Mountains in the Making: Multispecies Montology in a Changing Himalayan Climate

What makes a mountain a mountain? Recent mountain scholarship has challenged the treatment of mountains as static topographic formations, approaching them instead as dynamic socio-ecological systems. Yet the multispecies processes through which mountains continually become mountainous, particularly under climate change, remain insufficiently theorized. Drawing on long-term multispecies ethnography and anthropological inquiries in Kham Tibet, China, this article proposes multispecies montology as a relational approach to mountain becoming. It traces how barley and turnips cultivate slopes, grasslands orient pastoral mobility, caterpillar fungi seasonally mobilize communities, and yaks and wildlife differentiate mountain spaces. Rather than treating these lives as biological components or indicators of environmental change, I approach them as constitutive participants with human communities together in remaking mountains. The article develops three dimensions of mountain becoming: verticality, temporality, and ferality, through which multispecies relations continually constitute and reshape mountain worlds. Mountains, I argue, are not merely inhabited by multiple species; they emerge through their changing relations. Multispecies montology contributes to mountain studies by reframing mountain sustainability as the ongoing capacity of heterogeneous multispecies relations to maintain, adjust, and remake conditions of mountain livability amid environmental change. It suggests that restoration should sustain not only desired landscape states but also the relational capacities through which mountain environments remain regenerative and adaptable.