them as one distinct region on a global scale. It focusses on persons and actions which connected upland areas across the planet. This paper looks at ways in which this general view of mountains has emerged in history from the 16th century onwards.

Flight of Fire by Tara D.W. Tine