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Paper short abstract

This paper explores free-range shepherding in Sardinia as a device of multispecies memory and ecological resistance, where humans, sheep, and landscapes co-create knowledge through emplaced romanticism and forms of more-than-human witnessing.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates free-range shepherding in Barbagia, central Sardinia, as a practice of multispecies witnessing and ecopolitical memory. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how shepherds and their flocks co-create worlds through what we term emplaced romanticism—a cultural device where memory is not a passive recall of a lost past, but an active, material practice shaping present ecologies. In the village of “Funtanalba,” ruins, orchids, and sheepfolds serve as memory devices, entangling humans and more-than-human beings in shared acts of remembering and reworlding.

These dynamics are not solely human-driven. Sheep transmit knowledge of the land across generations, guiding humans in settlement and pastoral practices, while plants like Ophrys apifera embody extinct relations in their petals. Drawing on the work of Despret, Meuret, and Haraway, we conceptualize this shepherding ecology as a cosmoecology—a network of mutual obligations and affective ties between humans, animals, and landscapes.

Focusing on such memory practices challenges dominant, often colonial and technologically mediated narratives of knowledge and witnessing—those shaped by satellites, sensors, or extractive logics. By contrast, these embodied and relational forms of memory give voice to ecologies that are technologically unmediated and historically silenced. They reframe traditionally excluded actors—reproductive forces such as shepherds, animals, plants, rocks, winds, and ancestors—as legitimate witnesses. In a region often perceived as peripheral or “wild,” free-range shepherding becomes a form of ecological reproduction and political resistance that pluralizes the field of who and what gets to remember.