“Nosso Alpinisimo”: Mountaineering, Topographical Nationalism, and the Material Meanings of Brazil

Abstract Interwar Brazil saw an explosion of excursionismo (excursionism), with dozens of clubs linked to but distinct from a broader culture of elite athletics. Excursionists aimed to reorganize space, constructing wilderness and making it intelligible to urbanites. This entailed what I call topographical nationalism, which sought to “conquer” Brazil's peaks and valleys; to extol its national landscape to disparate and competing publics, foreign and domestic; and to define what and where Brazil was and to whom it belonged. This essay argues that the growth of Brazil's organized adventure sports reflected complicated and conflicting mandates to define Brazilians alongside Brazil as a material place, to familiarize the former with the latter, to liken Brazil's topography to that of Europe, and conversely to declare Brazil's landscape and recreationists in competition with and superior to European counterparts.