Adrienne Cohen

ADRIENNE COHEN, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Vertical Life: Carnal Enskilment and Posthuman Intimacies in American Rock Climbing.” In the past two decades, rock climbing transformed from a countercultural niche sport practiced mostly by white men in the United States to one performed in gyms across the country by an increasingly diverse cohort of practitioners. Unlike many mainstream sports, climbing was originally premised on an outdoor experience which interacts with the indoor pursuit. By learning to move vertically, practitioners gain access to a new dimension of the world, and their proficiency often leads them to become familiar with, and invested in, stone landscapes. This ethnographic study, situated both in urban rock gyms and at outdoor cliff bands in Colorado and Wyoming, examines rock climbers, their kinesthetic and linguistic practices, and the walls they form relationships with. It also explores the relics of colonial and masculinist tropes in the sport and asks how shifting gendered and racial demographics of practitioners are transforming climbing culture—from lexicons to toponyms to coveted embodied qualities. At once an ethnography of semiotic worldmaking and of human-nonhuman relationality, this project invites new conversations between anthropologies of sport, gender, embodiment, and the geologic.