Haunted Mountains, Supershelters, and the Afterlives of Cold War Infrastructure

Bibliographic Data

ID12901357
AuthorsDavid Pike (0000-0001-7679-6963, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume13
Issue2
Pages208-229
Publication date2019-09-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-4907 • E-ISSN: 1749-4915
PublisherEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jsrnc.36575
OpenAlexW2971860069
LanguageEN
Citations received2

A dominant architectural form in the global North since the end of the Second World War, the deep-level supershelters, command centers, and hidden fortifications built within mountains mobilize an ambivalent imaginary called here the ‘bunker fantasy’. This cluster of images is simultaneously technologized and sacred. During the Cold War, imagined mountain bunkers in nuclear war fiction are shown to be haunted by what they exclude. After the Cold War, repurposed mountain-side bunkers and installations invoke new forms of the sacred as part of their reckoning with the past. Because the nuclear condition works against a progressive sense of history, it permits previously discredited or marginalized beliefs to begin recirculating in a new context. Through sacred mountains like Mount Shasta, the apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war becomes just one element within a cosmic and cyclical history that imagines alternate possibilities for the twentieth century

Ambivalence · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Bunker · Cold war · Context (archaeology · Fantasy · Literature · Political science · The Imaginary · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Psychology

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