Comparative Mountain Epistemes: Exploring the Southern Appalachians and the Maloti-Drakensberg

ABSTRACT: Mountains make an indelible impression on human life. As dominant features in any landscape, mountains create unique ecosystems, and they influence the daily lives of people living in that environment. They shape human thought and spiritual beliefs and create a collective body of knowledge and ways of knowing and doing, articulated here as mountain epistemes. This kind of knowledge system, or episteme, is indelibly linked to spiritual attachment to the landscape with its own symbolism. Many well-known mountain peaks are considered sacred natural sites with associative spiritual cultural heritage by local communities, although not necessarily by all who visit, signalling potential conflict between sacred and profane activities. Whereas the concept ‘mountain epistemes’ positions mountainscapes as sources of embedded knowledge, this type of knowledge is also experiential, evolving over time based on observation and familiarity in this specific natural environment. It is a special kind of indigenous knowledge, or folk knowledge, comprising both knowing and knowing how, that merges together knowledge, skill and art. Epistemologically speaking, it means understanding mountain ecologies, but also the human and non-human dynamics in the mountainscape. This article engages in a comparative mountainscape analysis of the epistemes embedded in the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States of America (USA) and the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa to demonstrate how mountain inhabitants live their daily lives, produce mountain knowledge and make meaning of the world they inhabit.