Contribution short abstract:

This paper account for the life of an Travelling Chair for Agriculture operating in the Italian Alps between the 19th and the 20th century. In particular, in explores how scientific and folkloric elements were blended in the functioning of this agrarian institution.

Contribution long abstract:

For many decades between the 19th and the 20th century, the Travelling Chairs for Agriculture played a noteworthy role in modernising and transforming agricultural practices in the Italian countryside, as significant historiographical literature has now documented. Such agrarian institutions, created with the support of municipalities and local banks, often represented important spaces of transnational circulation of people and ideas, as shown by the accounts of the lives of agronomists, botanists and animal husbandry experts who animated them. However, less attention seems to have been paid, up until now, to the specific forms of national identity championed by these experts and technicians, as well as to the social representations of rural societies that animated their work. Rudimentary forms of folk-lore seems to have underpinned and legitimated the actions of scientists who passionately devoted themselves to disseminating new agricultural techniques through leaflets, practical demonstrations and rural lectures. It is precisely what I will demonstrate in this paper, based on archival data about the life (1886-1928) of a Travelling Chair for Agriculture operating in the south-Western Alps. In particular, I will examine how the production of knowledge about Alpine societies was instrumental to the politics and functioning of an institution charged with improving agricultural economies. More generally, in considering how non-folklorist actors were close to a folkloric sensibility, I will show how it was the porosity of different social worlds that favoured the circulation of these spontaneous forms of ethnology of Alpine societies.