Paper short abstract:

Mutual aid initiatives have multiplied in recent years in Switzerland, bringing together on the Alp a range of volunteers who engage innovative exchanges with peasant families in need. On the Alp, interesting assemblages of humans and non-humans reshape their representations of the Other.

Paper long abstract:

In Switzerland, several aid programs, from associations and the state, support farmers in need whose farms are located at an altitude of over 800 metres, by providing them with human resources. Since 1995, numerous volunteers (civil servants, ordinary citizens) have been given their time and skills to support mountain farmers in their daily work.

Our paper relies on an undergoing anthropological project that proposes an ethnography of 4 volunteer programs to the mountain farmers in the Swiss Alps. It focuses to one of them, an eco-volunteer program, founded in 2020 in Valais, that provides sheep farmers with volunteers to watch over their flocks in order to prevent wolf attacks. Such innovative programs offer privileged sites to observe how interesting assemblages of humans and non-humans interact and change their representations of the Other, whether human or animal.

Our exploratory survey indicates that the volunteers who show up are often urban ecologists who dream of seeing the wolf, but who, once on the Alp, become attached to the sheep and start to fear its arrival. It suggests that farmers have many stereotypes about city dwellers, but ultimately appreciate the effort they make and the solidarity they show by assisting them, whereas the locals do not give them any help.

It suggests ways to analyse the composition of some little-known alpine microcosms that offer an other type of support (than the financial one of federal subsidies) to mountain farmers by reshaping their imaginaries, working practices and identity, on the basis of gift relationships.

Paper short abstract:

Through the conceptual lens of Zygmunt Bauman’s solid and liquid modernity the paper intends to examine how rural and urban relations, local understandings and uses of land, and occupational patterns changed in the lives of the members of different generations in a smaller region in Transylvania.

Paper long abstract:

The region in which I conducted my fieldwork has a long history of rural and urban relations. It's very first ethnographic portrayals from the 19th century make it clear that the villages neighbouring the city of Turda produce vegetables for the market of the city and send some of their youngsters to work in its mines and factories. Surprisingly these relations, these life strategies – at least in peaceful times - have not changed radically in most of the 20th century, even during the years of socialism, the period of nationalisation, forced collectivization and industrialization. Based on my ethnographic findings I wish to prove that the different generations of radically different historic periods followed similar mobility and economic strategies. Only recently, in Bauman’s liquid modernity did these routes of mobility become unviable life strategies, as local traditional practices of land use have been disrupted and jobs in the city became scarce. In my presentation I wish to introduce some members of the different generations, and to map the changes in mobility patterns and the functions of agriculture through documenting their life stories. With the portrayal of some of the locals and newcomers my I intention is to point out the controversial character of space in liquid modernity: to the well-off citizens space becomes transparent, practically non-existent and to them exercising mobility is matter of choice, a liberty, while to others space is burden, and mobility is a must, an unwanted strategy dictated by economic necessity.

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic case study of the Danish policy of redistributing state jobs from Copenhagen to the provinces, the paper shows how the local encounter of a relocated government workplace and a rural town community interacts with local and regional imaginaries of past centres and peripheries

Paper long abstract:

Based on an anthropological study of the Danish national policy initiative of redistributing state jobs from Copenhagen to the provinces, the paper draws on an ethnographic case study of the everyday encounter of the government workplace, Nota, and the local town community, Nakskov, on the Danish rural island of Lolland, where Nota has taken up residence in the former town hall at Nakskov’s central town square. Through a focus on materiality and time, in the paper I illuminate and discuss the various socio-cultural implications of this exact placing, seen from the two-fold perspective of the relocated workplace and established local inhabitants. As regards the former town hall and especially its council chamber, first, the analysis unpacks how, in practice, a dual ownership between the State and local townspeople comes into being, within which as a workplace Nota must now operate and maneuver in everyday life. Next, it is argued how, furthermore, Nota’s placement in the town’s cultural-historical “inner sanctuary” comes to interact with and revitalize larger historical contexts outside of the former town hall building; namely the Danish national amalgamation of municipalities in 2007, whereby Nakskov’s status as independent municipality for nearly 140 years ended. It is concluded how, fundamentally, the local encounter between the relocated government workplace and the established town community do not begin with Nota’s arrival, but that its specific layers of meaning and terms of interaction are already entrenched in local collective self-understandings and regional imaginaries and memory about past centres and peripheries.