When the Mountain Acts Up: Experiencing Vertical Bordering and More-than-Human Relations in the Alps

Abstract

This article examines how bordering is experienced in alpine environments undergoing rapid ecological change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 in the transboundary region of the Aosta Valley (Italy), Haute-Savoie (France), and the Canton of Valais (Switzerland), it explores how more-than-human relations become strained, suspended, or reconfigured through infrastructural instability, environmental rupture, and sanitary regulation. Based on a photo-ethnography, the analysis focuses on three empirical cases: infrastructural disruptions in the Val de Bagnes; the collapse of the Birch Glacier in the Lötschental Valley; and the effects of the Lumpy Skin Disease on pastoral practices across transboundary valleys. The article shows that alpine spaces are continuously co-produced by more-than-human assemblages through dynamics, in which bordering emerges not as fixed spatial line but as a conditional relational process unfolding across elevations and over time. By foregrounding interruption, waiting, constrained access, regulated proximity, suspension and exposure, it contributes to posthuman border studies by approaching bordering as a relational dynamic grounded in the material and temporal conditions under which more-than-human relations become practicable or impracticable.

1. Introduction

This paper examines how relations between humans, animals, and mountains become strained, interrupted, or reconfigured in fast-changing alpine landscapes. It argues that alpine spaces are continuously co-produced through volumetric bordering dynamics between humans and non-humans that fold space and time together. Here, bordering is approached as a relational process emerging within more-than-human environments. “Volumetric” refers to the entanglement of spatial practices with the passage of time in the vertical dimension, through which human and non-human agency (Ingold, 2022; Tsing, 2015; Kohn, 2013) become perceptible. Engaging with debates on posthuman border studies, this ethnography foregrounds how these entanglements co-produce the mountainous space in the transboundary region of the Aosta Valley (Italy), Haute-Savoie (France), and the Canton of Valais (Switzerland).

The Northern Alps, profoundly reshaped by climate change and biodiversity loss, are not merely a passive backdrop for these dynamics but rather active agents, influencing human perceptions, practices, and strategies. These entanglements intersect with complex socio-economic and political dynamics, including tourism, agriculture, hydropower, and transboundary governance. They materialize in everyday practices: mountain tourism adapts as routes and itineraries are rerouted or reconfigured in response to environmental transformations (Miczka et al., 2025); wolves (Canis lupus Linnaeus, 1758) adjust their geographies in response to human activities, prompting pastoralists and hunters to adapt their practices accordingly (Galloni d’Istria, 2024; Rippa, 2023); and commemorative ceremonies emerge to mark glacier retreat (Chamel, 2023). The Alps have generated a substantial body of literature, both on their representations and on the long history of landscape transformation (Dall’Ò, 2025; Rhoades, 2007; Viazzo, 1989; Burns, 1961). Building on this scholarship, this article examines how such transformations are engaged through situated more-than-human relations.

At the core of these interactions lies the dichotomy between nature and culture, which Latour (1991, p. 135) refers to as the “Great Divide”. This separation structures modern ontologies by distinguishing nature from culture and humans from non-human entities. Yet alpine contexts reveal a more ambivalent and situational engagement with this divide. In this article, I examine the practical conditions under which such distinctions become difficult to sustain in everyday alpine life. Rather than positing alternative ontologies, this ethnography traces how modes of relating to non-human entities are variously maintained, suspended, or rendered temporarily impracticable in situated practice.

These modes of relations require access to deeper levels of perception and consciousness, which are difficult to grasp using standard interview techniques. To address this challenge, I mobilize a photo-ethnography (Chio, 2023; Pink, 2022; Edwards, 2015), grounded in a phenomenological approach to the environment and landscape (Aisher & Damodaran, 2016; Münster, 2016; van Dooren et al., 2016), inviting situated, sensory, and experiential modes of attention. Photography explicitly brings together more-than-human assemblages—understood as networks of relations encompassing humans, non-humans, materialities, and space—with the camera. In this sense, the photo-ethnographic process enables research conducted with, rather than on, these hybrid assemblages. Images are approached not merely as representations, but as intimate “contact zones” (Haraway, 2008, p. 244) and encounters, transforming photography into spaces of exchange. A photo-ethnographic corpus was produced during repeated fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025. The elicitation of these images—both in situ and through exhibition settings—engaged participants in immersive and reflexive engagements with changing landscapes.

Situated within debates on more-than-human and posthuman ethnography, this approach prioritizes relational practices and shared spatial-temporal dynamics, rather than attempting to reconstruct species-specific perspectives. At the forefront of the analysis is the materiality of mountains, and bordering understood as a process unfolding over time through “vertical archipelagos” (Murra, 1975, p. 74). Adopting a three-dimensional perspective on valley space allows verticality to be reconceptualized as volumetric, rather than as a mere extension of horizontal spatial logics in mountainous contexts. Building on Billé’s notion of “volumetric re/bordering” (Billé, 2020, p. 6), this analytical framework approaches bordering as a spatial and temporal dynamic that renders perceptible the conditions under which the continuity of more-than-human assemblages can be maintained, or become uncertain or impracticable in everyday practices.

Empirically, the article draws on three case studies located in the Val de Bagnes, the Lötschental Valley (Canton of Valais, Switzerland) and the Franco-Italian-Swiss transboundary Mont-Blanc region. Taken together, these cases examine how turbulent and sometimes destructive entanglements have emerged in recent years through infrastructural interruption, environmental rupture, and sanitary crisis. The article first outlines the methodology, then presents three empirical case studies, before discussing the implications for posthuman border studies.

2. Materials and Methods

This research builds on earlier work on human–wolf relations in Valais and Haute-Savoie (Galloni d’Istria, 2024), while shifting the analytical focus toward the mountain as a non-human actor and toward volumetric bordering through which more-than-human relations unfold. Fieldwork was conducted between 2024 and 2025 in several alpine valleys in Switzerland, Italy, and France, including the Val de Bagnes, the Lötschental Valley and the Mont-Blanc region (see Figure 1).

This photo-ethnography draws on a more-than-human ethnographic approach attentive to how human and non-human relations are shaped through space, time, and material conditions. Rather than seeking to reconstruct species-specific perspectives, the research focuses on situated practices. It examines how interspecies relations become perceptible in everyday life through vertical bordering, and how the modulation of the continuity of more-than-human assemblages actively shapes the valleys studied.

2.1. Photography as Phenomenological Engagement

Photography plays a central role in this research, not as a representational or illustrative tool, but as a phenomenological practice of attention. Modes of relating to non-human entities are often difficult to apprehend through standard interview techniques alone. Following approaches in visual anthropology that emphasize embodied perception and situated experience, photography is used to engage with more-than-human assemblages as they are enacted and disrupted in practice. Fieldwork involved repeated walks, prolonged stays, and movements through landscapes often marked by restricted access, infrastructural closures, and environmental instability. These conditions shaped both my mobility and photographic practice. Photographing in such contexts entailed waiting, detouring, stopping, or being unable to proceed, foregrounding interruption, uncertainty, and absence as constitutive elements of the field. Photography thus became a way of remaining engaged with the rhythms and constraints through which relations to the landscape unfold, even when verbal exchange was limited. By engaging the body, perception, and attention as part of an ongoing ethnographic practice, photography reconfigures the conditions of participation particularly in situations where relations are fragile, interrupted, or only partially articulated.

2.2. Photo-Elicitation and Complementary Methods

The photographic material produced was subsequently discussed during in situ photo-elicitation encounters and in exhibition-based settings. The visual corpus comprises seven hundred photographs produced during repeated fieldwork; several curated selections were chosen for exhibition and elicitation, serving primarily as contextual and interpretive devices informing the analysis. Photographs produced were exhibited in six venues in Geneva between 2024 and 2025. These exhibitions gave rise to seventy-two semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews with visitors, as well as twelve exploratory in situ elicitation encounters. Images were discussed with pastoralists, mountain guides, hunters, hikers, residents, and institutional actors in conversations that took place both on site and in exhibition settings. These exhibition encounters included not only Geneva-based visitors but also participants from the valleys themselves, reflecting the relatively close connections and regular movements between alpine localities and the city. These moments of elicitation opened dialogue allowing photographs to function as contact zones where experiences of environmental change, constraint, and belonging could be articulated both collectively and individually.

The exhibitions aimed to create spaces of encounter where images circulated and elicited commentary. Through these situated interviews, photography operated as a relational device, extending fieldwork beyond the moment of image production and enabling relations to be verbalized and revisited over time. While responses to the photographs varied across interlocutors and situations, they did not divide neatly between locals and visitors or between occupational groups. Across encounters, participants repeatedly returned to questions of access, exposure, vulnerability, and adjustment, even where their specific concerns and positionalities differed.

Beyond these photo-elicitation encounters, the analysis relies on the articulation of heterogeneous materials—photographs, embodied field experience, informal conversations, archival documents, and archival images—through which bordering processes became perceptible over time. In addition to photography, the research involved twenty informal conversations conducted with interlocutors across the different valleys visited. These conversations resulted from serendipitous encounters during fieldwork, and were conceived as situated moments of dialogue, emerging through shared movement or moments of waiting. Research dedicated to a corpus of five hundred archival documents (held at the Archives of the Etat of Valais, Switzerland) played a decisive role in orienting the analysis. Past testimonies and official documentation pointed toward key spatial sites structuring the region, notably mountain pastures, as well as to the mobility of animals. A second corpus of archival images produced by local photographers was analyzed to contextualize the newly produced photographic corpus within the region, anchoring it within the local visual history. This corpus of images, produced by fourteen professional and amateur photographers—long-term residents of Valais as well as more recent inhabitants—was selected from the photographic collection held at the Médiathèque of Martigny (Canton of Valais, Switzerland).

3. Results

The article draws on three empirical case studies, organized to foreground distinct, albeit interrelated, forms of bordering. The first examines how a linear and wild–domestic ordering of the valley becomes intermittently impracticable in everyday relations under shifting temporal and material conditions in the Val de Bagnes. The second shows how a sudden environmental rupture makes vertical bordering perceptible by suspending relational continuity and reorganizing access, attachment, and belonging in the Lötschental Valley. The third examines how relations between humans and non-humans are conditioned through the modulation of proximity within complex spatial arrangements, reconfiguring relations of care, contact, and co-presence in transboundary valleys. Together, the cases show how borders emerge as bordering processes through which relations are sustained, suspended, or recalibrated over time.

3.1. Following the Wolf, Learning the Valley

Retracing wolf movements in the Val de Bagnes, against the road-bound forms of human mobility that organize the valley, reveals the limits of a linear understanding of alpine space and of the wild–domestic distinctions that sustain it. In this case, the wolf functions as a methodological entry point into the valley’s uneven conditions of practicability. Bordering thus appears not as a fixed line, but as the temporal and vertical modulation of the conditions under which access, co-presence, and movement remain practicable.

It builds on a longer-term research trajectory on human and non-human relations in Valais, which initially focused on representations and conflicts surrounding the return of the wolf in the canton. While this earlier work examined how the status of wolves was classified and debated, archival research from the mid-twentieth century repeatedly pointed toward alpine pastures and valley landscapes as key sites where these conflicts were articulated; spaces where forms of habitation, pastoral practice, and animal presence overlap without being clearly separable. These reports describe the difficulty of stabilizing presences in alpine pastures, as animals, herds, and predators move across elevations and seasonal rhythms. Following these archival traces into the present, I moved from documents to fieldwork in valleys, beginning with the Val de Bagnes, where I started to trace the trajectories followed by wolves on the ground.

The recent presence of wolves in the valley is marked by strong opposition and sustained controversy, prompting debates over land use and the future of alpine livelihoods. These debates tend to presuppose a spatial ordering in which the wild is located “beyond” inhabited zones, and the domestic remains anchored at the entrance of the valley. It is precisely this ordering that fieldwork in the valley began to unsettle.

Rather than reassessing wolf politics as such, I take this ordering as a situated entry point to ask what happens when one tries to follow wolf trajectories across a valley whose own conditions of access are unstable. It entails moving through a landscape where the animal presence comes to reveal, in the eyes of some hunters, an abandonment of a particular mode of relating to the mountain (Rippa, 2023), considered untenable by some local inhabitants. In this sense, this case draws on a more-than-human approach attentive to a plurality of active entities through which relations continuously come into being. In following wolves, the inquiry becomes entangled with the mountain’s material dynamics, revealing relations that exceed a predator–prey configuration. As will become apparent through the empirical scenes below, attempts to trace wolf movements repeatedly encounter interruptions produced not by the animals alone, but by avalanches, landslides, and infrastructural closures, through which the mountain begins to emerge as a central non-human actor shaping human and non-human relations, movements, and forms of co-presence in the Val de Bagnes.

The geography of the Val de Bagnes suggests a fluid and continuous circulation running from Sembrancher to Mauvoisin, and further up to Chanrion, a linear representation widely shared as a road-bound social imaginary of the valley space. It is, however, contradicted by the multiple points of access to the valley, including the well-known Fenêtre Pass, which has offered passage from Italy into the upper valley for centuries. Other mountain passes likewise open multiple routes into the valley, outlining a set of thresholds and overflows that animals have also long known and traversed. Entry into the valley is therefore not limited to a single axis nor to a progression from lower to higher elevations. Instead, access spills in from all the margins, following a circulatory logic that contradicts the cartographic representation.

While tracing wolves in this valley between 2024 and 2025, I set myself the goal of following their movements in order to physically experience their trajectories. Drawing on publicly available—yet deliberately imprecise—records, historical documents, and contemporary testimonies, I focused my attention on the Dranse, the river that runs through the valley from end to end (see Figure 2). It appeared to me as a provisional guiding thread connecting the various margins, and thus as a potential meeting point with wolves. This assumption soon proved misguided. Like many others before me, I had thought that the valley could be interpreted as a differentiated domestic space where living beings occupy relatively stable positions. Tracking human and non-human movements over several seasons and from one year to the next complicated this reading.

An annual rhythm structures life in the valley, a rhythm with which my fieldwork quickly came into friction. Each autumn, the closure of the only road between Fionnay and Mauvoisin—generally from October to May—creates a sharp break with the upper valley. According to residents, this closure marks the border between Lourtier, considered the last village inhabited year-round, and what begins beyond it, an area described by the local tourist office as “wild”. Over the past two years, additional closures have shifted this rhythm. In July 2024, a major landslide cut the road at Champsec for three months thereby cutting off access to most of the valley. In May 2025, traffic was interrupted further up the valley, first between Fionnay and Bonatchiesse, then between Bonatchiesse and Mauvoisin, precisely at the time when the road usually reopens. In June 2025, another major landslide extended the instability from Champsec, prompting the army to be deployed to construct an emergency provisional bridge. The closures never occurred in the same place. Distances lengthened, itineraries were reconfigured, and access to the margins became uncertain. Detours did not repeat themselves; they shifted. Over two years, I reached Mauvoisin by car only once. The rest of the time, I had to walk. Gradually, endurance replaced frustration. The aim was no longer to reach a specific point, but to work with whatever remained accessible at a given moment. I kept walking. I retraced my steps. The Dranse river remained the most constant reference.

It was during one of these interruptions, beyond Fionnay (see Figure 3), that I encountered a municipal security officer. He arrived on a motorcycle and stopped beside the barrier. Looking up toward the slope above the road, he said to me: “A motorcycle is better than a car here. If you want to get around the valley more often, you should get one.” His walkie-talky crackled as he explained that the road had been opened and closed repeatedly in recent weeks. “We try to secure it,” he added, “but the mountain decides the rhythm.” As we spoke, large blocks of rock detached from the slope with dull, guttural roars. He paused, looked up again, then continued. A few weeks earlier, he told me, an avalanche had killed someone. “Four thousand meters above: when it comes from that high, there’s nothing you can do.” He could not say when the road would reopen. “Maybe the next day, maybe in several days. Probably by Mother’s Day” he said. It was not. Seeing my disappointment, he offered to take me with him. I declined with regret and continued on foot instead. The weight of my backpack—photographic equipment, water, food—set the pace of my movement. My walking was punctuated by stops and detours (see Figure 4). Silence was crossed by distant rumblings from the slopes above. I kept walking. I retraced my steps as night fell.

Simply moving at all became increasingly difficult. Over the course of these imposed journeys, photography became a field practice in its own right. These walks produced a large photographic corpus, later used in exhibition-based and in situ elicitation, without which these experiences would have remained difficult to articulate. I photographed as I walked, paying attention to the transformations of the valley as they became perceptible through my slowness. The images did not seek to explain these phenomena, but to render sensible their inscription in bodily effort and in the time that conditioned my own movement.

In this first empirical case, following wolves functions as a methodological entry point that brings into view the practical limits of wild–domestic distinctions for ordering the valley. This reading is sustained by an imaginary that treats the valley floor as the primary axis of movement and organization. Yet photo-elicitation encounters revealed that many inhabitants—including those with secondary residences—do not rely primarily on this axis. One resident commented while looking at the images of the valley, “We don’t live along that line. We move across the mountain. I like seeing the chamois by the salt stones we leave near the ridgelines.” He described moving across slopes and mountain passes, circulating from one valley to another, visiting transhumant herds at altitude, as well as colleagues and friends. Such comments displaced the road from its status as the primary organizing axis of the valley and brought into view other forms of movement structured by slopes, passes, and seasonal routes.

From this perspective, relations do not depend exclusively on the continuity of the valley road. Seasonal closures, shifting access points, seasonal mobilities of domestic and wild animals, and altitude-dependent rhythms render the valley navigable only through intermittent and uneven connections, producing asymmetrical conditions of encounter. These changing patterns of movement do not simply affect circulation; they alter who or what can remain present, for how long, and under what conditions. Road-bound mobility tends to sustain the image of the valley as a continuous linear corridor, whereas walking across disrupted terrain exposes the uneven temporalities and altitude-dependent conditions that structure access. Through these intermittent closures and forced detours, relations with the mountain and other non-human entities did not cease; they were displaced or temporarily suspended. The mountain remained a term of the relation even when inaccessible. What varied were the conditions of co-presence: directly perceptible when walking, mediated through monitoring data, suspended when upper zones became unreachable. Relations became indexed to fluctuating conditions of access, unfolding through detours, interruptions, and partial continuities across elevations. Environmental transformations do not introduce instability; they render their variability more perceptible. These interruptions not only redistributed mobility: they reconfigured the very conditions under which relations could be perceived, sustained, or described. The valley no longer appeared as a set of stable zones, but as a succession of thresholds in which co-presence depended on fluctuating temporal and material conditions.

This case shows that the understanding of the Val de Bagnes that circulates most widely—presenting the valley as a linear space organized along a single axis, where the wild is located “beyond” inhabited areas—remains intelligible and operative in maps, administrative frameworks, or general discourses about wolves. Yet its relevance is intermittent: once it becomes a matter of moving through or organizing oneself within the valley under shifting temporal conditions shaped by landslides, debris flows, avalanches and road closures, this reading can no longer be sustained as a continuous framework in practice. It is through this intermittent impracticability that the mountain ceases to appear as a mere backdrop and begins to assert agency, while the wild can no longer be assigned to a distant “elsewhere.” Through these situations, it becomes perceptible that this way of reading the valley cannot serve as the only framework through which it is traversed, inhabited, or experienced. During a photo-elicitation encounter, one resident noted that the road closure between Fionnay and Mauvoisin had only become systematic in the past decade. Previously, he explained, inhabitants managed rockfalls and avalanches and the road remained open throughout the year. “People knew how to deal with it,” he said. According to him, the expansion of tourism increased the number of visitors in areas of the valley that could no longer absorb such exposure. What changed was not the mountain itself, but the threshold of acceptable risk and the conditions under which access could be maintained. Looking at the images of the blocked road also prompted interlocutors to describe the valley as a terrain of crossings, detours, and uneven access. During an exhibition-based encounter, another interlocutor commented: “It’s important to talk about wolves. My father was a farmer, so I know what they’re like. We need to talk about them. But all these avalanches, all these landslides… People no longer understand what the mountain is. And with all the rocks falling… and it’s not over… it’s going to fall even more. We don’t make demands, we adapt.” She also mentioned municipal works along streams and dikes. What emerged through photo-elicitation was the prominence of other non-human entities—avalanches, landslides, glaciers, rivers, and torrents—in structuring everyday relations to the valley. One interlocutor said “ We know how to read the mountain. We know how to listen. We know when to cross. We know when to refrain.” I used the word “dangerous”, but several inhabitants kept insisting they had long-standing relationships with avalanches and landslides, and how these were central to everyday relations with the mountain. In this context, what appeared as more disruptive was often not these non-human forces alone, but changing forms of municipal management, perceived as reshaping established relations of access, exposure, and adjustment.

Photo-elicitation also brought the valley’s shifting temporalities to the foreground. During an exhibition-based encounter, as one recent inhabitant remarked, “from one year to the next, it’s never the same,” giving the example of haymaking, which takes place “when it’s possible and adjusting the rest.” Temporal variability thus emerged not simply as a background condition, but as a practical dimension through which work, movement, and relations to non-human entities are organized in the valley.

What becomes untenable, therefore, is not the distinction between wild and domestic as such, but the possibility of using it as a continuous and sufficient framework for moving through and describing the valley in practice under altitude-dependent and temporally shifting conditions. The photo-elicitation encounters showed that everyday relations to the valley were shaped by avalanches, landslides, glaciers, rivers, and torrents, which interlocutors described as part of a long and familiar, if turbulent, relations to the mountain. By rendering a dominant reading of the valley—widely used in administrative frameworks and everyday discourse—intermittently impracticable in everyday practices, bordering emerges through these inscriptions of time into vertical space. Bordering thus operates here not as a fixed spatial border, but as the altitude-dependent and temporal modulation of the conditions under which access, mobility and perception can be sustained over time. It produces variable relational thresholds through which proximity and co-presence become intermittently practicable or impracticable.

The following case moves away from everyday disruptions to examine how a sudden and spectacular environmental rupture makes these conditional dynamics visible at a different scale.

3.2. When the Mountain Acts Up

This case shows how the collapse of the Birch Glacier made vertical bordering perceptible by abruptly suspending ordinary relations to the Lötschental Valley, and by exposing divergent temporal understandings of how, and whether, life there can continue. On the 28 May 2025, a large section of the glacier collapsed onto the valley. A massive volume of ice and debris reached the valley floor, radically transforming the landscape, destroying the village of Blatten, and rendering large portions of the upper valley unattainable (see Figure 5).

The collapse appeared at the limit of what could still be practiced in the valley. The site remains inaccessible, as falling debris and continued instability have turned the valley floor into a prohibited zone. The situation unfolded in what several inhabitants described as an “after-moment,” in which some habitual uses of the valley could no longer be pursued as before, yet no new stable configurations had emerged. Inhabitants can only observe the transformed landscape from a distance, as familiar paths, fields, and dwellings have disappeared or have been rendered dangerous. In these conditions, vertical bordering was not only a matter of restricted access, but of suspended relational continuity. Photographing meant engaging with a landscape that could no longer be approached or followed. For the first time, photography did not accompany movement or practice but attempted to sustain attention to a relation without access. What became unsettled was the ordinary ways of inhabiting and moving through the valley. Certain forms of presence could no longer be sustained, while no new stable configurations had yet emerged.

Shortly after the event, an inhabitant emphasized that the collapse should not be understood as a form of retaliation by the mountain. “It’s not that the mountain is taking revenge against us,” he said. “Here, we haven’t changed the way we live and do things. We’ve kept our usual practices.” He explained that people in the valley did not see themselves as having disturbed the conditions of coexistence with the mountain. “What happened doesn’t come from here,” he continued. Rather than seeing the collapse as a consequence of valley life, he described the inhabitants as collateral damage in a relationship that extends beyond the Lötschental Valley, especially toward the lowlands. From his point of view, the collapse was linked to distant human activities, whose effects had accumulated over time and altered broader balances. This interpretation neither frames the mountain as a passive backdrop to human action nor as an intentional agent endowed with purpose. Instead, it situates the collapse within a relational understanding of the mountain as a non-human presence whose agency emerges through processes of accumulation, temporal delay, and sudden release. Rather than marking a spatial border, the glacier collapse inscribes time into relations between entities, revealing the volumetric nature of vertical bordering as the co-presence of multiple temporalities across elevations. “It builds up,” he said, “and then at some point it releases. […] The melting of the permafrost, the glacier collapsing, sliding down like soap—not our doing. Here, people know how to keep things right with nature, how to live with this place.” In this situated view, the mountain is not only something represented by those who live alongside it. The mountain also represents “nature” by contrast, pointing to an “other”: the lowlanders whose activities are perceived as having triggered the destruction of half of the valley.

The spectacular consequences of the event also attracted global narratives framed in terms of climate change, which circulated far beyond the valley. Several inhabitants described feeling partially dispossessed through these narratives, as they contributed to redefining the valley from the outside. For many local interlocutors, the collapse was not interpreted through climate change alone, but also through questions of belonging, continuity of dwelling, and the legitimacy of external narratives about the valley’s future. During in situ photo-elicitation encounters conducted after the collapse, the images elicited markedly different temporal framings. One interlocutor, whose home faced the transformed mountainside, remarked: “This mountain fell on us. For those who lost their homes, it’s terrible, but for me, I live opposite it and I love it… I love this mountain even if I can no longer get close to it, even if it continues to fall, I honor it.” Such remarks made visible that the collapse did not simply interrupt relations to the mountain; it also reconfigured them, allowing attachment, admiration, mourning, and distance to coexist. This contrasted with an exhibition-based encounter in Geneva, where one visitor remarked: “The mountain keeps coming down. You can see it. After floods and everything else… how can they rebuild after this?” The sheer scale of the fallen mass—the volume of ice and debris that had risen along the valley sides—was described as overwhelming. Local inhabitants did not deny the magnitude of the rupture, but articulated their responses within longer and sometimes divergent temporal horizons. One resident stated: “I was born here and I will probably die here.” His wife immediately replied: “No, you will die here, that’s for sure.” Several local interlocutors also recalled previous catastrophes in the valley, insisting that past avalanches, floods, or rockfalls had not prevented them from continuing to live there. The collapse was thus not always framed as an unprecedented break, but as part of a longer history of inhabiting a volatile landscape. These exchanges revealed a desynchronization of expectations within the very space of dwelling: attachment, endurance, uncertainty, and apprehension coexisted without stabilizing into a single narrative. What the photographs made perceptible was not a uniform response to the catastrophe, but the coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities through which relations to the mountain, to dwelling, and to the future were being reconfigured. Certain collective events were maintained in modified form—such as the New Year cors des Alpes concert or carnival parades—even when access routes were shortened and gathering points had shifted, revealing a desynchronization of paths and places rather than a complete interruption of valley life.

In response, most inhabitants of the affected village expressed a strong desire to rebuild quickly and to remain in the valley, rather than relocating in the lowlands. This desire does not express a refusal of change, but an attempt to preserve continuity of belonging and to resist a redefinition of their relationship to the valley by external actors and narratives. It also draws a line between those who have been directly impacted by the event and those who have not. Here, vertical bordering operates not only through material rupture, but through the desynchronization of temporal and social horizons. It unsettles fixed social boundaries among the local community, while simultaneously producing new cultural borders of belonging and interpretation between many valley inhabitants and external lowland populations.

The glacier collapse alters not only physical access but also relationships of attachment, dwelling, and belonging to the valley. Yet despite the spectacular volume of rock and ice displaced, the event does not shift attention toward the glacier itself as the primary object of relation. What remains most salient for inhabitants are the surrounding mountains, among them the Bietschhorn, toward which relations continue to be oriented even after access has been lost. In this sense, the collapse transforms more-than-human entanglements by shifting relations to the mountain from inhabited proximity to distant, suspended, and contested forms of continuity. Belonging itself becomes implicated in bordering, as the relation to the mountain persists without direct access. What photo-elicitation makes particularly perceptible is the desynchronization of temporal horizons through which living with the valley continues to be imagined and negotiated: “I can’t go up there anymore, but it’s still my mountain”; “We’ve always rebuilt, and we’ll rebuild again”; “People from outside say it shouldn’t be rebuilt, but they don’t live here”; “Before, we knew things were moving, but not like this.” The catastrophe thus reconfigures both the materiality of the valley and the affective relations through which inhabitants remain attached to the Bietschhorn. Significantly, interlocutors expressed stronger attachment to the surrounding mountains and to valley forms of life than to the glacier itself.

The collapse demonstrates that vertical bordering does not operate only through mobility and circulation, but through delayed accumulations at higher elevations that reconfigure access, attachment, and the inhabitable conditions of the valley floor. Vertical accumulation and sudden release made bordering perceptible as a temporal layering of space. Here, vertical bordering becomes perceptible as relations to the mountain are reorganized under divergent temporal horizons. This second case thus shows that bordering becomes perceptible through rupture and the suspension of relational continuity. It makes visible a relational threshold at which access, attachment, and belonging are reorganized under divergent temporal horizons. Institutional and administrative responses follow the collapse, yet the bordering process precedes them. While the glacier collapse in the Lötschental Valley rendered the agency of the mountain abruptly visible through rupture and release, other transformations unfold without spectacle or immediate material disruption. Some threats remain invisible and inaudible, yet progressively reshape more-than-human relations, pastoral practices, and territorial governance. The following case turns to such a process: the presence and the anticipated circulation of the Lumpy Skin Disease virus across the valleys of the Mont-Blanc region during the summer of 2025.

3.3. The Vertical Archipelago

The previous case showed how bordering becomes volumetric through the inscription of multiple layers of time into the vertical dimension. This third case shows how the anticipation of Lumpy Skin Disease reorganized pastoral relations across the Mont-Blanc region by maintaining vertical circulation while thinning the density of interspecies contact across elevations over the course of the pastoral season. Vertical bordering operates not through rupture, but through the anticipatory modulation of proximity. The analysis developed in this subsection is grounded on photo-elicitation encounters in which photographs of transhumance routes, high-altitude pastures, and pastoral gatherings were used to prompt reflection on proximity, care, and changing interspecies relations.

Competing social imaginaries of the Alps actively institute distinct ways of inhabiting, practicing, and relating to the mountain (Debarbieux, 2019). Certain forms of spatiality—most notably verticality—play a central role in this process. Verticality is not merely a physical characteristic of mountainous terrain; it constitutes a symbolic dimension through which individuals connect spatial arrangements to their social practices. In the valleys, this vertical dimension is most visibly engaged through transhumance. Seasonal movements between valley floors and high-altitude pastures trace recurrent paths that connect multiple elevations. Summer grazing settlements, distributed across different altitudes, are not isolated sites but remain linked through social networks of exchange and cooperation. These connections give verticality its own materialities and structure everyday life during transhumance. Verticality here is not a continuous space, but a structured assemblage of relations sustained through practice. Within vertical archipelagos of the region, the cumulative agencies of animals further materialize verticality in its temporal dimension. Domestic herds and wild animals extend their geographies across seasons and years, traversing slopes, valleys, passes in ways that are indifferent to fixed political borders. Their movements contribute to shaping when, where, and under what conditions relations unfold (see Figure 6).

To understand how interspecies mobilities are experienced and articulated, photographs were used during photo-elicitation encounters as sensory mediations of past and present relations with animals, inviting my interlocutors to reflect on their relationships with non-human entities. Interviewees frequently referred to repeated encounters with animals classified as game species—such as chamois or deer—or as protected species—such as wolves or eagles—as intimate and enduring relations. In high-altitude pastures, the theme of care emerged prominently in relation to domestic animals, including cows, sheep, and goats. Distancing from animals—whether wild or domestic—did not appear as a spontaneous or self-evident practice, but rather as the outcome of situated evaluations and negotiated perspectives. As Lizet (1998, p. 42) suggests, such forms of distancing can be understood as a testing of intimacy, extending to the very spaces in which these relations unfold. This configuration becomes particularly visible when the conditions of transhumance are disrupted. It can be illustrated by a brief vignette drawn from the sanitary restrictions of the summer of 2025.

During the summer of 2025, Lumpy Skin Disease was detected in Haute-Savoie. Although the mortality rate of cows remains relatively low, the disease is highly contagious. Transmitted through fly, horsefly and mosquito bites, it is classified as an epizootic risk, requiring the systematic culling of entire herds when even a single animal is identified as infected. Transhumance was not suspended: herds of cattle continued to move between valley floors and alpine pastures. What changed, however, were the conditions under which proximity could occur. What was at stake was not circulation itself, but the density and configuration of relational contact across elevations. Cattle from different farms could no longer come into contact. Shared enclosures were avoided, collective gatherings reorganized, and sequences of encounter carefully managed. As one pastoralist put it looking at a picture of the alpine pasture, “People don’t realize. The heifers, the nursing cows, and now this virus. People see cows in an alpine pasture, but for me this is my workplace and my herds… Here, up there, it doesn’t work like that.” He explained that he had previously grouped certain herds together, whereas sanitary measures now required separation, even though the animals themselves were not accustomed to it. Vertical routes remained active, but the relational density that normally characterizes pastoral life was deliberately thinned. Circulation persisted, while contact was regulated.

In Haute-Savoie, social transhumance events were maintained in modified form. Sheep and goats remained present, while cattle—particularly cows from different herds—were excluded from shared gatherings to prevent contact. The virus did not interrupt verticality; it reconfigured it. What was negotiated was not movement itself, but distance, separation, and exposure. Bordering here operated through the modulation of proximity: determining which bodies could approach, which had to remain apart, and under what conditions relations could take place. Although the virus was not present in the directly neighbouring Val d’Aoste, Val de Bagnes and Val Ferret, its anticipated spread reshaped pastoral practices well beyond the affected area. In the Val de Bagnes, the famous Combat des reines (Swiss cows fighting) scheduled in Bonatchiesse in August 2025 was postponed to 2026 as a precautionary measure, despite the absence of confirmed cases in the valley. In Val Ferret, the Fête de la désalpe (Festival of the alpine descent) in La Fouly was cancelled in September 2025 for the same reasons. Such restrictions had not been observed since these gatherings were first institutionalized, to my knowledge.

These sanitary measures were frequently interpreted through the lens of more recent collective experiences, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic. Pastoralists expressed concern not only about contagion itself, but about the possibility that a single detected case could justify the destruction of an entire herd, abruptly interrupting months of labour and seasonal continuity. The fear was not solely of disease, but of losing everything at once. Visitors to one of my exhibitions, reflecting on the cancellation or modification of traditional alpine descent festivals, also drew parallels with the suspension of social life during the pandemic. The thinning or absence of these gatherings evoked a renewed awareness of how quickly seasonal rhythms could be halted. What resurfaced in these encounters was the memory of collective interruption. In this sense, the virus reorganized the conditions of proximity under which interspecies relations could continue, while relational density was deliberately reduced.

The virus—present in a transboundary region—not only affected cattle as a pathogenic agent, but also reorganized how, when, and under what conditions relations between humans, animals, and spaces could take place. In other words, it reorganized a wider set of more-than-human relations by recalibrating the conditions under which proximity could occur. Here, bordering operated through the modulation of proximity rather than through the interruption of circulation. Seasonal ascent continued and vertical routes remained active, yet herds that would previously have shared enclosures had to remain apart. What makes this bordering volumetric is that it did not distribute separation across a single line of division, but across a vertically structured pastoral space linking valley floors, alpine pastures, enclosures, and seasonal gatherings. More specifically, this case shows how relations of care, herd management, animal contact, and collective pastoral life are reorganized by sanitary anticipation. In this context, one salient more-than-human relation that comes into view is that between pastoralists and the virus, mediated through cattle and through the regulation of proximity across elevations. The virus reconfigures pastoral relations of work, gathering, and seasonal co-presence. More-than-human entanglements are not suspended, but recalibrated as circulation continues while distance, contact, and exposure are actively redistributed. In this configuration, proximity ceases to function as an ordinary condition of pastoral life and becomes an object of anticipation and administration. This third case thus shows that bordering can operate through the anticipatory regulation of proximity, where circulation continues but the density and configuration of more-than-human relations are actively renegotiated across a vertically structured space. It makes perceptible a relational threshold at which co-presence remains possible only through the managed redistribution of distance, contact, and exposure.

4. Discussion

Within more-than-human border studies (Barry, 2025; Fleischmann et al., 2025; Chuengsatiansup & Limsawart, 2019; Boyce, 2016), this article examines bordering through experiential conditions under which situated relations are sustained, suspended, or reconfigured. While more-than-human border studies have highlighted the participation of non-human actors in bordering processes, this article builds on this scholarship by adopting a posthuman perspective that focuses on the material and temporal conditions under which relations themselves become sustainable or untenable. It also engages recent work at the intersections of border studies and conservation (Arney, 2025; Ramutsindela, 2015), while resonating with broader debates on bordering that move beyond human-centered accounts (Oliveras-González, 2023; Ozguc & Burridge, 2023). It further speaks to recent work on volumetric re/bordering (Billé, 2020). Across the cases, bordering does not appear as a fixed line separating pre-existing entities, but as a relational dynamic that modulates co-presence, access, proximity, and continuity within a volumetric alpine space. The contribution of a posthuman approach here is not simply to add non-humans to border analysis, but to show how bordering emerges through changing relations among humans, animals, infrastructures, pathogens, slopes, debris, and altitude-dependent temporalities. Photo-ethnography makes these shifting conditions perceptible at the level of experience. Taken together, the three cases show that relations are not always expressed through direct interaction; they also become empirically perceptible through distance, interruption, mediated attention, and the recalibration of access.

Drawing on posthuman border studies as a heuristic framework, this article examines how limits, access, and proximity are experienced in everyday relations with more-than-human environments. In this sense, bordering designates the experiential thresholds through which relations are maintained, suspended, recalibrated, or rendered impracticable over time. As used here, the notion of bordering does not refer to borders as juridical entities or to geopolitical border regimes, but rather to relational thresholds emerging within more-than-human environments. Across different scales and forms of disturbance in alpine environments—animal mobility, infrastructural interruption, sudden environmental rupture, and sanitary crisis—bordering emerges through the conditionality of relations. What is at stake is not whether relations exist or cease to exist, but under what conditions their continuity can no longer be taken for granted.

More specifically, the cases show that these relations are materially and temporally conditioned in distinct yet comparable ways. In the first case, repeated road closures, landslides, avalanches, and forced detours on foot made human access dependent on non-human material rhythms, while relations to the mountain became perceptible less through direct visibility than through interruption, traces, waiting, and mediated attention. Rapid environmental transformations do not create this variability so much as render it more salient. In the second case, the destruction of Blatten and the continued inaccessibility of the upper valley did not terminate relations to the mountain, but displaced them into distant, suspended, and contested forms of continuity, making belonging itself a site of bordering and rendering visible the desynchronization of temporal horizons through which everyday life with the valley continues to be lived and negotiated. In the third case, transhumance continued, but shared enclosures, inter-herd contact, and collective pastoral gatherings were restricted or cancelled, so that proximity no longer functions as an ordinary condition of pastoral life. Mediated through cattle, Lumpy Skin Disease reconfigures care practices, herd management, and seasonal co-presence, as pastoralists must adjust patterns of contact, distance, and exposure in response to contagion. Across these cases, bordering does not mark the simple presence or absence of relations, but the variable conditions under which relations remain practicable, become suspended, or must be recalibrated. What emerges is not a set of fixed borders, but changing thresholds of access, attachment, co-presence, and dwelling.

Photo-elicitation did more than document changing alpine conditions. In the first case, it displaced attention away from the expected salience of the wolf toward other non-human entities and toward the valley’s shifting temporalities. In the second, it made perceptible how relations to the mountain persist without access and how temporal horizons of dwelling become desynchronized. In the third, it brought into view how pastoral relations are reconfigured through cattle, sanitary restrictions, and the regulation of proximity in response to the threat of Lumpy Skin Disease. In this sense, photo-elicitation functioned as a relational device through which indirect, suspended, and recalibrated forms of more-than-human relations could become empirically perceptible.

In the situations examined here, bordering is rarely visible as spatial demarcations. Instead, it becomes perceptible through interruption, waiting, uncertainty, and exposure. Roads remain open yet inaccessible; valleys remain inhabited yet partially unlivable; movements continue while proximity must be regulated. The three cases further suggest that these bordering processes cannot be understood solely through a separation between humans, animals, and environments. The distinction between wild and domestic and between nature and culture proves only intermittently adequate as an analytical ordering device once the valley is approached as a lived, volumetric space. Mountains appear here not as static backdrops to human action, but as participants in the co-production of space, whose presence becomes most perceptible when continuity fails. Referring to mountains as participants does not imply intentionality, but points to forms of agency that unfold through material and temporal dynamics. Across these cases, alpine space emerges not as a pre-given container, but as continuously shaped through the entangled actions of humans, animals, infrastructures, and geological processes.

What follows from this is not the emergence of a coherent alternative ontology, but the practical instability of the distinctions through which these relations are usually ordered. Instability appears not as a transitional phase, but as an ordinary condition of coexistence through which bordering becomes perceptible in vertically structured environments. In these environments, relations repeatedly exceed distinctions between nature and culture, and human and non-human framings without stabilizing into alternative modes of relating, such as a form of “minor animism” (Stépanoff, 2021, p. 216). The cases foreground the variability of how relations are maintained—or provisionally suspended—across different modes of co-presence—direct, mediated, synchronized, distant, or suspended.

Overall, these cases suggest that the analytical task is less to identify stable “modes” of relating than to describe the material and temporal conditions under which relations can be maintained, become increasingly onerous, or break down. Instability is not an anomaly but the ordinary condition through which bordering operates in alpine environments undergoing rapid ecological change. Approaching bordering as a lived threshold—shaped by verticality, interruption, and exposure—offers a way to account for these shifting conditions without reifying them into fixed classificatory frameworks.

5. Conclusions

Across the three cases examined here, this article shows how the Alps are co-produced through shifting relational conditions—of access, proximity, and exposure—rather than through fixed spatial borders. Rather than focusing primarily on institutional dispositifs, it approaches bordering as a lived and temporal process through which more-than-human relations become sustainable, strained, suspended, or rendered impracticable across elevations and over time.

This article describes the conditions under which relations become perceptible, fragile, or impracticable in vertically constrained alpine environments. Across the cases—infrastructural interruptions in the Val de Bagnes, glacier collapse in the Lötschental Valley, and sanitary anticipation around the Lumpy Skin Disease virus—bordering is rarely encountered as a fixed line. Instead, bordering becomes perceptible through interruption, waiting, constrained access, regulated proximity, and exposure. In the first case, this took the form of intermittent altitude-dependent interruption; in the second, of sudden rupture and desynchronized temporal horizons; in the third, of anticipatory regulation that thinned relational density without suspending movement. In this sense, borders operate as conditional thresholds that emerge through practice within a vertical and unstable environment. What these cases make visible is that bordering modulates the conditions of co-presence rather than simply separating pre-existing entities.

These findings also show that distinctions between wild and domestic, and between nature and culture, function only intermittently as analytical ordering devices in the situations described here. Relations repeatedly exceed these framings without stabilizing into alternative modes of relating. What stands out empirically is the ordinariness of instability: relations remain provisional, uneven, and continuously renegotiated as material conditions and temporal rhythms shift. Instability appears not as an exceptional breakdown, but as the recurrent condition through which bordering becomes perceptible across different scales of disturbance. What emerges, therefore, is not an alternative ontology, but the practical instability of the distinctions through which these relations are usually ordered.

Conceptually, the article specifies how vertical bordering operates as a volumetric process, in which the mountain’s material dynamics—closures, accumulations, sudden releases—actively shape the conditions of relating. Methodologically, it shows how photo-ethnography can support attention to moments when continuity fails, allowing bordering to be approached as an experience rather than an object, and making indirect, suspended, or recalibrated relations empirically perceptible.

By attending to vertical bordering as a lived and temporal dynamic, this article shows how alpine space is co-produced through the shifting conditions under which more-than-human relations can be sustained, interrupted, or rendered impracticable. In doing so, it contributes to posthuman border studies by drawing attention away from representation and from borders as fixed objects, to bordering as a relational process grounded in the experiential conditions under which relations become practicable or impracticable, whether through direct interaction or through interruption, distance, and mediated attention.