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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in rural Italy, this paper examines how living with the Marsican brown bear reshapes local conflicts over belonging. The relationship between humans and bears unsettles oppositions between nativism and cosmopolitanism giving rise to new forms of multispecies community.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Marsica area (Abruzzo, Italy), this paper explores how human/nonhuman relations complicate polarized politics of belonging in rural places. Focusing on the endangered “native” subspecies of Marsican brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus), it examines how residents, conservationists, and institutions negotiate competing claims of autochthony, care, and exclusion through a nonhuman figure that is at once deeply local and profoundly invested with translocal representations.

The bear is widely framed as an indigenous presence and mobilized as a marker of territorial authenticity and ecological continuity. Simultaneously, it is embedded in transnational conservation regimes, EU biodiversity policies, scientific monitoring networks, and global environmental imaginaries. Through everyday encounters, conflicts, and original practices of coexistence, rural actors articulate forms of belonging that exceed the neat opposition between nativism and cosmopolitanism. Rather than expressing either closed nativist territorialism or liberal openness, these practices reveal a relational politics grounded in a human-nonhuman communitas.

By approaching rural politics of (un)belonging through an ecoanthropological lens, the paper argues that nonhuman beings can function as mediators of polarized rural imaginaries, unsettling anthropocentric assumptions about who belongs and on what grounds. In doing so, it contributes to debates on rural marginality, autochthony, and cosmopolitanism by showing how global connections and local attachments are not opposing forces but are co-produced in everyday multispecies worlds. The case of the bear highlights how rural places are not merely sites of political polarization, but laboratories for alternative - though fragile - forms of belonging in a polarized world.