Contribution short abstract:

This presentation will examine the specificities of access to natural resources for the inhabitants of a mountain settlement from an SES (social and ecological systems) perspective. Resources are abundant in the settlement, but access to them is limited/problematic for the locals. This raises the question of the extent to which the specific dynamics can be examined from the perspective of different trap situations, in particular the entitlement trap approach.

Contribution long abstract:

The settlement investigated in this presentation was established as a logging camp at the end of the 19th century. As long as timber was plentiful in the area and/or socialist/paternalistic distribution provided the goods necessary for a livable life, a semblance of prosperity was maintained despite the crises that occurred - and were almost continuous. Thus, the inherent problems of the system - that local people do not actually have access to resources, or have access to them only through intermediaries - have also remained constantly hidden. However, after the collapse of the socialist system and the timber industry, and the closure of the mill, these problems suddenly surfaced. The locals had to look for new opportunities almost overnight, while the principles of distribution hardly changed. The village has now discovered other resources in addition to the wood of the forest: gathering forest fruits and mushrooms, but access issues remain unresolved. A competition is therefore under way, which has now extended to the process of touristification (creation of a landscape and use of resources for touristic purposes). This presentation examines this competition and under-codified situation and looks at the relationship that locals built with the environment and natural resources. In order to capture the complexity of the problem, the paper adopts an SES (social and ecological systems) approach and also asks how plausibly the entitlement trap as an explanation describes the relationship within the community and between the community and the environment.

Contribution short abstract:

In the rural communities of the Peruvian Andes, school education is considered a means of social and economic advancement. However, there are discrepancies between the discourse on educational expectations and decisions in a context of unfavorable structural socioeconomic conditions.

Contribution long abstract:

This article examines the expectations and decisions of peasant families regarding education in the peasant community of Huacatinco in the district of Ocongate in the Cusco region (southern Andes of Peru), in a context of accelerated change. Quechua-speaking mothers and fathers use the metaphorical expression ñawiyuq (with eyes) to refer to the education they would like their children to have. The research shows that the greatest aspiration stated by mothers, fathers, and school students is to achieve secondary education; and then to pursue higher education, which, it is hoped, will allow them to obtain employment and economic wellbeing. However, in practice, many young people do not continue with their higher education, opting to work as soon as possible, especially in the informal mining sector. Thus, there is a discrepancy between the discourse on educational expectations and decisions in a context of unfavorable structural socioeconomic conditions.

Contribution short abstract:

Andean communities have long been stereotyped as isolated, timeless, and closed, overlooking their dynamism, interconnectedness, and complexity. This paper challenges such narratives by exploring the economic, social, and cultural flows that link urban and rural spaces across multiple scales. Drawing on ethnographic research and photographic material from Puno, Arequipa, and Cuzco, I examine tourism, mobility, and rural/urban relations to reveal the Andes as connection sites where verticality mediates local and global relationships.

Contribution long abstract:

Since at least the modern era, literary and, later, academic representations of mountains and the communities that inhabit them have produced stereotypical narratives depicting these spaces as isolated and peripheral, populated by traditional communities impermeable to external influences. These idyllic, conflict-free rural imaginaries have persisted, even in altered forms. Often perpetuated by the tourism industry, such narratives essentialise mountain environments and their dwellers as static, unchanging places. In Peru, for example, both recent and historical narratives about the Sierra (i.e., highlands) have frequently relied on depictions of desolate and empty landscapes, self-sufficient and closed communities, and fixed, immutable identities—representations that ethnographic inquiry reveals to be profoundly superficial. The Sierra has always been and remains today a site of economic connections, flows of people, ideas, goods, conflicts, and knowledge—an intersection of urban and rural relationships that ties together Indigenous, national, and transnational worldviews. This paper reflects on the need to unwrite the vision of the Andes as exclusively local and closed and to overcome the dichotomous framing of urban and rural as discrete, unconnected spaces. Drawing on ethnographic examples and photographic material from my fieldwork, which began in 2013 in Puno, Arequipa, and Cuzco, I will discuss how tourism, internal, national, and international mobilities, traces of "rurality" within "urbanity," and the materiality of things, mediated by intersecting ontologies, contribute to a more complex, multifaceted, and non-essentialised portrait of Andean communities. In the Andean world, verticality is not unidirectional but a dimension of connection, linking local and global scales.

Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss storytelling and writing as more than human practices. Taking the manifold relationships between humans and mountains in Switzerland as a starting point, I follow the questions of who has the right to tell a story resp. who is telling stories to whom.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss storytelling and writing as more than human practices. As a central aspect of my PhD project, I am looking at the manifold relationships between humans and mountains, especially in the Swiss Alps, focusing on narratives that emerge in and influence these relationships. Scientific, literary or everyday practices lead to a variety of different relationships: listening to the mountain, trying to understand how it is changing, feeling it, reading its signs, searching for its secrets, looking at it from a distance, living with it, using its resources, controlling its movements, taking care – who is telling a story to whom? Narrative practices are not exclusively human, they are part of the world: the living and the things leave traces and tell their stories. From these non-human articulations, humans derive incredible details and connections about rock strata, animal grazing, plant growth, the sound of glaciers, earth energies. Humans learn to decode mountain worlds and their stories, and can reconstruct entire bodies, long epochs, or powerful events, but they also form intimate relationships, tacit agreements, and detailed knowledge sharing within these worlds. Who has the right to decide what a story is and what it is not? What determines its value and who tells it? By focusing my attention on the relationships that unfold in mountain worlds, on the practices of approaching, paying attention and paying heed, I follow the material-semiotic signs that come together in mountain storytelling and ask how human and non-human narratives connect.

Contribution short abstract:

The Appalachian region of the United States has been persistently stereotyped in dominant narratives. This paper gives examples of how multiple ways of knowing have been drawn on to craft counterstories that portray Appalachia’s diverse identities and perspectives and intense global connections.

Contribution long abstract:

The Appalachian region of the United States has been persistently stereotyped by successive generations in dominant national narratives through music; cartoons; movies; novels; journalism; historical, spatial and demographic mis/representations; and government discourses. This presentation will review the work that such stereotyping does culturally and ways that residents have drawn on multiple ways of knowing and sensing to contest those representations and forge new ones. One example will be a project in which the author (an anthropologist) has collaborated with a geologist, sociologist, historian and community members to document a waterscape in Appalachia through Traditional Ecological Knowledge, oral history and geoscientific research to consider what we can learn from a river about adapting to climate change. Other examples – drawn from the work of many in the region - will include countering stereotypes of Appalachia through uncloaking what they attempt to render invisible or silence: the intense global connections and diverse identities and perspectives in Appalachia. These counterstories are being communicated through foodways, visual art, poetry, memoirs, mapping, and outlawed stories and histories (as the Kentucky legislature is poised, for example, to pass legislation forbidding discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion in state universities). A forward focus of this project – following the sustainability tenet of reuse – is to collect existing resources on countering stereotypes of isolation and homogeneity of the Appalachian region for use in teaching, even if public education needs to seek broader community venues as this work is restricted in state schools.

Contribution short abstract:

Exploring how the perception of Emptiness of the landscape made by Western trekkers in the Nepali Himalayas emerges, this paper discusses how the local inhabitants running hospitality businesses respond to the trekkers’ imaginaries. It also highlights the global imaginative connections they draw from in doing so.

Contribution long abstract:

Every year tens of thousands of trekkers, mostly from Euro-American contexts, walk along the Annapurna Circuit Trek in the central Nepali Himalayas. Generally departing from Besishahar, a town at around 800 meters a.s.l., after about a week the trekkers reach the Thorong La, a 5,416 metres pass, to then descend in the valley of Muktinath and lower Mustang. As emerged in the research I have carried out in Kagbeni, a village located on the route, and through extensive digital ethnography with former trekkers, an important factor contributing to the lure the Himalayas exert on the visitors is the perceived emptiness of the Himalayan landscape. An emptiness that the trekkers deem central in the experiences of personal growth they report making on the route.

This paper discusses how the emergence of this perception of emptiness is bound to an understanding of the locals as “noble-savages” in a state of nature, and has its roots in the historical Western imperial project in the Himalayas. Besides contrasting the trekkers’ experience with that of the locals, who experience the local landscape as a living space shared by humans, deities, and other beings, this paper will also explore how the locals interact, attempting to run successful hospitality businesses, with the desires and imaginaries of the trekkers. It will focus in particular on how they do so by relying on multiple imaginative connections that stretch to places as far as the United States and that play out both through personal relationships and on social media.

Contribution short abstract:

Using family archives as a method and form of representation, we will tell the story of three generations of farmers working on agricultural land in the alpine valley Vinschgau/ Val Venosta, Italy, that has long been pictured as isolated and backward.

Contribution long abstract:

Our presentation will focus on the changing use of agricultural land in an alpine valley in present-day Italy that has long been pictured as isolated, poor and backward. Until its annexation by Italy after World War 1, the German-speaking Vinschgau/Val Venosta was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and considered the breadbasket of Tyrol. The combination of its unique inner-alpine dry climate with the abundance of water for irrigation and the constant dry wind coming down from the top of the valley made it the perfect place to grow grain. The collapse of subsistence farming in the mid-20th century ended this period. It was followed by an increase in dairy production and a short period of intensive vegetable cash-cropping that alleviated many of the valley's smallholders from generations of extreme poverty, but soon led to pest problems because of a lack of knowledge of suitable crop rotations. After the advent of new apple varieties adapted to the high altitude in the 1980s, in the span of a generation, Vinschgau has become the largest consecutive apple growing region in Europe. Its inhabitants now constitute one of the richest populations of small-scale farmers in the world. By using family archives as a method and form of representation, we will tell the story of three generations through text and images that ask for more complexity and grey areas than the dominant narratives of this mountain area.

Contribution short abstract:

We are among Swiss shepherds and their flocks on high alpine pastures in Switzerland. Unwriting the stereotypical image of a supposedly passive shepherd leads me to emphasise instead the complex, multi-species relationships between shepherds, dogs, sheep and the alpine grassland. The importance of sensory perception, particularly visual communication, in the adjustment of daily activities becomes apparent, and reveals how shepherds coordinate activities with their animals, accentuating the collaborative nature of their work in navigating and shaping high-altitude environments.

Contribution long abstract:

My current research project regularly places me in the company of Swiss shepherds and their flocks, providing a valuable opportunity to observe their daily lives and interactions. During this immersive fieldwork on high alpine pastures, I came to understand that the relationships involved are far more intricate than they might initially appear. Their bond is deeply rooted in a complex interplay where sensory perception and intuition converge to create a dynamic collaboration. The picture is more nuanced yet when we consider that semi-natural alpine grassland is not just a backdrop, but an active component of a multi-species association.

The image of a patient flock of sheep under the watchful eye of a shepherd - a calm, mild-mannered figure passively observing from a distance - is as iconic as it is reductive. While this stereotype persists in our imagination, it fails to capture the depth of skill, knowledge and effort required. This paper aims to un-write this received notion by focusing on the intricate expertise and techniques that shepherds, herding dogs and sheep rely on to navigate the long summer months spent at altitudes above 2000 metres. Among these skills, I will pay particular attention to the visual dimension of their relationship: shepherds, dogs and sheep communicate and coordinate their daily activities largely through eye contact. The shepherd's gaze becomes his primary tool, and the visual dialogue with the animals highlights the subtle yet profound ways in which the actors collaborate to adapt to and shaping a challenging environment.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper presents findings of a pilot study examining the construction and maintenance of agricultural irrigation systems (bisses/Suonen) and mountain bike trails in the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. Using Maintenance and Multispecies Studies, we challenge traditional views of these infrastructures as human-centered, instead seeing them as sites of complex interactions between humans and non-humans. Through 'unwriting' modern scientific narratives, we reveal the mountain as a dynamic web of elements with agency, enacted through specific practices and interactions.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper presents the initial findings of our pilot study, “Geteilschaften? Communal Maintenance as More-than-Human Cooperation in the Anthropocene.” This ethnographic study examines the practices involved in constructing and maintaining two types of mountain infrastructures in the Canton of Valais in Southern Switzerland: agricultural irrigation systems (bisses or Suonen) and mountain bike trails. Using approaches from Maintenance and Multispecies Studies in order to offer new insights into more-than-human cooperations and/or frictions in the Anthropocene, we extend the concept of Gemeinwerk—traditionally referring to collaborative, communal maintenance work carried out by agricultural collectives sharing resources and responsibilities—to include non-humans and contemporary, leisure-oriented infrastructuring practices. This perspective challenges both the common interpretations of these mountain infrastructures as mere expressions of human domestication of nature and the simplistic distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ infrastructuring practices. Instead, we consider both the channels and the trails as sites of complex interactions between humans and non-humans (including plants, animals, geological formations, climate, technical objects, legal regulations, narratives about the past or the future, etc.). Through a gesture aiming at unwriting modern scientific narratives, ‘the mountain’ is here approached as a material-semiotic actant: not a passive or uniform backdrop, but a dynamic, intricate web of elements, each with specific modes of agency and in constantly transforming relationships with others; and continually and situationally enacted through specific practices and interactions.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper will explore the relationship between the Bedouin community and natural flood cycles in central Sinai. It will focus on an urban megaproject currently under construction in the mountainous region of Saint Catherine, which aims to prevent/control the flooding of rainwater. Through this entry point, the paper seeks to examine differing perceptions of floods: what forms of dwelling co-exist with the existing flood cycles? Who views floods as a blessing in the desert? And who regards floods as a hazard?

Contribution long abstract:

One of the components of the Grand-Transfiguration-Project, under construction in St.Catherine, is to build a flood control system because the city is located at the intersection of many valleys and has been classified as a flood-prone zone. Now that millions worth of real estate is being built, the mountainous landscape of St.Catherine needs to be “domesticated through controlling the flow of rainwater. This paper will draw on literature that broadens the temporal lens to challenge anthropocentric views of certain natural phenomena often seen as catastrophic. Many scholars have highlighted the benefits of natural regimes of wildfires and floods for biodiversity in certain landscapes, arguing that urbanization in known flood-plains and fire-belts is a form of trespass against nature. In St.Catherine rain flooding is part of a natural cycle that sustains both human and non-human life in these arid terrains. Rainwater rests in valleys and reservoirs that Bedouins and a multitude of non-human species cyclically dwell around. Tampering with the flow of floods to protect the real estate being built may benefit sedentary communities, but it will have unaccounted for consequences on the landscape and its inhabitants. While the literature of the ontological turn prioritizes a more inclusive outlook into surrounding ecological/social worlds, phenomena like wildfires and flooding are still widely analyzed from an anthropocentric lens that spectacularizes their violence on human habitations and not the other way around. This paper will look at floods from a multi-species lens to examine how they are experienced and perceived by different groups.

Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on the case of cork oak woodlands decline in the Andalusian mountains, we explore the unexpected processes of socio-economic restructuring which take advantage of the new resources which deforestation makes available.

Contribution long abstract:

Iberian cork oak woodlands are a good example of transforming mountain contexts “accelerated by climate change”. For some decades now, they have been going through a multi-factorial process of deforestation called “seca” in Spanish (and declínio in Portuguese). In the case of Los Alcornocales Natural Park (Southern Andalusia), oak decline is the result of the lack of traditional practices of socio-ecosystemic reinvigoration and a style of management focused almost exclusively on hunting and cork extraction. Game species overload makes tree regeneration impossible, while climate change weakens existing trees, thus facilitating the dissemination of the lethal oomycete Phytophtora cinnamomi. Cork oak woodlands decline has been a key factor for the resurgence of forest workers’ unionism in this region, mainly represented by the Andalusian Cork Workers and Muleteers Association (ACOAN). But deforestation has not been the source of damage, solastalgia and struggle. In a context of increasing wood availability, a novel trend consists in the development of entrepreneurial activities by several former forest workers. Although their “patios” (facilities where their workers process raw wood from the forest) are known by some local people as “funeral parlours of the natural park”, they are also responsible for a full employment situation. Beyond the problematic of the needed adaptation, our paper focus instead on the social restructuring processes that are developing in the context of local environmental transformations accelerated by climate change. We think this is a crucial perspective to understand (and face) the socio-environmental challenges that mountain regions are going through currently.

Contribution short abstract:

Mourning rituals for (future) environmental loss remains in Western society mainly anthropocentric. Rituals for humans are projected on "dead" landscapes. This paper aims for rituals emerging from daily encounters with the "dying" Hochvogel mountain.

Contribution long abstract:

Within the context of the climate crisis, mourning rituals concerning (future) environmental loss have gained attention in the last couple of years. In 2019, Iceland held the first glacier funeral for the dead glacier Ok. Almost at the same time, people in Switzerland went on a funeral march to the Pizol glacier, wearing black. Since then, glacier funerals have spread globally with the intention of raising awareness for the global climate crisis. Death and commemorative ritual is in this context a powerful manner to do so. But the rituals remain predominantly Westernized ones, usually held for other humans, projected on a landscape. This paper aims to emerge death -, end-of-life care - and commemorative rituals together with the "dying" Hochvogel mountain, based on a four-week autoethnographic field work by artistic researcher s†ëf∆n schäfer, in July 2024, as the first trip of many to follow. Daily visits to the mountain's summit led to first attempts towards rituals emerging from the intimate interaction between schäfer as a human, and the Hochvogel mountain as a more-than human entity, but also between the weather, fauna and flora, equipment are active non-human participants in the proces of ritual making and performing.

Contribution short abstract:

After defeating the Vedanta Corporation in 2013, the Dongaria Kondhs revived their traditional farming and weaving and renewed their sense of their rights to the forest. I will present ethnographic research on the Indigenous practice of symbiotic relationship with nature to combat climate change.

Contribution long abstract:

Indigenous people view land and natural resources as sacred –living, thinking, and acting beings. Indigenous land, forests, water, and mountains are currently under pressure, commodified, and objectified from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities and mindless development ventures taken up by states and profit-oriented multinational corporations. "Plantationocene" has broken the ties to place, disregarding the indigenous land-based knowledge and wisdom. Based on my fieldwork in Odisha, I will focus on the sacred logic of Dongaria Kondhs and the neighboring tribes to protect their holy mountain, Niyamagiri, the source of their food, water, livelihood, and spiritual identity. Previously, I have discussed mountains as powerful and sacred actors in indigenous people's efforts to organize and protect their regions from irrevocable destruction through mining activities (Pandey and Kingsolver, 2022).

The Dongaria Kondhs are trying to revive their traditional farming and weaving. With a renewed sense of their rights to the forest after fighting against Vedanta, a U.K.-based mining company, in 2013 and in collaboration with grassroots organizations, e.g., Living Farms, the tribe has resuscitated lost seed varieties and revitalized their symbiotic relationship with nature for sustainable farming and weaving. The Dongaria women, through their elaborate cultural rituals, are leading this initiative.

Based on ethnographic research, I will present Indigenous wisdom on their land, medicine, livelihood, and spiritual identity as the logic behind fighting against climate change, the coercive state, and profit-making corporations.

Contribution short abstract:

The presentation addresses how two mountain communities in the Slovenian Alps perceive environmental changes at different temporal and spatial scales, and how they make, remake, and unmake environmental relationships, which help them in coping with these changes.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation explores the perceptions of environmental change among the locals, especially, transhumant pastoralists, in two distinct Alpine communities in Slovenia: Bohinj and Solčava. Both localities have traditionally relied on pastoralism, albeit in very different forms of farming, grazing practises and relationships with the environment. The presentation addresses how the locals perceive environmental changes at different temporal and spatial scales and how they make, remake, and unmake environmental relationships. Environmental relationships, which involve relationships between humans, animals, plants, forests, mountains, pastures, weather, and other environmental attributes are continuously in the making. Changes seem to be accelerating and can be attributed to diverse factors, such as climate changes (e.g. floods, droughts, snow patterns, extensions of pastoral seasons), conservation practices (e.g. reintroduction of wolfes and other wildlife), impact of tourism, or local practices. Such approach also aims to unwrite the understanding of mountain communities as stable, unchanging and detached from global processes. Instead, it will argue that local environmental knowledge, skills, or habituated practices serve to constitute affordances for the development of new practices, thus providing possibilities for imagining futures and coping with the changing world.

Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on my ethnography of the relationship between Indigenous mountain communities and Western alternative spirituality in Colombia and the Czech Republic, I argue that mountains serve as a primary source for understanding human-nonhuman interconnectedness and global environmental sustainability.

Contribution long abstract:

The Indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, are often stereotyped as "traditional cultures", separate and fossilised groups inhabiting a remote mountainous region. In Western alternative spirituality, they are romantically portrayed as those who have not been completely corrupted by our civilisation and have therefore been able to preserve ancient wisdom about how to live in harmony with nature. However, far from cultural purity and pristine tradition, these groups have been in contact with various types of nonindigenous actors for centuries and have been profoundly influenced by missionaries, trade, migration and tourism.

Drawing on my ethnographic research in Colombia and the Czech Republic, I examine this relationship between Indigenous mountain communities and Western alternative spirituality. In particular, I focus on the visits of Indigenous people from Colombia to Europe, highlighting the ways in which Indigenous political and religious agendas meet Western environmental and spiritual discourses. Indigenous ways of knowing, based on lived experience of the mountains, are being reshaped by narratives of harmony with nature, ecological crisis and climate change. The aim of this paper is to show that it is the mountains that serve as a primary source for understanding the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman beings, their coexistence and global environmental sustainability.