Paper short abstract:

Zdrój is an area of dilemmas characteristic to post-transformation societies. Local memory in Zdrój reaches the tradition of a former elite mountain spa town. However, transition has brought an erosion of the state`s position leaving the space open for new, yet contested discourses and practices.

Paper long abstract:

Zdrój is a mountain spa town in southern Poland. Patients, attracted by curative waters and unique microclimate, have been visiting the place for more than two centuries. The first ethnographic encounters and experiences revealed, that Zdrój is a complex area of social dilemmas and interactions characteristic to post-transformation societies of Central Europe. The sociocultural memory in Zdrój is anchored the “invented tradition” of a former elite spa town. The remains of it can be traced in local discourses, architectural heritage (villas, baths) and in the town`s composition reflecting social stratification.

Nowadays, Zdrój suffers from the effects of transition, namely environmental and social degradation, limited job opportunities, and labour migrations. After 1896, the town rapidly moved from the (mono)culture of healing and modern recreational landscape controlled by the state, to the scattered culture of a free market focused exploitation – not elite, nor healing. Centralized model of managing local resources and associated sociocultural meanings has been discarded. A good example of this is the local water, which, as we have learned, once a collective good and social actor attached to the place and its community, currently has been commoditizated and handed over private hands.

After completing the project in 2020, we still consider this process as non-finished. Nevertheless, we understand, that transition has brought to Zdrój massive changes in social relations and local memory. Gradual erosion of the state`s position has left the space open for new discourses, yet the latter often being contested and rejected by the local community.

Paper short abstract:

My presentation deals with a small Hungarian mountain region, where social structure have been rapidly changing in the last two decades due to economic and demographic reasons. I study the connections of locals and environment through the concept of topophilia.

Paper long abstract:

In recent times, migration and free move is increasing in a great scale, which dramaticly alters our working practices and habits, especially in montanious areas with bad infrastructure. In my paper presentation, I am dealing with the changing social composition and the varying economic basis of villages lying in Mecsek-mountains (South-Hungary), and the attitudes toward spaces reflected in land use activities. It involves the research of various pursuits from farmers' work to hikers' leisure activity in the last two decades. My approach is standing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s book about topophilia, in which he describe numerous possible connections and ways of thinking about landscape and space. I also use Castells’ „network society”, Ingold’s „lines” concept as a theoretic frame, to introduce the experiences of a long term participant observation. I argue that despite of free move, people have less (depending on their economic power and holding) access to natural resourses (material and intangible), and it can be measured through the use of places. The use of spaces and the landscape in general is practiced by specialized groups (with varying landscape knowledge from shallow to deep), however the most of man-made, and touristically appreciated values (scenery, folk architecture etc.) are threatened because of globalized consumption patterns.

Paper short abstract:

Alpine pastures have become the focus of the media South Tyrol. This interest was triggered by the return of the wolf, drawing attention to an imbalance in the management of pastures. This paper deals with a group of shepherds who elude the mainstream discourse aiming to revitalize alpine pastures.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s, alpine pastures in South Tyrol (Italy) have increasingly become tourist resorts, while alpine dairymen, -women and shepherds have played only a marginal role. Herd animals such as sheep, goats and cattle became fewer and their economic role increasingly insignificant. The media rhetoric against the wolf was intended to cover up this imbalance. The shepherds I am working with rely on pastoral practices learned from their relatives, in the Italian lowlands and in Switzerland. They plea for a renewed professionalization of herding practices. This includes the understanding of their relationship with the environment and animals that is characterized by their sole human presence amidst livestock and predators in a harsh alpine mountain context. The practice of these shepherds is to stay with the herd and take care of it during daytimes, fencing it during night. To protect the herd, electric fences and herd protection dogs would also be needed, assets and tools provided with support from EU subsidies.

In my paper, I look at the relationship of these shepherds with their environment, domesticated herd animals, wild animals (eagles, vultures and wolves) and the alpine pastures. Their understanding of places and practices is embedded in a network of relationships that makes use of the technical possibilities and yet builds on an active dialogue with the animals. In this sense, the paper will shed light on the human and animal relationship networks that a renegotiated understanding of locality in the South Tyrolean Alps calls for.

Paper short abstract:

Current fieldwork with high-altitude farmers in the context of a research project in South Tyrol (Italy) affords the opportunity to present and discuss some particular local values and imaginaries and the negotiations they are subject to within the wider locality of the valley and the region.

Paper long abstract:

"For nothing in the world would I have married an apple farmer", I was told by a woman in her late thirties, when we drove through seemingly endless apple plantations, interspersed with 4 star hotels and neat guesthouses. We were close to the village where she had grown up and lived before marrying a farmer whose remote homestead is located on the steep mountain side of a nearby valley, 1600m above sea level. She had thus chosen a distinctive kind of life, in relative isolation and in daily contact with the soil, from which she, her husband and father-in-law extract the income for the growing family.

Since the late 1970s, the regional government of South-Tyrol has subsidised high-mountain farmers, thus facilitating the modernisation of cowsheds and milking installations and developing the necessary infrastructure to enable farmers to remain on their remote farms. Nevertheless, ‘traditional’ self-sufficiency is fundamental for their self-image, it remains an important aim and is constantly negotiated with the shifting relational networks linking them with the valley bottom. Their constant intimate and intense relationship with animals, plants, soil and the surrounding landscape, all of which they observe meticulously, gives them confidence in understanding upcoming developments and in dealing with them in respect of their immediate environment.

Current fieldwork with high-altitude farmers in the context of an ongoing ethnographic research project of the University of Bolzano (Italy) affords the opportunity to present and discuss some particular local values and the tensions they are subject to within the wider locality.

Paper short abstract:

The engagement in a global post-industrial economy based on leisure and tourism has led to new ways of inhabiting mountain areas. In this paper, we discuss the intersections, tensions, and power relations that (dis)connect tourism and agriculture in two valleys of the Catalan Pyrenees.

Paper long abstract:

Val d'Aran and Cerdanya were the firsts valleys in the Catalan Pyrenees that became a tourist destination linked to mountain sports, particularly in relation to the development of the ski industry. Until the mid-twentieth century, these mountainous regions were mainly managed as farmland, being tourism a relatively small phenomenon. These valleys had a complex social structure, with differences and inequalities structured on the basis of land tenure ownership. However, a common trait was the diversification of economic activities, combining farming with mining, the production of hydroelectric power, and cross-border trade. Moreover, seasonal migrations constituted one of the households’ strategies to ensure a livelihood.

The engagement in a global post-industrial economy based on leisure and tourism has led to new ways of inhabiting these mountain areas, changing local socioeconomic dynamics and structures, and therefore, transforming local agricultural cultures in uneven ways. Literature has addressed deagrarisation, but also the intensification of production or shifts in production orientation, such as agroecological conversion or artisanal production. In sum, the process of turistification, gentrification and urbanisation has deeply transformed farming activities.

Based on ethnographic research data, we will examine the intersections between tourism and agriculture. By focusing our analysis on the historical coexistence of different economic activities in these mountain areas and their current transformations, we intend to overcome binary analysis in which the urbanization process linked to the development of ski resorts is seen as incompatible with farming activities, overlooking the interrelation, tensions, and power relations that (dis)connect these two productive sectors.