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Research

PASTURELAND AS A NON-HUMAN ACTOR

This project responds to strong ecological concerns about environmental changes in the Alpine area and in particular to species loss and proposes a comparative ethnographic study of livestock practices, grasslands, and the international food and animal market in Switzerland and North East Italy. These have been the focus of ecologists for several decades but only now start to raise concern in the public sphere. A crucial aspect of this urgent subject matter is hardly perceived by scientists and the public: the concealed connections of fragile ecological areas with the global market. The proposed project wants to explore and understand these connections.

GRASSLANDS AS CHAINS OF RELATIONS

We propose to focus our investigation on Swiss and northeast Italian semi-natural grasslands - a food resource for herded grazing cattle and sheep - and on those aspects of the international feeding industry and animal market that bear on species survival on these grasslands. Thus, our project deals with disparate, but connected fields and will provide insights concerning its two poles: the management of and practices on Alpine pastures and the far-reaching entanglements of global agrobusiness. We use grass as a non-human subject to glean more about the human world and propose a comparative ethnographic study of herding practices, grasslands and the international feeding and animal market in Switzerland and north-eastern Italy.

To catalyse ethnographic knowledge, the project asks the following questions:

What is to be learned from pasture grasslands when they are taken to be part of a ‘chain of relations’, interlinking people, animals and the international feed and food market?

How are grasslands, still one of the world’s largest biomes, re-acting to changing human practices?

How are pastures, animals, herders, the international feed industry, and the animals market interacting and co-depending?

What are the interdependencies of these local actors with the global ones, such as producers of concentrated cattle feed, and how do these grassland connections allow one to look beyond Alpine pastures and to relate global issues back to them?

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MULTI-SITED AND MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK

To answer these questions, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with a multi-species approach will be conducted in several places in Switzerland (Grisons and in the Jura mountains) and in northeast Italy (South-Tyrol and Friuli) and with different types of actors: herders, animals, grass as well as representatives of the animal market and the feeding industry. Ethnographic fieldwork is conducted on certain high Alpine summer pastures, by accompanying several itinerant herders moving between higher and lower-lying pasturelands and with several feed production facilities and livestock auction houses. A total of 128 formal, semi-formal and life-story interviews are conducted to bridge the gaps between the disparate fields, bodies of knowledge and kind of actors involved. Based on four different ethnographic situations in Italy and Switzerland the aim is to investigate this complex of questions comparatively.

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MAKING INTERDEPENDENCIES VISIBLE

This pioneering study on global grasslands makes the concealed interdependencies of local practices and global industries visible. It responds to the alarming results of ecologists' investigations on the loss of biodiversity, and to the "UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration" (2021-2030) with its focus on grassland biomes. Taking Swiss and northeast Italian pasture grassland as a compass for this research project and its novel methodological approach makes it possible to determine significant factors, conducive for the maintenance of Alpine grasslands. This research is all the more profitable as it allows us to take into account concrete interdependencies between local pasture practices and the global agrobusiness and thus to identify potentials on a larger scale, notably concerning European environmental policies.