Conference Program

Alpinism may appear as a niche and “exotic” practice, yet it offers a paradigmatic lens through which to observe broader processes of democratization that have traversed modernity and are now re-emerging in contemporary troubled times. Historically, alpinism has been an elite activity, not only socially but also in terms of the highly specialized skills, knowledge and embodied competencies it requires for minimizing intrinsic risks. In recent years—particularly in the post-COVID era—the growing popularity of mountain environments has been accompanied by significant transformations: the diffusion of romanticized experiential imaginaries through social media, increased accessibility and commercialization of mountain practices, and the availability of new technologies that contribute to a perception of reduced risk. This has led to the emergence of new practitioners “perhaps better equipped than experienced” (Johnston and Edwards, 1994), in a context further complicated by climate change, which renders already fragile high-altitude environments increasingly unstable and demanding in terms of skills and judgement (Mourey et al., 2019a).

In this context—also marked by growing mistrust in expert knowledge—revisiting Elias allows us to explore how dispositions such as autonomy, judgement and responsibility are not given but socially produced within specific configurations of learning and practice.

Addressing the panel’s question concerning how educational processes contribute to democratization, this paper examines the Italian case of alpinism schools within the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), a state-recognized institution whose training activities operate as voluntary associations within the civil sphere. These schools constitute spaces of socialization in which shared values, forms of solidarity and civic belonging are produced, while simultaneously fostering embodied dispositions related to autonomy, responsibility and risk management.

After briefly outlining the process of the quasi-sportivization of Italian mountaineering—which led to the emergence of CAI schools—and the subsequent process of democratization, both closely intertwined with broader Italian socio-political developments and reconstructed through documentary analysis, the paper draws on an enactive ethnography, complemented by visual and creative methods, to analyse alpinism and rock climbing courses as institutionalized yet non-formal sites of learning. It shows how instructors do not substitute action—as in traditional guided climbing—but contribute to the formation of an expert habitus capable of acting under conditions of uncertainty. In this sense, autonomy emerges not as an individual attribute, but as the outcome of a relational and processual configuration of interdependence.

By integrating Elias’s figurational approach with a focus on the material-natural environment - the paper conceptualizes risk-taking and management as an embodied, relational and socially mediated practice, rather than as an individual choice. It argues that expert knowledge does not eliminate uncertainty but enables practitioners to navigate it as an irreducible dimension of mountain environments in which zero risk does not exist. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding how processes of functional democratization (Elias, 2012 [1970]) unfold within non-formal educational settings, through the embodied formation of subjects capable of responsible action.