Elisabeth Tauber
Free University of Bolzano, Italy
ORCID: 0000-0003-3654-837X

PAGES: 114-125

KEYWORDS: herder, landscape, body, total social fact, Eastern Alps, Italy.

ABSTRACT:
Until the structural change in South Tyrolean agriculture in the 1960s, the high pastures were important as essential fodder resources for the subsistence farming of mountain farmers, so it was primarily the farmers who were responsible for negotiating grazing rights. The task of the herder, on the other hand, was essentially to observe these rights strictly. Historically, herders in South Tyrol have played a socially marginal role, their activities focusing exclusively on the summer high pastures. But the current situation is different. Drawing on the example of one particular mountain pasture and one herder, the landscape can be understood as a “total social fact.” This landscape as a whole is able to give us a condensed account of the comprehensive changes over the past fifty years, expressed as the return of scrub, and the new embodied practices of the herder as well as the grazing animals.

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:
Tauber, Elisabeth. 2024. “Herders in Transformation: Exploring Changing Landscapes in the Eastern Italian Alps.” Martor 29, 114-25. [DOI: 10.57225/martor.2024.29.08]

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Tauber_Martor 29

MARTOR no. 29 / year 2024

Herders in Transformation: Exploring Changing Landscapes in the Eastern Italian Alps