Abstract
Based on an ethnography of the shepherds in an area of central-southern Italy, the chapter outlines representations of this traditional breeding practice—the seasonal movements of shepherds and herders with their animals in search of grazing land. Ethnographic accounts and narratives evoke the Deleuzian themes of the rhizome, “nomadic thought” and “becoming animal” as well as socio-anthropological concerns, such as the notion of “two sides of historicity” and the ethnographic construction of the “sense of places.” Pastoral routes are somehow represented as flows of narrations while walking human-animal rhythms resemble punctuation in the narration of this deeply embodied experience of a cultural landscape. At the same time, the chapter analyzes representations that the process of “heritagization” produce, and that recently transformed transhumance into a cultural and fascinating object. Traditional and vagrant pastoralism is useful for thinking and narrating in the new global heritage framework.
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Inland Areas National Strategy, 2014–2020.
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Transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock along migratory routes in the Mediterranean and the Alps has been accepted to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Many different actors have cooperated in the preparation of the Dossier, including local and regional institutions as well as National Ministries, some NGOs engaged in specific local actions, and scholars—including the author—involved in research and projects about this topic. It has been a very interesting albeit ambivalent process in which the way of defining the specific cultural asset “Transhumance” has been deeply intertwined with forms of narration and representation which are more or less shared and co-produced with local communities of practice.
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Although Agamben’s concept of “openness” is much more complex and multifaceted, in summary this notion can be said to seek to reaffirm how important it is for humans to reconcile with their animal dimension in order to overcome the non-sense of contemporaneity.
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Translation by the author.
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Translation by the author.
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Translation by the author.
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Translation by the author.
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This video documentary has already won the Prix at the 2018 Turin Documentary Festival. It has been produced and distributed by Fondazione Solares with the help of a crowdfunding campaign based on intense battage across social networks. To carry out the crowdfunding campaign, the author delved deeply into techniques and organized an energetic dissemination plan.
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Translation by the author.
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Transhumance as a phenomenon is found and practiced all over the world, with shepherds and herders moving seasonally or daily from one place to another to ensure that their animals have access to pasturage and water. Especially when performed seasonally, this movement of horizontal transhumance ends up representing the real framework of the daily lifestyle of pastoral populations and definitely shaping their landscapes.
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Translation by the author.
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Bindi, L. (2020). Take a Walk on the Shepherd Side: Transhumant Narratives and Representations. In: Fagerlid, C., Tisdel, M. (eds) A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34796-3_2
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