In this episode, Jason König and Jonathan Westaway interview Alexandra Cotofana about her work on the mountains of Romania. Alexandra is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at Zayed university in Abu Dhabi.

Alexandra is the author of Xenophobic Mountains. Landscape sentience reconsidered in the Romanian Carpathians, (2022), and co-editor of Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape (2022).

The episode begins with a discussion of Alexandra’s experience of growing in the Carpathian mountains in Romania, and with some reflections on the challenges of doing ethnography in a community you are close to.

We then turn to Alexandra’s Xenophobic Mountains book. Alexandra starts by explaining the concept of sentient and xenophobic landscape. She contextualises it in relation to recent developments in anthropology and in the humanities more broadly which question the dominance of rationalising, western modes of thought, and ask us to ‘take other world views seriously’, including notions of the agency of landscape and other non-human entities.

We then go on to talk about the way in which those ideas apply in Romanian history. We discuss the stories that circulated around the crash of an Israeli Defence Force helicopter in the Romanian mountains in 2010, where the mountain was said to have caused the crash. We talk among other things about how those ideas are paralleled in other cultures and how they have been shaped by the experience of occupation and resistance in Romanian history. We also discuss how the prevalence of these ideas in the mountain regions of the country can help us to understand the rise of right-wing nationalism that has had international prominence recently in the Romanian presidential elections of 2025.

Alexandra discusses future plans for a history of mountain huts in Romania and the way in which they have been intertwined with national discourse throughout the 20th century and beyond. The podcast ends with some final reflections on why it is an urgent priority to understand the entanglement between mountain communities and nationalist discourse better.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

For a version of our podcast with closed captions and transcript please visit this link.

To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)