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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.