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Paper short abstract:

Farmers in the Eastern Alps face fierce debates about care and exploitation of their land, groping along the uncertainty of increasingly monotonous agricultural landscapes that can be understood as formative sites of encounter and intersecting networks that thoroughly make and change us.

Paper long abstract:

The data for this talk comes from a recently concluded research project on issues to do with alpine pastures and high-altitude single farmsteads in the Eastern Alps. We will talk about mountain farmers and herders, people who work in different ways on steep, often inaccessible mountain terrain in close collaboration with animals, plants, and land. In our research the focus was on current developments, which, however, also included a comparative consideration of the last six decades. During this period, considerable agricultural transformations took place, resulting in changes of the Alpine landscape beyond agriculture. Since then, people are struggling with painful contradictions between local ideals of intact landscapes and realities of conventional agricultural practices. Species loss, loss of soil stability and effects of extreme weather conditions rumor below and above monocultural landscapes causing anxiety and a sense of uncertainty among local people. In this scenario, mountain farmers and alpine herders are considered the most important keepers of the cultural landscape. Though its drastic transformation is, paradoxically, considered to be also their own responsibility. The local population sees them as being accountable for the overgrowth of high alpine pastures and over-fertilisation of meadows by industrial dairy farming. In our ethnographic research we come across fierce debates on the need of care for and practices of exploitation of land. Though in our analysis we understand the transformation of landscapes of agricultural worlds as formative places of encounters and overlapping networks and relationships from which they emerge; that thoroughly make and change us.