Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with mountain farmers and shepherds, who work in different ways on steep, alpine mountain terrain in close relationship with animals, plants and land(scape). Our focus is on current developments, following the considerable agricultural changes that took place over the last decades.

Paper long abstract:

The focus of our ongoing research in the Trentino-South-Tyrol region are mountain farmers and shepherds, who work in high altitude, steep mountain terrain in an intense relationship with animals, plants and land. The current developments in this small-scale agrarian sector, following the considerable agricultural transformation that took place in the region over the last decades, calls for an ethnological re-consideration.

In our understanding, landscape plays an essential role in the “agrarian worlds”, which we understand, following Galvin (2018), as formative meeting places through the networks and relations from which they re-emerge. Farming practices with and on land are part of a larger network, co-constituted by people, animals, plants and land. We consider landscape as an actor in the social and cultural lives of the people we work with. The contradiction between idealized western concepts of landscape and the realities of everyday working of the land as we see it during our research, is a constant challenge for our work. Local people look from very different perspectives at the landscape and are concerned with current transformations - for reasons of climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil stability and tourism.

In this short paper, we look at landscape, asking how co-sociality, understood as everyday interactions and interrelationships – characterised by care, sociability and intimacy – manifests itself. What is the current state of the co-constituting relationships of humans, animals and grassland and what might it mean for re-creating the landscape and re-thinking research practices?