Paper short abstract:

Our paper proposes a brief literature review of comparative perspectives in mountain studies within sociocultural geography and anthropology to point out the diverse forms of describing and analyzing changing communities in different mountain regions, particularly in the Alps and the Andes.

Paper long abstract:

We discuss the potentialities of existing geographical and anthropological approaches to analyze changes in communities of mountain areas in the context of contemporary multi-crisis and uncertainties.

In comparative sociocultural anthropology of mountain areas, since the 1980s, scholars have investigated historical processes and wider regional scales to overcome reductionist forms of cultural ecology. Andean anthropologists have focused on political violence, migrations, and changing economic connections at local, national, and global level. In the Alps, anthropologists have taken the economic transformation of the second afterwar as a starting point, both searching for continuities in memory and monitoring demographic change, depopulation, and repopulation. In the last two decades, from all these branches, scholars have directly addressed the uncertainties of globalization and environmental crisis.

In sociocultural geography too, historical analysis has been particularly fruitful to describe and analyze changes in the Alps. As a common feature, geographical mountain studies stress the interdependence of mountain and plain areas and underline that demographic changes go hand in hand with social, economic and landscape changes. Furthermore, geographical mountain studies identify changes in politics as a possible driving force of variations in the use of different vertical zones and social transformations. Studies investigating the formation of collective identities describe changes in the forms of identity construction of communities in mountain areas through political transformations and economic globalization. A last set of literature focuses on the change of the image of mountain areas connected to the arts, and economic and communicative globalization.