The Jura is presented not as a landscape with one self-evident meaning, but as terrain apprehended through a technique. A skier’s method shapes which slopes appear steep or gentle, so the mountains become part of a culturally specific world of practical meanings and difficulties.

Terrain Interpreted Through Technique

The passage places the Jura alongside the Swiss and Bavarian Alps and the Telemark as mountain regions that a French skier encounters through a French method of skiing. The terrain is physically there, but its practical character is disclosed through the skier’s technique: the same slope can seem steeper or gentler according to the method used to descend it.

A French Instrumental World

For the French skier, the Jura offers French meanings, difficulties, and an instrumental complex—a landscape organized by the practices through which it is approached. The example makes national belonging concrete without reducing it to birthplace alone: inherited techniques shape how the world appears, even when the skier has not chosen them. The Jura thus illustrates how a place can remain geographically itself while being encountered differently through distinct practical ways of inhabiting it.