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Paper short abstract

This paper explores mountain grazing practices in the Italian Alps since the 19th century as a situs of interplay between scientific expertise and vernacular experience. It mobilises an historical perspective for critically reflecting on the vanishing of environmental knowledge in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract

Confrontations and fractures between diverse ecological knowledges have long shaped European countrysides. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, early 19th century scientists were involved in governementalizing efforts to reform mountain grazing practices, turning more-than-human entanglements of Alpine pastures into a "battlefield of knowledge" (Long and Long 1992). Considering this, this paper examines how science and local experience can be mediated in situated knowledge production processes in the Alps, also exploring how past expert junctions might inform responses to today’s severe ecological crisis.

Drawing on environmental anthropology and STS, the talk combines historical analysis of a farming handbook produced under the Napoleonic domination with ethnographic explorations of environmental knowledge in nowadays Southwestern Italian Alps. In particular, it engages empirically and theoretically with the transnational work of an Alpine botanist (1753-1827), whose writings sought to bridge scientific reasoning with vernacular expertise about Alpine pastures. The paper, thus, interrogates past and present forms of environmental knowledge, considering how people can individually and collectively be capable of recomposing different ecological know-hows in generative ways.

Ethnographic explorations have shown that this scientific endeavour remains relevant today. As this part of the Alpine region faces accelerating climate changes and rewilding processes, the 19th-century botanical handbook serves as a field device for critically reflecting on the vanishing of ecological knowledge in the Anthropocene. Moreover, the paper considers rural, peripheral areas as sitii where - by overcoming fractures and polarizations - anthropology can participate in constructing of new universalisms by recomposing diverse, situated knowledges (Bečka et al. 2024).