Skiing into Modernity

Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History, by Andrew Denning. Oakland, University of California Press, 2014. xiv, 236 pp. $65.00 US (cloth), $29.95 US (paper). In Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History, Andrew Denning traces the development of (downhill) skiing and the sport's growth in the European region for which it is named, as well as the changing understanding of both from the nineteenth century through the 1970s. Central to his argument are the various meanings ascribed to skiing and the Alps over the years, which Denning calls Alpine modernism, described as the cultural distinctiveness of skiing, elaborating a dynamic and volatile ideology (11). The relationship between humankind and nature continually changed through the act of skiing, ultimately resulting in the modernization of the Alps, attracting millions of visitors a year. skiing, as Denning demonstrates throughout eight chapters, is full of contradictions. Skiing modernized the Alpine wasteland in the middle of Europe, transforming the region from a natural escape from the urban ills of the fin-de-siecle into a winter wonderland (10), which relied on mass media and twentieth-century consumption habits to drive tourism. As modern amenities popularized the sport, much of the early meanings that skiers had ascribed to the sport disappeared (111). Even the notion of skiing as a Volkssport was met with contrasting ideas amongst the skiers themselves regarding whether it was Romantic and spiritual or something that should be spread to the masses (67). These contradictions also appear in the role of gender in skiing. Women had long participated in the sport, and its demand for functional clothing was welcomed by the new woman of the 1920s, yet advertisements for ski resorts and products often depicted the ski bunny, an object of sexual desire. Denning includes many advertisements featuring skiing, but these could have been expanded with additional examples to illustrate further the contested meanings. One of the greatest strengths of Denning's book is his transnational approach. Whereas regional studies that straddle international borders typically address a single border between two states (such as Peter Sahlins' Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley, 1989), the great expanse of the Alps--covering Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy--requires Denning to take a truly transnational view of the sport and region. Not only is the book a history of a vast area, but the individuals who developed the sport--from Norwegian students studying at German universities to British men and women visiting resorts to take the airs to tourists from one state taking ski vacations in another--also crossed national borders and shared ideas

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology) · Ideology · Literature · Modernity · Modernization theory · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Political science · Politics · Romance · American Environmental and Regional History · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Psychology