240526 SE The European Alps: Historical and current perspectives in Anthropology (P4) (2022S)

Aims:
The course provides a comprehensive overview and critical discussion of past and current research on and in the European Alps in anthropology. It pursues three aims: first, to stimulate and foster anthropological research on current life in the European Alps; second, to learn about the pressing issues of current living in mountain regions in Europe; and third, to critically reflect on the interconnection between regional selection and research topics and their assignment to different social and cultural sciences.

Contents:
Anthropology holds a long history of researching social, cultural and environmental life in mountain regions all over the world. The European Alps, comprising highly heterogeneous regions and extending over eight nation states in Europe, have a particular place within anthropology. In this seminar we deal with historical and current approaches of conducting research on and in alpine regions in Europe. We will critically engage with the varying periods of great research activities but also the marginalization of research in the 20th century. First, we will engage with the past main topical, theoretical and methodological approaches to mountainous livelihood and contextualise them within the wider disciplinary interests. Such were for instance studies on local agricultural economies and issues of ownership of land, local strategies of adaptation to high-altitude environments, the relevance of social structures such as kinship and inheritance rules, group identities and rituals, and last but not least, various issues associated with the distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. More or less, the past studies were shaped by concepts of bounded localities and a sharp distinction between the rural and urban. With shifting their emphasis on researching global dynamics and interconnectedness in the late 20th century, anthropologists have significantly reduced their interests in ‘the Alps’. As a consequence, they left the engagement with ‘the European Alps’ to a great extent to neighbouring social and cultural sciences for a considerable period. However, global phenomena like migration, tourism and climate change provoked a clear revival of social and cultural anthropological studies on current social, cultural and environmental changes in the European Alps. Arrived in the 21st century, anthropologists now consider the Alps not as bounded localities in rural areas any longer. Rather they conceive them as localities that are globally connected in manifold ways and due to that experience a broad range of changes. That way, current anthropology provides illuminative insights into the complex and often ambiguous and disputed processes of an ever increasing ‘vertical globalisation’ in the Alps. Based on various topics, theories, methods and ethnographic illustrations we will engage with these current research in critical ways.

Methods:

We will draw on a broad range of ethnographic and methodological illustrations of studying social, economic, cultural and environmental issues in the European Alps. The teacher will provide a sound introduction to the seminar topic. Students will regularly read texts, research additional texts, participate in the discussions, give oral presentations, comment on films and texts, and write a final seminar paper. We will learn to critically engage with the methodological, theoretical and ethnographic approaches, discuss their particular relevance, strengths and weaknesses by relating them to past and current anthropological discourses.