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Short abstract

The Sardinian Blue Zone reframes a marginal agro-pastoral landscape as a global model of longevity. This paper examines how scientific translation reshapes rural land imaginaries, turning backwardness into value while sustaining epistemic hierarchies.

Long abstract

This paper examines the Sardinian Blue Zone as an epistemic rural frontier emerging from a historically marginal agro-pastoral landscape. First identified in the mountainous region of Ogliastra, the Blue Zone has become a global model of longevity, transforming a territory long depicted as isolated and underdeveloped into a paradigmatic site of health and resilience.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and postcolonial scholarship, the paper traces the sociotechnical translation processes through which individual biographies were converted into demographic indices and subsequently into genetic and epigenetic explanations. These operations reframe rural practices — pastoralism, subsistence agriculture, seasonal foodways — as measurable lifestyle determinants while simultaneously homogenizing complex ecological and social realities.

The Blue Zone thus operates as a frontier where agricultural imaginaries shift: marginality becomes value, low-intensity land use becomes sustainable virtue, and rural “backwardness” becomes biological advantage. Yet this revalorization remains ambivalent. The scientific construction of longevity reproduces subtle colonial logics of extraction and validation, reinforcing Sardinia’s position as an epistemic periphery dependent on external authority.

At the same time, local actors strategically reappropriate the Blue Zone identity through tourism, heritage performances, and symbolic boundary-making, turning stigma into resource.

The Sardinian case reveals how rural frontiers are not only sites of ecological or economic transition, but also arenas where knowledge, identity, and power are renegotiated.