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.