Paper Short Abstract:

Based on an ethnography carried out by the authors in the pastoral commons in the Sierra de Segura and the Sierra de Castril (Andalusia), this presentation accounts for the multiple assemblages which incorporate humans and other-than-human agencies, which have shaped these landscapes for centuries.

Paper Abstract:

Communal management of natural resources is a living but invisible reality in many parts of the world, even more at the periphery that the rural world has become. This is also the reality in Spain, where various forms of communal governance have endured and resisted secular attacks from both the public and private spheres. Based on an ethnography carried out by the authors in the pastoral commons in the Sierra de Segura and the Sierra de Castril (Andalusia), this presentation accounts for the multiple socio-natural assemblages which incorporate not just humans, but also include other-than-human agencies (domesticated and wild animals, “domesticated” and wild flora), which have shaped these landscapes for centuries.

Long-standing practices such as extensive communal livestock farming (mainly sheep) and the cultivation of cereals and olive trees converge, and are assembled and reassembled in the territory, with external agencies that imposed enclosure policies (19th century) as well as policies of forestry exploitation and reforestation (first half of the 20th century). More recently, hunting and wildlife management strategies, agrarian and conservation policies, and tourism and forms of biocultural patrimonialisation have been imposed on the territory. This paper will focus on how these herders have adapted to changing and occasionally adverse scenarios, maintaining -albeit with nuances- their communal organisation. Interviews conducted by the authors as well as the consultation of historical archives will allow us to understand the adaptation and notions of territory that have been practiced in the study area since the second half of the 19th century.