The high alpine mountains are strongly impacted by global warming and act as sentinels of future upheavals at lower altitudes. The perception of the alpine milieu and the ways of interacting with it, by the people who spend much time in situ, such as mountain guides, glaciologists, mountaineers, crystal hunters or hut wardens, are disrupted because of this accelerated transformation. This is shown by the emergence of new modes of relations, such as funeral ceremonies for disappearing glaciers, but also more discreet interactions (meditation in osmosis with a glacier, increased sensitivity to the stability of a rock wall, ascents experienced in a state of "animality", etc.). This project aims to better understand these modes of relations by studying them through the contemporary anthropological debates around the notion of animism. Beyond classical ethnographic methods, it is based on a methodology originally developed in the field of cognitive sciences. The techniques of micro-phenomenological interviews -allowing a very fine description of lived experience- and analysis is adapted to the context of investigating sensorial human/non-human relationships. Shootings of such interactions in high mountains environments are conducted and then followed by interviews confronting the interviewees with audio-visual traces of their experience (video elicitation). The final objective is to access the level of pre-reflexive consciousness, in order to identify animistic features that remain otherwise inaccessible in usual narratives.By documenting these modes of relations that go beyond the ontological separation between nature and culture, the project aims to challenge the very existence of such dualism that is generally assumed as constitutive of Western modernity. This research will produce major advances on the issue of animism and on relations to inorganic entities in anthropology and sciences of religions. The development of an innovative methodology based on cognitive sciences will also broaden the field of use of elicitation techniques to humans/ non-humans relations and may be taken up by other researchers in the future, in a fast-growing field that attracts many young researchers. It will also have a strong impact on society at large: it will contribute greatly to social, cultural, and political debates on what is alive or not, and on what type of relations we should have with other-than-humans.