Paper short abstract:

This paper describes the preliminary results of a place-name based research conducted in the Alps concerning the relation between vulnerability, resilience, history, risk, disasters, and environment. It aims to demonstrate how social vulnerability and resilience are embedded in the landscapes

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes the preliminary results of a place-name based research being conducted in Aosta Valley, a French-speaking region in the Alps, concerning the relation between human vulnerability, resilience, history, risk, disasters, and environment. It aims to demonstrate how social vulnerability and resilience are embedded in the landscapes, in its history, and in its memory-scapes.

Is well-known that the act of naming places is an act of controlling space and infusing it with particular values and belief-systems. The particular context of place-naming came to be understood as a basic human undertaking to signify social or cultural meaning in experiences of the world, and place-names came to be appreciated as matrices of language and the various cultural elements (including landscape) which compose a society's way of life. Place-names have the potential to transform the sheerly physical and geographical into something historically and socially experienced. Toponyms, therefore, identify the knowledge that past generations have assigned to such places. For that, toponymic information can be used to complement scientific understandings of "natural phenomena". Some ancient place-names have maintained a significance related to "natural risks" (potential disasters) or already happened disasters. This ancient local place-names served to connect people to the land, maintaining "rapport" with ecology, fauna, flora and material culture, but now this link has mostly been lost. People are re-building and re-inhabiting the same "risk places", building their futures forgetting their past. Historicizing vulnerability and resilience means renegotiating the collective memory and the socio-spatial identities, and allows to connect past and future in a dialogical perspective