Sociologies (Jun 2014)
Analyser sociologiquement des autobiographies
Abstract
From its emergence and its institutionalisation in the UK in the mid-19th century, mountaineering has been characterised by a dense literary production, spanning narratives of ascents to contemporary professional mountaineers’ blogs. With a comparative perspective between France and the UK, this article focuses on the autobiographies of mountaineers. In line with the method suggested by Gérard Mauger in 1994 and drawing from the example of autobiographies written by French and British mountaineers from the 1920s onwards, this article seeks to underline the heuristic interest of the “literary” autobiography for sociology, and attempts to answer the categorical rejection, suspicious of biographical and referential illusions, of the use of such materials.
