Paper short abstract:

This paper identifies and discusses religious impulses in the formation of South Tyrolean borderscapes by tracing the meaning of these impulses for the institutional, discursive and symbolic formation of meshes between social boundaries and political borders.

Paper long abstract:

The current South Tyrolean border between Italy and Austria is since more than 100 years a source of dispute between people living in this region and beyond. Even though the violent clashes have ended today, this political border is still constantly negotiated in both everyday situations and ceremonies as well as political commentaries. The political border in many ways is transformed into language borders (German, Italian and Landin), landscape borders as well as social and cultural borders between imagined communities which often coincide with the language boundaries. As the Finnish geographer Anssi Paasi points out, the construction of such multidimensional borderscapes which evolve around (former) political borders and that can extend over large areas, involves processes of institutionalisation, the formation of border discourses and the formation of symbolic representations of the border. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article identify and discuss religious impulses in the formation of South Tyrolean borderscapes by tracing the meaning of these impulses for institutional, discursive and symbolic formation of meshes between social boundaries and political borders. Empirical examples to identify and discuss religious impulses will be ceremonies in which religious elements are prominently embedded such as that of the South Tyrolean Schützen (marksmen) and the reflection on their historical and geographical formation.