Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Daniela Salvucci
(Free University of Bolzano-Bozen)
Giovanni Masarà (University of St Andrews)
Tobias Boos (Free University Bolzano-Bozen)
Gabriele Orlandi (Université de la Vallée d'Aoste)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Roberta Raffaetà
(Ca' Foscari Venice University)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
People in mountain regions across the world are increasingly (re)claiming territorial belonging and ownership. Moving beyond the “West and the Rest” framework in discussing autochthony, indigeneity, and localisms, the panel examines how these territorial claims are differently articulated.
Long Abstract
Mountain areas worldwide are facing new forms of exploitation and extractivism, being perceived as the ultimate reserves of resources, as possible touristic destinations and potential places of refuge from rising temperatures and sprawling metropolises. In response to conflicts, frictions, and polarizations connected to this, people in mountain regions across the world are increasingly (re)claiming territorial belonging and ownership. While some communities demand a political acknowledgement of the value of their local and/or indigenous knowledge(s), some claim to autonomously decide who and how is entitled to manage their own environmental resources or infrastructures, and others are attaching emotional, ethical and identitarian meanings to their context-sensitive, ‘traditional’ practices.
This panel seeks to move beyond the “West and the Rest” framework in discussions of autochthony, indigeneity, localisms, and eco-populist discourses. We aim to examine differences, possible similarities, continuities and discontinuities in how territorial claims and narratives of belonging are articulated in mountain regions globally. While similar dynamics may be found elsewhere, mountains warrant special attention: they have long been imagined, also within anthropology, ethnology and folklore studies, as spaces of difference, Otherness, self-sufficiency, and autochthony. We especially welcome proposals that investigate the social, political, and historical conditions shaping mountain territorial claims, focusing on how these claims may assert boundaries and hierarchies of belonging, and/or cultivate solidaristic and inclusive forms of autonomy and care.
As societies worldwide seem to be increasingly “going indigenous”, we believe anthropologists, ethnologists, folklorists, and montologists are tasked not only with understanding these dynamics but also with finding ways to collaborate with people in mountain regions to co-develop tools and practices for building more just and equitable societies. We are also asking: how can researchers engage with communities navigating the manifold polarising forces related to environmental practices in mountain areas while generating more inclusive, participatory, and plural forms of belonging(s)?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In the Portuguese town of Soajo, claims over the correct naming of a mountain range walk in hand with a fight for self-definition and of righting historical wrongs. This paper will address this ongoing conflict as a window into contemporary struggles for the survival of a mountain community.
Paper long abstract
The naming of the northern portuguese Soajo mountain range has confounded researchers throughout history, and has been the subject of political dispute. Soajeiros, the locals, argue that it is the right and only way to name the mountains. Through time, however, different outsider accounts placed the otherwise named Peneda mountain range somehow where Soajo is, arguing instead that Soajo is either somewhere else, or confined in ill-defined cohabitation with Peneda.
For soajeiros, this exceeds the matter of convention. Losing the mountains means losing a struggle that dates to the loss of Soajo administrative autonomy. It means the erasure of belonging to the mountains, of territory, identity and community.
This secular struggle is, today, intensified with the advent of tourism as a main economic force, and the way it normalises local practices within mainstream forms of presentation (in Soajo particularly, by engaging with the concept of “biocultural heritage”). However, the idiosyncratic struggles of soajeiro identity preservation, as well as the framing of claims to territory, may be sidelined in favour of more easily accessible commonplace imagery and naming conventions. Including that of mountains.
This paper draws on fieldwork ongoing in the Soajo region. It will peek at current disputes over identity, territory, and autonomy, through the framing of naming mountains. Here, past and present coalesce, towards legitimacy-building and heritage-making within the shifting uncertainties of living in mountain communities.
Paper short abstract
The Sierra de Perijá is explored as a border mountain area shaped by layered refuge histories. Focusing on Yukpa and peasant territories, displacement and post–peace accord land claims, this paper examines mountain territoriality as sedimented practices of refuge, mobility and coexistence.
Paper long abstract
The Sierra de Perijá, forming the border between Colombia and Venezuela, is a mountain region historically constituted through successive waves of refuge, displacement, and re-materialization. Long home to the Yukpa, the only Indigenous group inhabiting the Sierra, the mountains functioned as a refuge from colonial expansion. During Colombia’s internal armed conflict, the region became a shelter for peasant communities displaced from other parts of the country, before later turning into a site of expulsions once violence entered the Sierra itself. Since 2016, the area has been further reshaped by cross-border mobility, the use of transit zones for contraband, the arrival of Venezuelan refugees, and the establishment of demobilization camps for disarmed ex-FARC combatants.
This paper conceptualizes the Sierra de Perijá through the lens of mountain refuge histories, approaching the region as a layered territory of belonging in which past and present modes of refuge sediment into overlapping and competing territorial projects. These include legally recognized Indigenous resguardos, claims to ancestral Indigenous territories, proposals for peasant reserve zones, individual property regimes, military infrastructures, and international border arrangements. In the post–peace accord context on the Colombian side of the Sierra, these layers are re-articulated through land claims, victim compensation, reconciliation, and territorial “healing,” while simultaneously being shaped by infrastructure expansion, emerging tourism, and the anticipation of future resource extraction.
Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper argues that belonging in border mountain regions emerges not from fixed or exclusive claims to autochthony, but from historically sedimented practices of refuge, mobility, and negotiated coexistence.
Paper short abstract
Yakushima Island, in southern Japan, is known for its sacred mountains and millennia-old cedar trees. My ethnographic fieldwork concentrates on the recent revival of the rituals "takemairi" ("worship of the sacred mountains"), as an attempt to restore the equilibrium of the "eco-semiotic system"
Paper long abstract
At first glance, Yakushima gives an impression of peaceful stability - that of a natural mountainous environment preserved from human impact, embodied by its millennia-old cedar trees and officially stamped by UNESCO with the label of “World Natural Heritage".
For centuries, entry into these mountains was permitted only twice a year during the takemairi, ritual practices that are still observed today. The takemairi (literally “worship of the sacred mountains”) is a ritual performed by each of the island’s 24 communities, in which people begin the ascent from the sea to the top of the okudake in order to make offerings to the gods. In the islanders’ worldview, maedake (“the mountain in front”) is the part that humans can enter and use for forestry, whereas okudake (“the remote mountain,” the highest peaks invisible from the village) are the place of the gods, protecting the island and furnishing resources to islanders through the rivers.
But over the centuries, industrial forestry, beginning in the Meiji Period with expropriation, not only almost totally destroyed this ecosystem, leaving the mountains bare, but also disrupted the takemairi rituals, which disappeared in most communities for decades. From the 1970s onward, mass forestry was replaced by mass tourism for hikers from all over the world, decided again by the “country” against the opinions of islanders, who observed, powerless, a new disruption of their “eco-semiotic system”: a meta-system in which all natural and supernatural realities are interconnected and tend toward a fragile equilibrium, punctuated by phases of rupture.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines resistance to a mining project in Covas do Barroso, showing how the threat of extractivism catalyses territorial reclamation as re-existence. Through everyday practices, inhabitants enact relational worlds, unsettling dominant views of territory and belonging in rural Europe.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines a process of territorial (re)claiming in Covas do Barroso, a rural mountainous village in northern Portugal, in the context of sustained local resistance to a prospective lithium mining project since 2017. Drawing on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork and my collaborative engagement with this place-based struggle since 2021, it focuses on how the anticipation of extractivism became politically and ontologically generative. It argues that the threat of extractivism catalysed territorial reclamation as a form of re-existence (Porto-Gonçalves 2006). Grounded in a political ontology framework, this paper examines the practices mediating inhabitants’ relations with their mountains and their diverse lifeforms, revealing that these practices enact a lifeworld in which mountains are not external landscapes but active agents provoking politics. Such relations resonate closely with relational modes of being, suggesting that ontological difference is not exclusive to explicitly non-European Indigenous contexts. Fundamentally, the imminent threat of mining has made these enactments particularly visible, transforming taken-for-granted ways of life into conscious stances of defence. Inhabitants increasingly define themselves as guardians of an affective territory sustained across generations and recognised as World Agricultural Heritage. In this sense, extractivism operates not only as environmental and economic disruption but also as a catalyst for the politicisation of lived relations – in what I term a process of re-existence. By opening up Northern multiplicities, this paper moves beyond the “West and the Rest” divide, showing how mountain territorial reclaims in rural Europe unsettle dominant assumptions about indigeneity, autochthony, and belonging.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how people in a mountain region articulate territorial belonging and ownership through everyday talk about indigeneity, livelihood practices and engagement with government actors.
Paper long abstract
“Kenya’s new indigenes” (Lynch, 2011) living in mountainous-forested areas shaped by histories of conservation‑driven dispossession are increasingly (re)claiming territorial belonging and ownership. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research conducted between May 2022 and February 2023 among the Ogiek of Mount Elgon in Western Kenya, this paper examines how territorial and ownership claims are articulated through everyday talk, livelihood practices and engagement with government actors, particularly forestry and conservation authorities. The paper shows that claims to territory and ownership move beyond court proceedings and activist arenas, as they are embedded in everyday interactions and practices. These engagements reveal how territoriality and ownership are produced across multiple scales—from everyday interactions to ongoing negotiations with government actors—and how claims simultaneously draw boundaries of belonging while invoking micro-ethnic claims to ownership and control. By foregrounding a mountain region in Western Kenya, the paper contributes to emerging discussions of how territorial belonging and ownership claims are articulated globally.
Paper short abstract
Gilgit Baltistan is a contested mountain region where climate change and governance reshape claims to land and belonging. Drawing on preliminary ethnography, this paper traces how indigenous practices, women’s labour, and digital media reshape relations among people, territory, and authority.
Paper long abstract
Gilgit Baltistan (GB) is a contested mountain region at the intersection of the Himalaya, Hindukush, and Karakoram ranges and home to the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar regions. Administered by Pakistan and bordering Afghanistan, China, and India, the region is frequently portrayed as a scenic periphery. Yet GB has long been shaped by struggles over land, resources, and political recognition. Recently, these struggles have been intensified by climate change, felt here at nearly twice the rate of lower elevations.
Based on initial findings from an ongoing field study, the paper explores how local communities engage these transformations through practices that combine indigenous knowledge with non-indigenous political and digital tools. I document efforts to sustain husbandry techniques, maintain irrigation infrastructures, and replace chemical inputs with locally sourced alternatives. Women’s labour sustains these practices, linking households, land, and systems of governance.
I also examine how digital media are used to document environmental change, challenge dominant representations of the region, and engage with people beyond nationalist frameworks. Rather than treating these practices as opposition, our analysis traces how they rework relations between the state, environment, and community in everyday life. These practices express attachments to land and articulate claims that do not rely on formal political recognition alone. The paper contributes to anthropological discussions on indigeneity in mountain territories by tracing how environmental problems are experienced, negotiated, and addressed in a contested region.
Paper short abstract
Based on visual ethnography in the kopanice of Nová Bošáca (Slovakia), this paper examines how mountain families reclaim territorial belonging through cattle care after socialism. Regeneration emerges as an ethical, multispecies practice of staying with land amid marginalisation.
Paper long abstract
Mountain regions across Europe are framed as marginal or residual, yet they are increasingly sites where territorial belonging is claimed through everyday practice rather than formal recognition. Based on visual ethnographic research in Nová Bošáca, a kopanice settlement of dispersed farmsteads in the Slovak–Czech border mountains, this paper examines how such claims are articulated through multispecies relations with cattle in a post-socialist context.
From the 1950s onwards, many inhabitants combined factory labour with small-scale farming at home. Although agriculture was economically devalued under socialism and postsocialism, it persisted as a familial obligation and ethical relation to land, often reframed as a “hobby” sustained through unpaid labour. Drawing on photo-elicitation with family archives—images of cattle, barns, milking, slaughter, and everyday work—I analyse how different generations narrate relations with cows. Older interlocutors describe cattle as co-workers anchoring households to land; middle generations recall exhaustion and everyday violence; younger family members express ethical unease and selective attempts to rework care.
Rather than asserting autochthony or indigeneity, these practices constitute quiet claims to territory grounded in endurance, care, and refusal to abandon marginal land. Following Ingold (2023), regeneration is understood as a generational effort to renew life without reproducing inherited violence. Engaging regeneration as a concept linking intimacy and politics (Durham and Cole 2007), the paper argues that in European mountain regions, territorial belonging is produced through multispecies labour and ethical attachment rather than ownership discourse, complicating binaries of tradition and modernity and opening space for more inclusive mountain autonomy and care.
Paper short abstract
Using a decolonial lens, this paper explores Alpine and Apennine communities as sites of internal coloniality and territorial (re)claims. By focusing on local epistemologies and folkloric heritage, it shows how resilience and autochthony are mobilized to challenge decline narratives.
Paper long abstract
In recent decades, anthropology has embraced decolonization as both an epistemic and methodological imperative, calling for a re-reading of Europe’s internal and mountainous regions not as passive peripheries, but as active spaces shaped by enduring forms of internal coloniality. From this perspective, mountain areas—from the Alps to the Apennines—emerge as complex territories where histories of agrarian transformation, industrialization, depopulation, and touristification intersect with power asymmetries, extractive regimes, and externally imposed development models.
Applying a decolonial lens to mountain anthropology entails a shift toward local epistemologies and situated knowledges—vernacular land-use practices, seasonal mobilities, and communal regimes of resource management—while critically interrogating who defines “peripherality,” which forms of knowledge are legitimized in heritage-making and development processes, and how communities may reclaim their own temporalities and spatialities against standardized policy frameworks rooted in colonial and industrial modernity.
Drawing on ethnographic research in selected Alpine and Apennine communities in Italy, this contribution examines locally articulated dispositifs of resistance, resilience, and adaptation to historical, economic, and environmental upheavals. Particular attention is devoted to folkloric heritage, understood not as a static repository of the past but as a dynamic practice of identity (re)construction and territorial reclaiming, through which forms of autochthony and belonging are reactivated in the present. In dialogue with the panel’s theme, the paper argues that these processes can be read as practices of mountain territorial (re)claims that challenge narratives of decline and reconfigure indigeneity and agency in an increasingly polarized world.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows how an Alpine linguistic minority community tackles marginalization through ethnic self-representation. Walser ethnic claims operate as a tool to further heritage tourism, paradoxically exerting counter-hegemonic resistance through the now hegemonic language of heritage-scape.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on the findings of ethnographic research conducted in Carcoforo, a small municipality in the upper Sesia Valley in the Western Italian Alps. The cultural and historical-demographic trajectory of this village shows how those inhabiting marginal areas, such as mountain communities, strategically deal with various institutional levels. Paradoxically, this involves resorting to the resources flowing from the economic and political centres to the peripheries to perform counter-hegemonic resistance against the increasing marginalization that affects mountain regions. The community composition is highly stratified, including permanent residents who live in the village all year round and those who live there intermittently. This coexistence shapes local social relations and fosters different – sometimes conflicting – ways of imagining the village. However, a common recourse to ethnic self-representation as a tool for defining the community emerges. In fact, Carcoforo is a protected Walser community under Italian Law 482/99 “Rules for the protection of historical linguistic minorities”, although the traces of the medieval migration of German-speaking settlers from Valais are now faint. Thus, Walser ethnicity does not derive from a linear process of cultural transmission. Rather, it is the result of a recent path of ethnic self-representation grafted onto folk revival dynamics, which have made the recovery of Walser cultural traits a driving force for identity assertion and local tourism promotion. The economic entanglements of this ethnic claim are particularly evident nowadays, as adherence to the heritage-scape hegemonic language is increasingly aimed at gaining access to economic and symbolic platforms for promoting tourism.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on photo-ethnography in Alpine valleys, this paper examines how environmental policies and ecological change shape relations between local populations, non-human entities, and territory. It questions the relevance of indigeneity in non-colonial mountain contexts.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on photo-ethnography conducted in Alpine valleys, this paper examines how environmental policies on wildlife and climate change shape relations between local populations, non-human entities, and territory in a non-colonial mountain context. It focuses on the ontological frictions and limits emerging from policymaking in fast-changing Alpine landscapes, and on how these frictions reconfigure everyday forms of territorial belonging without taking the form of explicit claims to indigeneity.
Rather than analysing overt narratives of autochthony or ownership, the paper attends to how environmental governance produces implicit boundaries of belonging and authority through ordinary practices and situated relations to the mountain environment. The Alpine case thus offers a critical entry point to reflect on the analytical limits and political effects of extending indigeneity to mountain regions shaped primarily by environmental regulation rather than colonial dispossession.