Abstract
This paper develops the concept of bioheritage. It does so by considering the work of a local and distinct breed of sheep, the Sambucana, detailing how this sheep has enabled the integration of otherwise centrifugal relations between markets for the meat, cheese, and wool derived from the many other sheep that have traversed the same locality over the past three centuries. Such integration binds bodies, memory, and consumption in a manner that illustrates the distinctiveness of bioheritage and advances understanding of wider social and cultural processes.
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Notes
Within the history of science, technology, and medicine, as well as the related field of science and technology studies, the emergence of “actor-network theory” could be regarded as offering a striking and resonant example of these fields’ contribution to the contemporary flattening of relations between ontological categories and structures (Harman 2016). One might say that actor-network theory aids an understanding of relations between humans, animals, and stones as no longer ordered hierchically. While not all proponents of actor-network theory share this understanding of the theory, the wider circulation of actor-network theory is nonetheless important to a broader transformation of contemporary thought about the material constitution of the world in which we exist and experience relations with others (Lemke 2021; see also Martin and Secor 2014; Cockayne, Ruez, and Secor 2019). This paper engages in a discussion of the transformation by considering both how humans have mobilized and transformed organic life to economic ends and how they have done so in ways that speaks to the current problematization of the organism (Bolman 2022; see also Wolfe 2010; Shields 2017; Law 2019).
The relationship between the study of history and the study of heritage and its production is particularly complicated, largely because the latter enterprise regards the past as the product of temporally removed cultural practices. As a result, Lowenthal (1998) has sometimes strongly contrasted the two modes of inquiry into the past, but discussions of their relationship, from Hobsbawm (1983) to Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge (2007) and beyond, point to a far more entangled relationship (see Harrison 2013). This said, while the study of heritage and the past need not entail any distinctive ontological commitment, the former remains more open to the studied superficiality of ethnographic method and is necessarily more attentive to processes of cultural transmission. As a result, the study of heritage and its production is perhaps more hospitable to the contemporary flattening of ontological categories and structures (Harrison 2015; Palladino 2018).
One of the paper’s reviewers asked for a map of the Valle Stura to better orient the reader. To accede to the request, however, would require privileging one among many different orderings of the space along the course of the river Stura. This would not only blind the reader to the complexity of the region’s historical transformations, which are detailed below, but also blind the reader to the more general role of sheep in constructing place and space. Foucault (1980) provided some very important reflections on these processes; see also Elden and Crampton (2007).
Deleuze (1992) discusses how a body should be understood as a nexus of forces such that no conventional, purely organic definition can serve as a model for a body’s capacities. These capacities cannot be known in advance because they are dependent on the contingencies of encounters with other bodies. As a result, the individuality of any particular body is to be understood as the outcome of a process of becoming, of “bodying” (Buchanan 1997). As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) put it pithily, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body” (p. 257). Since the ontology sustaining this particular understanding of the body has to be taken at face value, the test of its merits must rest with its productivity, with its capacity to let us see the world differently. The paper deploys this distinctive understanding of the body and related practices to articulate how the processes of connection that are involved in the production of one particular organic body, that of the Sambucana, come to order the spatial and temporal coordinates structuring the lives of yet other bodies, namely, the consumers of the Sambucana rendered into meat, cheese, and wool.
Genealogically, the contemporary ecomuseum derives from the museums devoted to the nation’s people and natural landscapes, which seem to have emerged mainly in Germany and Sweden around the end of the nineteenth century, and from those that emerged much later in France, which focused instead on relations between the rural and urban life as these were transformed during the first half of the twentieth century by the dynamics of economic modernization. The tensions between these different putative origins rehearse the multiple meanings of oikos, which can be used to refer either to the family, the family’s property, or the house, from whence also stems the fraught relationship between economic and ecological thought. While parts of this genealogy will be familiar to historians of the museum of natural history, the endeavor here is not so much to chart alternative sites of origin as it is to reflect on the effects of a particular framing of the organism evoked by displays and other sites of consumption in and around museums such as the Ecomuseo della Pastorizia. See Nyhart (2009); Rader (2013); Rader and Cain (2014). Foucault (1977) discussed very usefully the difference between these different historiographical orientations; see also Flynn (2005).
During the first half of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the leading and most widely read exponents of Darwinian thought. Bergson’s attraction to Darwinism was related to Bergson’s above-mentioned understanding of time and existence, but Bergson also objected to both the mechanism of natural selection and the role assigned to the germplasm. Bergson regarded the former as contradicting the intrinsic transformism of evolutionary process and argued against the latter that there was no material essence transmitted unchanged from one generation to the next because the transforming organism provided the material transmitted. Much of Deleuze’s distinctive insistence on the priority of process over substance rests on these ideas, but Deleuze also revises them, attending particularly to their implications for the relationship between bodies and organisms. Elizabeth Grosz has long drawn on these diverse resources to articulate a corporeal understanding of the relationship between sex, gender, and desire (Grosz 1994, 1995, 2004). There is also today a growing volume of more general inquiries into the significance of these intellectual traditions for a critical understanding of contemporary biology, particularly with regard to evolutionary developmental biology and the status of the organism; see, for example, Bennett and Posteraro (2019).
Hogget is the flesh of a lamb slaughetered at the end of its second spring or summer. This flesh is reputed to remain as tender as that of the newly born lamb, but also share in the richer and fuller taste of mutton.
On 17 November 2015, the online newsletter of the association Torino e le Alpi published an account of ongoing initiatives in the Valle Stura around felting and the Sambucana. It affirmed the historical importance of felt and felting by writing that “[sappiamo] … che il feltro veniva prodotto e utilizzato anche in Valle Stura grazie alle fotografie scattate da Clemens Kalisher, ebreo americano di origine tedesca che capitò in Italia nel 1962 e in maniera del tutto accidentale arrivò a Cuneo, dove immortalò gli abitanti di quelle montagne.” Please note that the wording cited does not reflect the views of the author. The document does not appear to have been archived. Should any reader be interested in the full text, the author can share a saved webarchive file.
In a comparative study of the Ecomuseo della Pastorizia and the Ecomuseo della Valle San Michele, Biffi (2014) observed that, if the former has offered a more sustainable approach to economic renewal, this is due in no small measure to the greater emphasis on the creation of useful cultural resources as opposed to the preservation of archaeological and other archival records. The two museums thus rehearse the tensions at the heart of ecomuseums from their very inception. See also Grasseni (2014).
There is nothing comparable to Riello’s (2013) study of cotton apart from Fontana and Gayot’s (2004) collection of disparate essays on the history of markets for wool. Ryder examined very usefully the sheep that have sustained these markets (Ryder 2007; see also Armstrong 2016; Woods 2017; Poczai et al. 2022).
By the eighteenth century, the valleys along the course of the Stura River were firmly integrated into the House of Savoy’s transalpine dominions. The valley’s more recent history has thus been shaped not only by the House of Savoy’s evermore expansive territorial ambitions, which brought it into conflict with much greater powers such as Spain, France, and Austria, but also by the House of Savoy’s eventual leading role in the establishment of the the Kingdom of Italy. The changing names for the House of Savoy’s dominions reflect this complex political history. For an introduction to this history, see Vester (2013); Cardoza (2000).
Rosenberg (1988) detailed the evolution of an alpine valley neighboring the Valle Stura over the course of the three centuries from 1650. Before the nineteenth century, wool and cheese were the chief sources of income, but the conversion of the sheep into meat became increasingly important to markets in Marseille and Toulon. Something similar seems to have occurred in Turin. At the same time, Rosenberg also notes how sheep’s access to common land was curtailed because it conflicted with the equally increasing importance that was attached to silviculture. Again, there is some evidence that something similar was also happening in the Valle Stura, as officials in Cuneo surveyed the valley’s resources and expressed interest in the trees to be found there (Gullino et al. 2010). In the valley Rosenberg studies, sheep then gave way to stabled cows and cheese was produced increasingly from cows’ milk. It is not clear from Chierici’s (2004b) archaeological survey of industrial plants in and around Cuneo whether the local industrialization of cheese production also favored cows’ milk, but there is no reason to believe that production in the Valle Stura followed a different pattern.
One of this paper’s reviewers rightly observed how the present discussion does not consider how sheep were used to fertilize soils. This function was certainly important to sustaining transhumant flocks into the early twentieth century (Fontana et al. 2004), but it does not figure in any way in the displays at the Ecomuseo della Pastorizia.
Sanna (2011, p. 713). While examining the organization of cooperative purchasing groups and their role in the development of more sustainable modes of food production, Grasseni (2013) drew attention to these groups’ ambivalence toward the Slow Food movement and its construction of ethical consumption, which would appear to privilege the most affluent consumers and do little to help producers to develop more sustainable modes of production. Similarly, the garments produced in the fashion Wool Box promotes retail at a premium cost, but the yarn itself is sold at a very low price. A speaker for the national industrial association makes it clear that, if primary producers are unable to secure a better price for the fleeces from which this yarn derives, it is no one’s fault but their own and so they need to improve their practices (Taverna 2010).
As one of the editors has observed, the genealogy of the term subjectivation is conceptually fraught. In this paper the term is employed to refer to the set of processes involved in creating subjects who act after images which they project of themselves and which are simultaneously responses to external relations with other subjects and objects. For a discussion of the term’s genealogy, see Traue and Pfahl (2022).
Grosz drew on both Lacan and Deleuze to articulate a different understanding of sex, gender, and the body to that usually associated with Judith Butler, which is closer to Freud and Foucault than to Lacan and Deleuze. Within Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Möbius strip is central to understanding the “mirror stage,” wherein the subject begins to gain control over its body through their actualization of discursive norms. Oppositions such as those between essence and appearance, mind and body, surface and density are all restatements of the relationship between inside and outside that is at play in this formative psychic stage. Deleuzian ontology shares this same critical disposition toward relations between time, space, and the body (Cockayne et al. 2019). Viewed from this more corporeal perspective, the organism comes to be regarded as something like a disciplining apparatus (Deleuze 1992; Legg 2011; Colebrook 2011; D. Smith 2018). Some critics (e.g., Haraway 2008) are ambivalent about these intellectual resources because, despite their flattening of differences between, for example, the human and the nonhuman animal, they seem at odds with the desire for a more equitable relation between the two; see also Shukin (2009); Beaulieu (2011). These resources seem nonetheless important to contesting any naturalistic understanding of bodies, whether these are human or nonhuman, and so recovering these bodies’ agency in shaping our understanding and response to the worlds we inhabit; see also Colombino and Palladino (2019).
A closing word about the Sambucana’s work. In a forthcoming essay for a volume on Intellectual Property and the Design of Nature, which Brad Sherman and Jose Bellido are currently editing, Annalisa Colombino and the present author argue that a properly nonhierarchical and relational understanding of all that constitutes the world we inhabit is inconsistent with the Marxian analytical frameworks frequently employed to examine relations between human and nonhuman forms of existence. These analyses might be better served by adopting a Maussian frame of reference instead, including in those situation where where work and the production of economic value are concerned.
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Acknowledgements
The argument advanced in this paper is indebted to interviews with Stefano Martini and Romina Dogliani, as well as extensive discussions of materials and methods with Mauro Ambrosoli, Annalisa Colombino, Camila del Mármol Cartañá, Tiago Moreira, and Teresa Young. Finally, the author is grateful to a number of editors and anonymous reviewers who have helped immeasurably to improve and sharpen the structure of the argument as the manuscript moved between different journals and disciplines.
Funding
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme supported the work on which this paper is based by funding the author’s tenure of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (657750).
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Palladino, P. The Making of the Sambucana: On Memory, the Body, and the Production of Bioheritage. J Hist Biol 55, 725–749 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09697-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09697-2