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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.