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Michela Zucca - michela.zucca@tin.it
Matriarchy & The Mountains
The Alps. The People
Anthropology of Small
Communities. Demographic Movements. Women’s Condition. Development
Perspectives.
By Michela Zucca
ABSTRACT
The project called “Sustainable development processes in
the marginal alpine communities of Trentino (Italy)” took off in 2003. We have conducted anthropological
fieldwork in five communities regarded as socio-economically marginal. The work
has been complemented by demographic research concerning over 1.800 Italian
Alpine municipalities, from 1951 to 2001. The data gathered have been used to
draw depopulation maps, divided by gender, as well as maps of “critical status”
based on different levels of social deterioration. The evidence shows that
problems almost invariably associated with mountain communities are not merely
of an economic nature. They have massive social and cultural implications.
As far as research method is concerned, we have opted for participatory
action-research, which is based on the idea that collected data can and should
be used to foster community development. This was done during the period of
analysis and afterwards. Actions have been carried out not only on traditional
rural activities but on innovative sectors such as tourism, culture and -
mainly - on ICT and networking. It is worthy of note that four of the five
villages that have come under our anthropological scrutiny have been
subsequently selected as beneficiaries of EU territorial development
programmes. This has permitted the creation of qualified work opportunities to
halt the migration of young people and women.
During our work we have been able to analyse the process of migration
within Trentino, mainly in those 10 municipalities were the gender divide in
employment had been found to be larger. Evidence for the period between 1991
and 2004 shows that women are moving from their birthplace to the nearest
place, usually a medium-large town, which can cater for their needs
(healthcare, family support, culture and leisure).
Our fieldworkers have observed the local political, economic and social
dynamics, with a particular emphasis on those inconveniences that are more
likely to induce residents to leave. By and large, what is most conspicuous is
the widespread distrust of the territory itself, and the unravelling of family
networks. As a result, local pharmacies, schools, post offices, banks, etc.
close down, and this increases the marginality of these areas, for it becomes
increasingly difficult for both residents and local authorities to start new
business enterprises. It is thus unsurprising that, in some places, development
programmes could not take off precisely due to the relative indifference of the
local population, a large proportion of which remains set on moving out.
Therefore, the originality of our
contribution lies in its focus on the procedures to detect, analyze, and
diagnose the experience of marginality in alpine communities. We propose that
social change should be premised on a combination of various elements and
conditions that are most likely to ensure a self-sustaining process of
development, based on local values and opportunities.
Michela Zucca, Centro di Ecologia Alpina, 38040 Viote del
Monte Bondone, Trento (Italia)
PART
I: The search for an identity.
“PATTERNS OF Sustainable
development in the remote municipalities of trentino”
The “patterns of sustainable development in the remote
municipalities of Trentino” project was initiated in 2003 and is sponsored by
the Centro di Ecologia Alpina. It consists in extensive ethnographic research
in five remote communities and in the analysis of the relevant demographic data
provided by the National Statistical Institute for the 1951-2001 period.
Results raises a series of questions that could be extended to the whole of the
Italian Alps.
The Research
The
Centro di Ecologia Alpina has been founded in 1993 to investigate human
ecology. Current research draws on a great deal of published and unpublished
studies.[i][1]
The
reasons behind the significant delay in the development of so many alpine
municipalities are not only of an economic nature. We hold that the current
situation can be imputed to cultural and social factors. Years of
action/research specifically designed by a four-specialist team led by Michela
Zucca to look into this issue in various alpine valleys have prompted CEALP to
undertake a comprehensive ethnographic study to substantiate our initial
hypothesis.
The team
Prior
to embarking on the actual ethnographic fieldwork, the team members –
Alessandro Gretter, Chiara Modenini, Nicoletta Tiziana Beltrame and Claudia
Marchesoni – under the direction of Michela Zucca, have attended a course in
anthropology of development to learn the theoretical and methodological
underpinnings of ethnographic research. The same course was offered again the
next years, and this time enrolment was made open to the general public. We
believe that it could be taught elsewhere in the Alps, and one of our primary
goals is actually to ensure that this will be done soon, also by circulating
more widely the papers and reports produced by the team.
The field
Sagròn-Mis, Cimego, in Western Trentino, Terragnolo, in the vicinity of
Rovereto, together with Ronzone, in the Non Valley, and Luserna (where an
undergraduate has also been involved in the fieldwork). These are the
municipalities in which our ongoing ethnographic study is taking place. Each
one of them has a population of a few hundred inhabitants and suffers from the
depopulation epidemics that affects so many alpine and rural communities.
This research has focused on areas where the social and economic fabric
has been frayed but also on other, less marginal districts, with real potential
for growth and where depopulation can be halted. During their residence,
researchers have sought to understand the development of the communities not
only from a historical perspective but, above all, the human element and the
socio-cultural factors that have led to the present situation.
Participatory planning for sustainable development
We have opted for the technique called participatory action-research:
based on data collection, we have started, already in the fieldwork stage, new
programmes for sustained development, which combine traditional rural
activities with innovative and broad solutions in the area of tourism, culture,
handicrafts and, above all, new technologies and web services. We expect that
this initiative will facilitate the creation of qualified labour, so as to
prevent young people and women from leaving their villages. Development
programmes of this sort, especially concerned with the promotion of local
cultural identities and the active participation of the local residents, have
been tried before in Trentino, at Pejo, Primiero and in Val di Cembra, as part
of the RECITE II “Learning Sustainability” and Interreg III C “European Network
of Village Tourism” frames. The “European Network of Village Tourism” has
involved four of the five municipalities under study, namely Cimego, Luserna,
Terragnolo e Ronzone.
Fieldwork
in areas where resettlement programmes are in place
Fieldwork
for the empirical verification of conditions abroad has been carried out in
tandem with the one taking place in Trentino. We have selected regions with
similar environmental and demographic circumstances, like the Science Park of
Sophia Antipolis in the French Alpes Maritimes department, Eastern Ireland,
and the Spanish Pyrenees. This has enabled the team to propose solutions that
had already been successfully tested elsewhere.
Data
gathering and quantitative analysis – data mapping
We
have compared qualitative and quantitative data through statistical analysis of
census data relative to the 1951-2000 period, for every municipality of the
Alps. Tabular summaries have been
graphically displayed as depopulation maps, featuring total numbers and gender
breakdown. In a similar way, we have produced “critical status” maps of
municipalities on the brink of extinction, assuming that shrinking
municipalities are those with a size of less than 500 inhabitants and at a
distance of at least at a 20 minute drive from the nearest town (the convention
being that in the Alps towns have at least 5,000 inhabitants). We have
considered the ten municipalities in Trentino where the men/women of fertile
age ratio was the most significant – incidentally, Trentino is the Italian
region where the male/female ration is the most unbalanced - in order to figure
out where, over the past 13 years, women have resettled.
Data
from the interviews have been run through statistical processing, and we have
arranged the most frequent statements thematically, so as to show relative
frequency and significance.
The context
The trend
towards the abandonment of settlements and economic activities in the remotest
regions of the Alps points to a state of deep social and cultural crisis and is
entirely confirmed by the interviewees. Inhabitants of small alpine villages
sense their marginality, their declining living standards and the perceived
increase of their “distance” from towns. Throughout their fieldwork,
researchers have examined the process of cultural change occurring during the
transition from tradition to modernity, one that has exerted a considerable
influence on the relationship between community and land and between the
community members themselves.
In
the space of a generation, the traditional economic, social and cultural
signposts have changed dramatically and we suggest that it would be useful to
learn, through an interdisciplinary approach, what the effects of this
transformation are, and what the most likely future scenarios might be.
>From a broader perspective, the situation is even more serious. Demographic
projections to 2025 of international organizations like FAO predict that 87
percent of the European population will be concentrated in urban districts. In
the Alps, the depopulation rate ranges from 30 percent in Trentino to over 80
percent in Carnia. Accurate data are not available for the Apennines, but it is
reasonable to postulate that data may be even more alarming.
People
in the mountains live in an undeclared state of emergency that calls for
complex and diversified solutions, sensitive to local identities and needs but
also, where possible, ground-breaking. This is all the more important because,
even though 70 percent of Italy is mountainous, Italians, even in the Alps,
regard themselves as city-dwellers. This has important repercussions at a political
and administrative level, because local authorities are not prompted to see
depopulation as an actual problem that needs to be tackled with
determination. Consequences can be
vastly many, from the shortage of people managing the land, to cultural and group
identity loss and the erosion of economic and social structures.
Objectives: development plans
The
main objective of the project is the anthropological definition and assessment
of a development plan increasing the quality of life in remote mountain
communities and reducing the discomfort of their inhabitants. This will provide
important indications concerning the way reforms and changes in the social,
economic and environmental fields should be effected in order to allow these
communities to survive. The four fieldwork researchers have illustrated a
number of recurring themes that could be used to induce young people and women
to continue to reside in their birthplaces. This study should uncover the
factors that affect most dramatically the development of these communities, and
prevent the use of local resources, both of an economic and cultural nature; it
should also suggest a way in which this seemingly inexorable loss of “vital
forces” can be halted.
We
want to understand why young people and, according to the available demographic
evidence, especially women, leave the places where they were born and raised
and move to the cities. A better understanding of this phenomenon will
encourage the formulation of adequate legislation and policies that, once
locally implemented, will hopefully keep small communities alive and vibrant.
Ultimately, we would like to provide evidence of the conditions of remote
villages, of their levels of social cohesion and of the quality of their
relationship with the environment, while assisting local authorities developing and advancing plans for the enhancement of the living
standards of the inhabitants of small villages.
An innovative content
The
advantage of the approach that we propose lies in the method that we employ to
ascertain the conditions of marginalization of alpine communities at the
intersection of their social, environmental, anthropological, and geographic
dimensions, with a view to the possible benefits that can be reaped from the
added value of local opportunities and practices.
Central
to our study is the notion of sustainable development, that is to say, an
approach responsive to the needs of the present generation, including economic
and profit growth and distribution, working opportunities, social and cultural
services, better housing and education (viz. Brundtland Report).
The
concept of sustainability and of quality of life that we set forth stresses the
importance of the social and anthropological elements that make up a community
and the strong but flexible bonds between a community and the surrounding
region. The research method that we employ combines quantitative (statistical)
and qualitative (ethnographic) data. Both provide benchmarks for each issue
that we explore. The definition of the opportunities for sustainable growth
will not only consider structural factors, but also the living conditions of
the community, marked by cultural distinctiveness, by traditional ways of doing
things, as well as by its vulnerability and deficiencies, vis-à-vis the
ubiquitous market economy.
The
development of targeted methods and strategies of implementation will involve a
plurality of variables and will have a special regard for the fragility of the
environmental, economic and social context in which they are deployed.
Methodology for sustainable development:
action-research
During
our fieldwork, we have employed the action-research technique, consisting in
data-collection aimed at the development of a given region, through the
involvement of its population. 2
The goal is eminently practical: the actors involved in an action-research
study are both the researchers and the informants. The definition of the
problem comes at a later stage, when researchers and the community come
together to discuss the relevant information and decide in concert what should
be done next.
The
observation of the social context is vital. “context” is an expression which
comes from the Latin verb “con-tessere”, meaning “to weave together” and, by
extension, “fabric.” Specifically, “context” includes all the elements that
define the identity of a group, a set of complex economic, social, cultural,
human, religious, mythical, and archetypal relations that constitute a social
milieu. This is the key-scenario for every development plan. It must consider
both economic and socio-cultural dimensions and must be empirically tested, by
trial and error. This is what makes it flexible: it varies as the context
changes, for there are no universally applicable, pre-packaged solutions. Needless
to say, theory is important, since no intervention can be built on a foundation
lacking an accurate theoretical framework and a reasonable amount of
information.
Two
methodological assumptions underpin this approach:
1. The gradual emancipation of the social sciences from
positivism and the theoretical models of the hard sciences, with their
irrefutable results and their scientific reliability based on universal laws.
Diversity of human behaviour generates a variety of situations and solutions
even when the context is ostensibly the same: it is this complexity that a
positivistic approach cannot fully grasp;
2. Expertise must be applied. Expertise is only valuable
when it is of some use.
Guidelines
For our action-research
we have followed the EU preferential guidelines for 2002-2005. The proposed
criteria are as follows:
• Capacity of
the project designers to make it suit the needs of the community;
• Bottom-up
approach at every stage;
• Broad
participation in planning and execution;
• Increased
equal opportunities, especially for women, through mainstreaming and
empowerment throughout the design and implementation of the project;
involvement and economic, social and cultural growth of disadvantaged areas;
• Identification
and involvement of end-users, by informal as well as direct contact
• Project
sustainability.
What needs
to be evaluated
When
it comes to economic development, including sustainable development, the first
thing to do is to appraise the initial conditions. A project cannot take off
without it and one needs to address the following issues:
• The number of
inhabitants of a community;
• Their
occupations;
• Their age;
• Their
schooling and education;
• Their attitude
towards entrepreneurship;
• The core
values of the community;
• The
community’s expectations;
• The
expectations of the most dynamic social actors;
• The role and
expectations of women;
• The role and
expectations of young people;
• Conflict and
disagreement;
• Distribution
of wealth;
• Family ties
and patron-client relations;
• Formal and
informal associative and aggregative patterns, within and without the
community;
• Business
activities;
• Entrepreneurial
spirit;
• Relations and
partnership between economic actors;
• Drive for innovations
among the young generations;
• Type of local
government and policy-making process;
• Degree of
consensus about the initiatives of the local authorities;
• Measure of
trust;
• Trust and
consensus with respect to action-researchers and their project;
THEORETICAL PREMISSES:
NOTHING IS MORE PRACTICAL THAN GOOD THEORY
Human ecology
Human ecology is about the processes of transformation
of the environment triggered by natural phenomena or human intervention. Human
beings have always modified the environment, as one can easily deduce from the
numerous signs of their presence, such as cropland and
grassland pasture and grazed forest land.3 Human beings determine the evolution or
extinction of entire ecosystems. Ecosystems are specific, porous environments
where population and nature co-exist and the impact of human action is usually
significant.
But while
in the past, at least until WWII, traditional economic systems prevailed and
human intervention was visible in settlements and fields, without being
exceedingly conspicuous, as there used to be a certain concern for keeping the
balance between nature and society, resources and the population, now these
practices are being phased out.
The
study of demographic trends is at the core of human ecology.
Historical-demographic research carried out by anthropologists4 clearly shows that men in alpine
communities migrated seasonally. Women did the same less frequently, in order
to supplement their other occupations: farming and herding for men, mainly
domestic chores for women. Families relied on a great deal of functional
flexibility. Where temporary migration did not occur, there still were ways in
which procreation was kept at bay, such as high celibacy and late weddings: a
case in point is the Swiss village of Törbel,
studied by Robert Nettino.5
Social
organization is another key aspect of human ecology. It comprises the
institutions, principles and rules established by the community to govern
individual behaviour. We are talking about a process, whereby individual
actions are not determined by social organization but really are its outcome.
In the Alps, wedding practices have shaped an institutionalized model of
society that forestalls an excessive demographic growth.
Another
branch of human ecology is cultural technology, introduced by Haudricourt and Leroi-Gourhan6 in the
Forties. It studies the relationship between human beings and their
environment, with technology as the intermediary. The interdependence of
science and society, which manifests itself through technological advance, is
an important variable because, according to Haudricourt, technological
innovations arise from a society undergoing a major process of social and
cultural change. It is technology that generally adapts itself to society. On
the other hand, no technological advance will occur so long as it is not
socially and culturally acceptable, because the process of devising something
technologically new is almost always related to a broader and diverse
socio-cultural context.
Cultural ecology
For
the experts of cultural ecology7 change comes from the process of
adaptation to the environment.
This
outlook focuses on the relationship between society and nature, on the
embeddedness of a community in its environment, on resource management and on
the harnessing technologies, on herding and domestication, on demography, food
habits, biological and technical adjustment to extreme climates, on the
“techniques of the body,” on health and healthcare practices. It involves
studies of primatology, prehistory, archaeology, ethnology, environmental
sciences, linguistics, and biological anthropology.
In
cultural ecology, the element of technology has a special importance. Andrè Leroi-Gourham8 and Andrè
Haudricourt have pointed out the close relatedness of science, technology, and
society, breaking away from traditional divisions between hard sciences and
social sciences, and demonstrating that tools, any sort of tools, from a plough
to a spaceship, are inventions that can only exist in a specific social and
economic context.
This
implies that there will be a constant interplay between a technological
environment, namely the technologies, techniques, actions and modes of work
available in a certain historical period to a human group, and the surrounding
ecological system. This substratum consist in the technological background of
the culture under study, and in the technological background, which includes
the technologies employed by those neighbouring peoples with which there is an
ongoing exchange of products and ideas. 9 Innovation occurs when a
society is ripe for it: then, it is either devised inside a community, or it is
imported and reworked: the difference between the two scenarios is, for all
intents and purposes, negligible.
Sustainable development
The
issue of socio-cultural change is crucial when it comes to sustainable
development and to putting an upper limit to growth for environmental reasons.
The most popular definition of sustainable development is the one used in the
Brundtland Report, in 1987, which led to the official adoption of the same
definition by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCDE),
organized by the United Nations. The report, entitled “Our common future,”
reads as follows: “humanity has the ability to make development sustainable, to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The
concept of sustainable development does imply limits – not absolute limits but
limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization
on environmental resources and the ability of the biosphere to absorb the
effects of human activities.”
Such a
definition can be contradictory, and this is precisely the opinion of Serge
Latouche, the chief advocate of downscaling growth.10 In point of fact, our culture is still heavily influenced
by nineteenth century evolutionism, stressing the importance of the notion of
“progress” as the engine of a more affluent and ultimately better society,
thanks to a larger distribution of goods, and of a linear perspective on human
history. Therefore, despite the results of many studies published over the past
decades,11 which
demonstrate that further growth is impossible, coming to terms with the reality
that the production of goods should be curtailed and that it is about time that
we implement forms of sustainable development, remains awfully unpleasant.
Human
beings can partly circumvent natural selection and intervene to alter the
natural order in a way that does not compromise it. But they can also
neutralize or destroy those processes that allow ecosystems to adjust to
change, regain their balance and re-establish their self-sufficiency. The
result is deterioration and loss of biodiversity.
Europe,
and especially Northern Italy, from the river Po to the Riviera and to the
Alps, has been densely populated since ancient times and its inhabitants had to
learn how to functionally adapt to the environment. Over time, they have
developed a lifestyle that was instrumental to the harnessing of natural
resources without depleting them: this highly sophisticated “technological
environment” has brought about important environmental changes across the Alps,
barring glaciers and peaks. 12
Human
beings decide to what extent the modification of the environment should be pursued,
which model of socio-economic development is the most advisable: a sustainable,
long-term and harmonious approach, or something entirely different, since
between wilderness and deterioration lies a gamut of options. We think it would
be most desirable for the natural environment and human society that humanity
attempted to strike a balance between the improvements of both. Protecting
nature does not mean placing it in a crystal coffin. What we should rather do
is to manage in a fair and effective way human progress and the evolution of
the environment.
It
is plainly evident that this is the ideal challenge for anthropologists,
because their expertise enables them to explain what has already been done and
to make an important contribution to the decision-making process concerning the
steps that should be taken to redirect attitudes and
practices toward the environment in the light of the local culture, its values
and its history.
Peasant culture and environmental protection
In Europe,
wilderness is long gone. Even seemingly untouched landscapes are the outcome of
human action, like grazing and timber cropping. Prior to the advent of mass
tourism and industrialization, that is, until the second post-war period, the
most common land management model in rural Europe was still subsistence farming
in small holdings. It was parsimonious and provident because the unrestrained
exploitation of the land could force people to migration. Peasants possessed a
distinct sense of history: changes in the ecosystems were made with an eye to
their immediate and lasting consequences and bearing in mind the experience of
the predecessors. 13
Interventions
were tailored to address specific needs and attempts were made to anticipate
future needs on the basis of the historical record and to coordinate present
and future activities. Until a century ago, the European rural civilisation
would manage the ecosystem regardless of demographic fluctuations. Human
interventions shaped the land over and over again with a different intensity
depending on the community and its needs.
The
Alps are a case in point. Until the early seventeenth century, the Alps were
one of the most densely populated region of Europe; 14 so much so,
that most mercenaries for the European wars came from there. In spite of this
human concentration - which was greater than, for instance, that of the fertile
Pianura Padana, and even at higher altitudes, where the ecological equilibrium
is more precarious -, the Alps were less seriously affected by the effects of
the cycles of bad harvest, famine, and pandemics, which were normally
devastating in a world where resources were limited. The main reason for this
greater adaptability, which was shared in common with the Pyrenees, the Apennines
and the Massif Central, was the broader distribution of settlements, which were
located at different altitudes and in different ecological settings, which
encouraged synergies and a more rational management of resources. In this
“environmental mosaic,” the economic base ranged from sub-Mediterranean
cultivation (lemon and olive trees), near the lakes, to high-mountain grazing
near the glaciers. This allowed the full and differentiated harnessing of
resources, so that a large amount of them would be obtained directly from nature (viz. timber, fish, game
and herbs), from farming (cereals, potatoes, fruit and vegetables), and from
herding. Seldom was there shortage of them all at the same time. The Alps were
an area of intensive farming, as opposed to the plain, where, as a rule, only
one crop was harvested each year (monoculture) and if the harvest failed, many
would starve and social and economic dislocation would ensue (unattended
irrigation systems and river embankments, murrains, etc.).
In
fact, crop production in the plains was comparatively remunerative in a market
economy, but this did not prevent most peasants from living through recurring
periods of hunger. A small-scale, family-oriented economy was less likely to
produce a marketable surplus, but could sustain the entire population in
disadvantaged areas.
It
is of signal importance that the capitalist system is a fairly recent
development in Southern Europe and one of the consequences of the diffusion of
the market economy in rural area has been economic, social, demographic and
ecological imbalance. A vicious circle took shape, in which economic growth was
concentrated in regions with high production standards. Rising living standards
in those same regions led to demographic growth and intensive cropping.
Simultaneously, less favoured areas experienced recession or stagnation,
emigration, and abandonment and turn into sources of cheap, unqualified labour
for the fastest-growing industrial districts of the United States, France and
Germany. Today large cities near the Alps are the favourite destination of
these migrant workers. The capitalist economy has caused the demise of
small-scale rural economy and the objective of production is no longer survival
for the family and the community, but market profitability. In agriculture, the
imperative was to cut down on costs and design economies of scale; farming was
mechanized and, where necessary, the whole enterprise would be relocated in the
Third World. As a consequence of this transformation, more land is needed to
support a family, farmers are encouraged to
expand and incorporate smaller farms and more and more large land holdings are
devoted to monoculture, more efficient in terms of profitability but
considerably detrimental in terms of biodiversity and traditional habits and
customs.
The ecology of abandonment and the identity crisis
The
ecology of abandonment is one branch of human ecology that focuses on how human
beings decide to move out of an occupation and of a given ecosystem and the
disappearance of traditional ways to graze and to manage forests. It documents
the short- and long-term consequences of these phenomena, such as the
interrelation between depopulation15
and ecological transformation, and their social, economic and cultural causes.
Needless to say, “abandonment” has anthropocentric connotations, for the same
phenomenon could also be described as nature’ final vindication.
This
discipline is concerned with those regions that have been transformed by stable
human presence and, all of a sudden, within the space of a few decades, have
been deserted. They have experienced the deterioration of their biodiversity,
hydrogeological characteristics and landscape. Take the terracing of the
Ligurian slopes, for instance. Massive urbanization along the coast meant that
only retired old people, deeply attached to the land, would continue to manage
terrace-cultivation. After their death, things will get certainly worse for the
stability of the ecosystem.
The
disappearance of cultivations and the return of the forest on the pastures
cause the extinction of various valuable and fragile vegetable species,
especially herbs, and the impoverishment of the soil. One of the results of
this process is that essences and products that were once derived from agriculture
and plants are now chemically mass produced, without attaining the quality
standards of the natural ones, viz. lavender essential oils.
A
vegetative analysis carried out by the Centro di Ecologia Alpina16
on some crop patches in Monte Bondone (Trento) shows that, compared to mowing
patches, low density larch forests and beech forests, open meadows and swards
that have not been used for cattle-grazing and
mowing for 30 years exhibit a greater biodiversity. Analysis of the variety of
species in these different habitats shows restrictions in the range of species,
from 97 species in the sward, to 70 in the meadow, 48 in the larches’
undergrowth and 46 in the beech forest.
The
management of pastures affects the ecological dynamics of vast stretches of
land. Alexander Cernusca and Ulriche Tappeiner17 in the Hohe Tauern national park, Austria, point out that
after only one year of abandonment, pastures display quantitative and
structural changes of vegetation as well as microclimatic variations. These alterations
may influence the run-off of rainwater, and therefore erosion patterns and
streamflows, in mountain ecosystems. The two researchers argue that this
research provides some important criteria to assess the environmental impact of
mountain farming. This, in turn, will affect the amount of subsidies that will
be allotted to mountain farmers. Such criteria should also include the positive
effects of alpine agriculture for the entire population, like recreational
benefits, the protection from avalanches and landslides, the preservation of a
vital source of potable water and hydropower. Data analysis has revealed that
because of the management of high pastures in the Hohe Tauern national park,
the owner of the hydro-electric power stations within the limits of the park
should contribute 90 Euros per hectare to local farmers to compensate them for
the additional 3 percent of water run-off that reaches its stations due to
their activities. Such estimates should be extended to other areas. The
beneficial effects of the work of mountain farmers and of their culture have
been far too often neglected. So much so that today mountain ecosystems are
threatened by the dramatic identity crisis of this category of workers and
mountain dwellers. The young generations and some middle-aged people often come
to the conclusion that rural economy and agricultural work are doomed. At
first, they are kept going by women and the elderly, then, when women manage to
find another job, they leave the land behind and, with it, their native culture
and traditions, now deemed worthless and passé. The young mountain-dweller
easily forswears his identity, he is ashamed of himself and feels isolated,
with no public support.
Older generations normally don’t think in terms of
profit alone and are more willing to stay and cultivate the land and perpetuate
their ways of life. So long as they can support themselves and are physically
capable, older people continue to live in their households and, if they are
forced to leave, they lose their zest for life. Otherwise, they retain a sense
of stewardship (and ownership) towards the place where they were born and
raised.
For a farmer “home” includes the whole region where he
lives: “his” mountain, “his” valley, etc. He feels guilty when a dry stone wall
falls apart, when terraces are eroded, when a pasture reverses to scrub, as though he were personally responsible for the survival of the
cultural landscape: traditional agriculture has become a second nature for him! Mass tourism has revolutionised the
traditional socio-economic model, premised on an all-sufficient and
decentralised mode of harnessing natural resources. The new, centralized model
of total exploitation of one resource over the others, is entirely removed from
the control and management of ordinary people, in that it depends on large
investments of capital. The ecological balance of the farmed land can only be
ensured by a sufficient amount of human labour devoted to its restoration. This
process stalls when human beings no longer feel such a vocation. In the Alps,
shared toil perpetuates the culture and gives meaning to the notion of nature
and landscape stewardship. Nevertheless, over the last thirty years, national
policies have produced enormous structural changes in both agriculture and
apiculture causing a dramatic reduction of cropland and grazing land.
Vegetation has reversed to typologies that existed before the establishment of
human settlements.
Such a process may take decades and entails several
successive stages, each defined by specific and unstable combinations of flora
and fauna. Mountain communities knew full well that there are thresholds that should not be crossed when it comes to balance social
needs and concerns about natural resources. They were aware that what is taken
away from nature must be given back, at some point (e.g. manure), and in the
same proportion. To the extent that these communities remained independent and
free, they retained their environmental conscience and a degree of functional
interdependence with nature. Then, pressures from the outside (nationalism,
wars, housing speculation, capitalism, mass tourism, and so forth) tipped the
balance against nature. FOOTNOTE? For further information on the subject of commons, public
domains, and the management of mountain resources in the Alps, see the research
conducted by the Centro studi per le proprietà
collettive e demani civici, at the University of Trento (http://www.jus.unitn.it/usi_civici/)
Anthropology and Economy
Even
today, the common perception of economics – among ordinary people as in the
ivory tower – is that it is an exact science,18 based on
mathematical models that can be applied to clearly definable situations:
underdeveloped countries, countries of the Northern hemisphere, agriculture,
industry, new economy… Save for the Anglo-Saxon countries, anthropology is seen
as too subjective a discipline to make reliable predictions about what will
happen in the future in a given community, especially with regard to the
economic sphere. However, the most receptive economic analysts have known for a
long time that barter, much in the same way as the exchange in the global
market, must obey to cultural, not only functional, rules. The way in which
production is planned, a commodity is assigned a material and symbolic value,
and is marketed, is the result of cultural dynamics specific to each
civilization. The ability to propose and the willingness to accept a new,
manufactured need (of goods, services, living standards, etc.) are contingent
on the effectiveness of a message. A cultural model can be imported, exported,
removed more quickly than a commodity. Economy and anthropology are
interrelated and the science of economics cannot be dissociated from the study
of the society where cultural and consumer practices take shape. From this
perspective, marketing strategies can greatly benefit from a methodical
ethnographic analysis. The hi-tech boom has produced an enormous quantity of
data to examine. But such is the amount of information that even the most
sophisticated computers could not handle it. One has to pick out the most
valuable information, and anthropological criteria can help considerably in
making this choice, by showing the navigation through variables and functions,
figures and reports to meet the expectations of the client, together with one’s
own.
Anthropology
cannot certainly replace economics, but it can scrutinize the same evidence and
offer a constructive critique, bringing out the implicit and hidden relations
between production, distribution and consumption on the one hand, and society
and culture on the other hand, because individuals and groups with their
biases, beliefs and undisclosed assumptions, are the only true agents in these
relations. The practical implications of this analysis, which are of
considerable interest, are however all too often ignored by those who manage
the economic growth of a country or a region.
Economics
as we see it is how people’s decisions on how to produce commercialize and
consume are informed by their background and habits of thought and action,
which are in turn culturally, socially, and historically determined variables.
Recently,
then, the debate on some crucial economic questions has moved from
universities, public offices and corporations to the public arena, and across
the world. The destruction of non-renewable energy sources, the increasing
economic rift between the rich and the poor, globalization, the influence of
advertising, and the commodification of individual identities, the changing
nature of work, are matters of consequences for the public.
In
pre-industrial communities, even in small rural communities, the dominant
economic model was autarchy: people tried to produce what was necessary to
support themselves and resorted very little to market exchange. Family ties
defined production relations. Production seldom exceeded the needs of a family.
This system collapsed with the advent of market economy in both colonial
societies and rural communities in Europe.
Today
we cannot possibly define that system as backward, because it did manage to
accomplish what contemporary economists can only dream of: a closed cycle of
production-consumption-recycling-environmental care. The collapse of this
age-old system led to environmental degradation. This is why we cannot think of
it as a simple economic model. On the contrary, it is a complex model that
minimizes the ecological impact and may offer some valid solution in these
times of environmental crisis. In this sense, the work of anthropologists fills the gap left by other academicians, providing the expertise
necessary to develop a new economic paradigm more attuned to the demands of the
public, more respectful of nature, more responsive to the disparities between
developed and developing countries, and between mountains and plains, cities
and countryside.
History, anthropology, advocacy and the struggle for
identity
Looking into the possibility for small alpine
communities to develop by their own efforts means writing the history of how a
human group pursue the identity struggle, that is, how its history has been
manipulated and neutered. 19 Without a strong identity
economic growth will not be as robust as one would hope for, and nurturing a
group identity without investing in collective memories, that is, in a common
and unique history, is futile. Yet, rural populations in the Alps have been
labelled “peoples without history” for centuries. 20
Until the 1960s Italy was essentially a rural
country; those who lived in the cities were a minority. Even today, we only
study the history of a 10 percent of the population that lived in the cities;
or, better said, of a 10 percent of that 10 percent, that is the members of the
ruling classes. Still more precisely, we are talking about half of the latter,
i.e. the men. In other words, our history is the monopoly of 0.5% of the entire
population. This may well be of historical significance, but it is
statistically irrelevant. A major shift towards social history in
historiography occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when Marc
Bloch and Lucien Fèvre founded the “École des Annales” 21 and began to
focus their attention on the history of the people who lived at the bottom of
society. This school made history and anthropology come together to
counterbalance the earlier overwhelming focus on events and historical figures.
Through
the study of ordinary people and their concerns, the historian detects the
fundamental mechanisms of a society.22 This theory has yet to make
headway in mainstream historiography: today the history taught at school is
still the same as it has always been.
Furthermore,
we tend to “forget” that most of the cultural, social and economic thinking in
the Middle Age was going on in cloisters and castles: illuminated manuscripts
were drawn in places that could be called “eagle’s nests.” Epoch-making
technological and scientific discoveries such as watermills, oil mills, the
forge hammer, the sawmill, and the wine barrel have not been made in
universities but in egalitarian, autonomous, mostly self-sufficient rural
communities, that did not shy away from innovation and creativity.
The
question of which history and which identity suit a community is not an easy
one to answer because, for all intents and purposes, the past is what
historiography defines as such, and the rules of historiography are determined
to no small degree by historical and ideological contingencies. History is
culturally and anthropologically mediated. Proof of that: the transition from
the history of the great figures and great events to social history, where
ethnographic data and information on the mentality of ordinary people proves
decisive. The masses become protagonist of their history, even though the
rationale and the forces of change sometimes are blurred, or even overlap. This
is really difficult to grasp, let alone accept, from within a linear,
cause-effect perspective on historical trends, one in which the centrepiece is
the individual, within a timeframe close to zero, made of quick, uneven and
short oscillations, that is, what we call “events.” These events form the
baseline of history, seen as an historical account of the way things really
happened, as though human life were entirely prey to the whims of exceptional
men whose actions and discoveries determine the fate of the common people. This
is a kind of history that is seen from above and not in the long-durée.
Yet, major social transformations do not originate from the decisions of
charismatic figures: the thoughts and actions of historical figures themselves
are the result of streams of events and processes unfolding over extended
time-periods and these are non-linear, non teleological; they are the ideal
subject for an anthropological study.
An anthropological outlook takes into account the
inventions born out of collective wisdom that are generally neglected by the
official historiography. Take the Middle Age, for instance. It was a period of
major technological advance, viz. watermills. But those accomplishments were
the outcome of the practical skills and reasoning of nameless people; it took
hundreds of years to develop and perfect them. But while less arresting
innovations are studied by heart, watermills are confined to textbooks dealing
with the history of agriculture. It is not a coincidence that most of the
techniques that sensibly improved our life, starting from the Middle Age, were
introduced in the Alps, and have been developed and tested by those people that
for centuries have been regarded as uncivilized. Among them, watermills, sophisticated irrigation techniques,
sawmills, forges, oil mills, grindstones, furnaces, presses, felt cloth, etc.
Social history, like anthropology and psychoanalysis study not only the
conscious and clearly identifiable activities of human beings but also, and
with a special emphasis, what is left unsaid, what is taken for granted and
tacitly assumed, the collective subconscious, psychological and mental
framework of a particular society at a given time. Anthropological
historiography describes the culture of a community, its aspirations, its
change, standstill, or even regression, its adaptation to the environment and
to changing economic, political, religious and social conditions. Its focus is
on collective history, where groups, communities and the masses play the
central role and where the experts attempts to figure out the whys and
wherefores of the life of anonymous people at the same time influencing and
influenced by the socio-cultural milieu.
Teaching people to appreciate popular wisdom: identity
economy and the role of tradition
Fieldwork
research, mostly in Africa, enabled Balandier23 and other exponents
of dynamic anthropology, a branch of anthropology that is concerned with
changes in the communities under study, to question the commonly held view that
there existed a dualism between tradition and modernity. This, he found too
simplistic and reductionist. Today, globalization is bringing these issues back
into the limelight. Dynamic anthropology identifies and explicates multifarious
influences and cultural changes affecting not only traditional cultures but
society as a whole.
Modernity
and globalization are often perceived by the public as leading to
destructuration, fragmentation, if not to the extinction of age-old systems of
values. In reality, while some disappear, other cultures are revitalized,
sometimes restored, when symbols and rituals of collective identification are
once again in fashion. Hobsbawm24 submits
that a tradition is not a cultural fact, it is not something that is already
present in a society: it is a use that changes over time and can be made from
nothing; and its adoption is made more convenient by material and immaterial
needs.
This is why we should not think of tradition as
something that belongs to the past; to the contrary, it plays an important part
in the definition of the present, by affecting the perception of events and of
the need and direction of change. For all the conservatives’ efforts to argue
the contrary, the interplay of tradition and modernity is not antagonistic but
dialectic. It follows that categories
such as false and authentic have little meaning in the debate revolving around
the concepts of modernity and tradition. The French anthropologist Gèrard Lenclud, pondering on the meaning of tradition, maintains that it does not
correspond to “a product of the past, a work from a different time that
contemporaries should receive passively;” something traditional is “not what
has always been, but what we want it to be.” 25 This approach, according to Lenclud, “helps us
dispose of a false problem, namely the question (…) of change and preservation,
of rates of relative transformation and conservation.” 26
But
then again, what is the function of tradition? Why is it so badly needed in the
timeframe, space, mentality, sensibility of the community under scrutiny or in
which positive actions are being undertaken?
Sometimes
anthropologists may be asked to revise, modernize and reinvent rituals and
archaic folklore to make them more plausible. This can be done for several
reasons, like rebuilding cohesion around shared symbolisms to prevent social
break-ups, or to promote tourism and the identity economy, and so forth. In the
light of the above, refusing to do this in the name of academic purism and the
cult of authenticity may be counterproductive: the degree of acceptance of the
revised tradition is really the only indication that such effort was worth it.
One
of the most interesting and stimulating outcomes of the combination of
ecological and anthropological research concerns traditional skills and
knowledge in the use of environmental resources. One can easily see it as
hyper-specialization and balanced adjustment to every single local condition,
in accordance with the requirements of a specific culture and its dominant
values.
There is a general tendency to cut down on waste and
function as a closed cycle, one in which garbage is re-utilised as an energy
source (e.g. manure), both ecologically and economically. Indeed, the two terms
come from the same Greek root, oikos, which stands for home, indicating both the
domestic and the natural environment as a shelter and a production unit. They
are not opposed but complementary, and this the most important lesson we have
to learn from rural civilizations.
One of the ways in which we
can recover this traditional wisdom is by means of the identity economy, which
is at once technology-oriented and rooted in the history of a community as well
as based on innovative forms of advertising. It combines high margins of
profit, respect for and appreciation of local identities, and social growth. It
is along this line that several communities with a strong identity are working
to brand their products as traditional.
Since the report of the
Club of Rome and MIT27 was published, which explained that growth is not
unlimited, that the current conception of economy, environment and their
relationship might lead to catastrophic consequences, traditional systems of
farming and forestry, herding and land-management have been resumed. Archaic
economies that had been of interest only to anthropologists are now studied by
other specialists who hope to find out the key to sustainable development, one
more respectful of the environment, cultures and local identities, and of the
Third World; and one centred on the use of local renewable energies, on setting
of limits, on the reduction of pollutants, and on a commitment to implement Rio
de Janeiro’s Agenda 21.
Development anthropology and tourism
In
the Alps, in peripheral communities, people feel the need to initiate processes
of development compatible with the revitalization and appreciation of their
cultural heritage. The latter is clearly an important element in the
establishment of new forms of local entrepreneurship. The promotion of culture tourism, where
culture is “translated” so as to become intelligible to outsiders, who should
feel involved and relish the opportunity to encounter authenticity and
spontaneity – as there is nothing more artificial than tourism promotion built
around immaterial goods – may well be the best solution for those areas that
have no other resources. To do this, it is indispensable that specialists
should carry out a preliminary survey. There is nothing worse than a tourist
who feels that he has been deceived. It is also better to avoid criticisms from
the local cultural institutions and associations set on defending the integrity
of their culture and prevent its commodification. Specialists can wed the
historical-anthropological research with handicraft, gastronomy, hospitality,
tours, and entertainment in general, as well as to the objectives of public and
private investors. It takes hard work,
clear goals, diplomatic skills, and the ability to involve the local
population.
Constant,
specialized training is needed for all the people involved in this kind of
project: authorities, entrepreneurs, new employees, teachers, etc. More
generally, the whole population should be kept informed about the progress and
outcome of this programme; while researchers have to realise that these tasks
are not irrelevant to their career goals. Widespread participation of ordinary citizens
will allow them to take matters in their own hands. This approach may well
cause disagreement and conflict, but the solution to these problems lies in the
role of negotiators and coordinators between the various sides performed by
researchers and in viewing tourists not only as a necessary hassle, but as a
source of potential beneficial change.
In
order to reverse the current demographic and social trends we need a cultural
renaissance of peasant civilization, especially among the youth, who must understand
that the things that they are most ashamed of might well turn out to be worthy
of transmission to posterity and a great opportunity for employment and for the
enhancement of the quality of life in the mountain valleys.
The Alps: mountains of problems
– a general overview
The 3 may 2004
law “Gasparri” recommends that, by 2007, 60 percent of the Italian population
should be enabled to benefit from the digital switchover of the TV broadcasting
network. Yet 80 percent of the Peninsula will be virtually cut off; mountain
regions will be especially affected by the digital divide, 28and this is particularly unfortunate,
given that their inhabitants are those who, due to their peripheral
position, would most benefit
from this switchover and who had been told that hi-tech innovation would
improve their lives by allowing them to work without commuting. 30 Today, access to broadband is mainly
available to those who need it the least.
31
The EU
expansion to the East will most likely harm the most subsidized sector of the
economy, namely agriculture. But while larger producers will increase the
prices and hire more immigrant workforce, thousands of family-led businesses in
the mountains will be hard hit with serious consequences for the environmental
integrity of the land. These are two examples of how “global” plans treat the
European and national territories as homogeneous and flat. Worse still,
European policies to support agriculture neglect mountain peasants who are not
included in development programmes.
The consequence is a slow, quiet ethnocide,
suppressing work opportunities and the local symbolic and cultural identity
markers: words like “mountaineer”, “peasant”, and “farmer” still possess
negative and disparaging connotations.
While the focus
of our research is on the Alps,32
we should also like to point out that things might be even worse in the rest of
Italy. After all, municipalities not in the mountains are only 4.2% in Central Italy, 17.7%
in the South, 15.6%, in the islands. By contrast, in the North-West and
in the in the North-East they are 33.6% and 41.9%,
respectively.33 While it is
certainly true that the Apennines reach lower altitudes and the climate is
warmer, infrastructures and emergency services are less effective and damages
are often greater in scale.
The
fact remains that, in spite of the relative ignorance of the Italian public,
the 13,000,000 inhabitants of the mountains, scattered across 190,919 square
kilometres, share a common heritage and identity. 34 What’s more,
about 100 million visitors, mostly from the plains and the coast, annually
choose the Alps as they holiday destination, making it the most popular international tourist destination in the world. 35 Many of them, especially retired citizens,
spend several weeks a year in the Alps, and can be considered part-time
residents.
The
Italian Alps extend for a thousand-odd kilometres from east to west, over an
area that is 42 percent of the total mountain area of the Peninsula. In 2001,
4.5 million people lived in the Alps. 1,851 municipalities, 22.8% of the total number of Italian municipalities
and 44% of the Northern municipalities, are located in the Alps.
The alpine habitat is highly heterogeneous and
outsiders looking at the Alps feel a sense of inaccessibility and environmental
fragility; or they look at them as the garden and playground of Europe; or else
they may be altogether indifferent to them. Lack of knowledge is an important
component of the various perceptions: when students are asked how many people
they think live in the Alps, the usual answer ranges from 300,000 to a couple
million inhabitants.
On
the other hand, the Alps are far from homogenous: it is fair to say that the
western portion does not seem to be able to overcome modernity and its
demographic trend is negative. The eastern part seems to be able to better cope
with it. Still, even within the same district there large social and income
disparities are likely.
In the course of
our study we have gathered census data for all the alpine municipalities for
the 1951 to 2001 period, to generate depopulation maps sorted by total number
and by gender. We have followed up on earlier work by Werner Bätzing, a well
respected alpine geographer who, in the Eighties, was the first to produce
demographic maps for the entire alpine region.
These are the
results for Italy. The first map shows trends of demographic increase and
reduction over the past 50 years. If we consider that, over the past fifty
years, the world population has grown by 250% and the Italian population by
20.86%, yellow zones should also be considered at risk of depopulation. The
second map documents in greater detail where people are leaving out and where
they are not.
Maps
show even more clearly that the Western Alps and some parts of Friuli and
Veneto are confronted with a severe crisis. South Tyrol has a positive trend
and Trentino is somewhere in between. However, if we compare the historical
record, we can see that things are slowly improving, even though the remotest
valleys are at a critical junction and some villages have by now passed the
demographic point of no return.
A
more detailed treatment of these statistical data can be found in the appendix.
The abandoned mountain
To understand
the nature of this depopulation process, one has to introduce the concept of
“demographic equal opportunities,” that is to say, to acknowledge that the
alpine area is entitled to growth patterns that should be comparable to those of
other Italian areas. In order to do this, we compare the average rates of
demographic growth in the Alps and in the rest of the Peninsula, and show which
districts have managed to keep up the pace over the previous half a century (fig. 3, highlighted in green). With barely 27% of the total,
these municipalities represent a distinct minority. Many of them are located in
South Tyrol and Trentino, where
we can use the expression “local growth” – development fostered by the locals.
There are other exceptions in the most economically developed Lombard valleys,
with a good concentration of metallurgical and handicraft industry. In the
provinces of Varese and Verona, growth has generally come from the outside and
residents must commute on a daily basis and become less attached to their
birthplace. The same is just as true in Bormio and in the Susa Valley, whose
economy is heavily dependent on Switzerland and in other municipalities that
are virtual satellites of the industrial districts of Turin and Genoa.
Further data
corroborate this impression: Werner
Bätzing and the Geographic Institute of Zurich have argued that the settlements
most affected by the demographic crisis are:
1) those located higher on the mountains;
2) those more distant from larger settlements which provide those services
that are regarded as essential, such as associative opportunities, shops,
schools, basic sources of entertainment. At the time of the study in question,
these settlements normally exceed 5,000 inhabitants and were within the
distance of 20-30 km.
3)
The smaller ones, with up to 300 inhabitants. 36
Our study draws on these data, which demonstrate that most mountainous
districts in Italy are directly threatened by globalization. Even the attempts
by provincial and regional authorities to undertake expensive developmental
policies for their peasant communities in the mountains have been frustrated by
the unwillingness of residents to continue to live there. The same occurred in
Switzerland as well.
In Italy, a study commissioned by Lega Ambiente and Confcommercio
indicates that most small settlements are located in mountain areas.37 The 2001 national
census showed that 79.7% of municipalities in the region of Aosta Valley had
less than 2000 inhabitants. This proportion diminishes only slightly in
Piedmont (73%), Trentino (67,8%),
Liguria (59,6%), Lombardy
(45,5%), Friuli (42.5%), Veneto (22,1%). Of these, more than half are
considered, for various reasons, “at risk”.38
40.9% of municipalities in Liguria fall in the same category. Ditto for 15.1% in Friuli, 13.5% in Aosta Valley, 10.9% in Trentino, 9.4%
in Lombardy, 3.4% in Veneto. But then again, over
97% of alpine settlements have less than 10,000 inhabitants. Grenoble, with
over 160,000 inhabitants, is the largest city of the Alps.
According to the 2001 Italian census, the average alpine municipality
has 2,436 inhabitants, but this figure belies the fact that the census surveys
also consider urban districts located in the Alps. In reality, 864, that is,
46.7% of alpine municipalities – twice as many than in the rest of Italy – have
less than 1000 inhabitants. 39
There
are 206 municipalities at greater risk, with less than 300 inhabitants, that
is, slightly more than 14% of those located in the Alps. The majority of alpine
settlements are shrinking, with alarming rates like 85% in Friuli,
approximately 77% in Piedmont, and 60% in Veneto and Liguria. In Lombardy,
Aosta Valley and Trentino half of them are getting smaller. Among the provinces
that have been granted an autonomy statute, only in South Tyrol the
depopulation rate remains below 16%. The fact of the matter is that financial
aid does not seem to be responsible for the differential demographic patterns
of South Tyrol as opposed to other Italian regions. This is a clear indication
that South Tyrolean policies targeting the strengthening of local identities
have been most successful. It is not just a matter of financial resources. The
Aosta Valley has received an even greater amount of subsidies, but this has not
reversed the downward-spiralling trend.
Where
do people go?
People
in the Alps gradually move to the nearest cities, which are becoming densely
populated, polluted, stuck in traffic jams, and are losing their identity. Unlike
cities in the plains, which have developed homogeneously, cities in the
mountains are physically constrained and had to grow longitudinally, absorbing
several rural settlements along the way. As a result, the farthest
neighbourhoods find themselves too distant from downtown and, because of their
low-income housing estates, they witness the emergence of latent or actual
interethnic rows between the original residents, who feel they should be in
charge, and the newcomers, who end up even more alienated.
Mountains near, mountains far
With the economic growth and the increasing European integration,
national boundaries are less and less a barrier and, since the Nineties, new
forms of EU-sponsored interaction and interdependence between alpine regions
are taking shape. Yet this has also led to a growing divide between advantaged
and disadvantaged districts and the intensification of traffic movements.
Gradually, the economic heart of Germany has shifted towards the subalpine
regions of Bavaria and Baden. Hi-tech research institutes in beautiful
locations are reminiscent of the Silicon Valley,
40 and the major axes of economic growth and trade between
Baden-Württemberg and Lombardy run through Switzerland. Additionally, this
entire area lies at the crossroads of East-West and North-South trade.
Similarly, the most developed economic districts of France, after Paris, are
Lyon and Marseille, and then Alsace and Strasbourg, Nice, Cannes and the Côte
d’Azur. They are all near the Alps. Grenoble and Sophia Antipolis, with its
environmentally friendly and culturally sustainable Science
Park, are emerging as foremost hi-tech players.
Even so, economic disparities between alpine villages and urban centres
are still remarkable: in real terms, the gross product of the alpine area is
about 30-40% lower than the metropolitan gross product (e.g. if the figure for
Milan is 130, the one for Sondrio is 75).41
The southern slope of the Alps has been confronted with harsher competition and
more severe climatic changes.
That there is a great potential for innovation in this area is past
doubt. One only has to think about the highly competitive industrial districts
of the prealpine valleys north of Brescia, and about Valle
Strona, Valsesia, Biella, and Belluno. We could also mention the numerous
universities and related research centres in the Alps and pre-Alps. 42
One of the less desirable effects of this state of
affairs is the growing and seemingly intractable problem of traffic travelling. Statistics are startling. Whilst in 1965, 87% of the transit
freight through the alpine core area was transported by rail and only 13% by
truck, by 1988 the proportion had changed considerably, and 55% of goods were
transported by truck. In 1994, road transport amounted to about 60% of the
total which itself has increased substantially and is forecast to grow further,
by 3%, annually with respect to goods, and 1,7% with respect to people. 43
For a long time, traffic was seen as the engine of prosperity in the
Alps. Up until recently, the position of a town along one of the main traffic
routes between north and south was regarded as an advantage. However, nowadays,
transport has become faster, and stops between Munich and Verona are mostly
unnecessary.
Recent protests against the re-opening of the Mont Blanc tunnel and
against high speed railways in Val di Susa and elsewhere,44 the blockades of the
Brennero highway, the Swiss referenda promoted by the local population, are a
testimony to the fact that people are by now perfectly aware that traffic can
only be advantageous when it stops somewhere along the way between departure
and destination, whereas it is only harmful, economically, environmentally and
socially, when it passes through. This
is unfortunately true also with respect to secondary roads, in the Alps as in
the Pyrenees. People have asked the local authorities to build them, regardless
of the economic and environmental costs, but once in place, they have not been
used to improve the quality of life of villagers, but to facilitate their
moving out. Only the first generation commuted to go to work. The following
generations have left and their parents’ houses are now holiday homes for the
grandchildren, who would never leave in a place where there is “nothing to do”…
Our fieldwork analysis and statistical data, which indicate that many of
the remotest municipalities are on the brink of disappearance is confirmed by
further statistical analysis. Fig. 4 lists the alpine towns with a population
greater than 5,000 inhabitants, even though some of them, like Livigno and
Cortina, exceed that value by virtue of the fact that many people reside there
only nominally, but really live someplace else. This notwithstanding, such
tourist towns attract workforce from the surrounding region.
5,000 inhabitants marks the lowest limit for a settlement to be
considered a town, with all the services generally associated with that status.
In Trentino, only 12 settlements in 223 can be classified as towns or cities.
Next, we have estimated the duration of commuting to and fro these towns
by private and public transportation in wintertime. The distinction between
public and private means of transportation is extremely important because
reaching a bus stop may turn into quite an adventure when seasonal conditions
are harsh. Owning a car is therefore a necessity and a privilege. People who
are too old or too young to drive find themselves at a distinct disadvantage.
We have then
examined the contention that more distant settlements are more likely to lose
inhabitants, compared to those closer to a town. The resulting cartographic
evidence substantiates this hypothesis, with a few exceptions: the border areas
with Switzerland, the Fiemme and Fassa valleys, and the Giudicarie. Although
most towns with at least 5000 inhabitants see their population increase, there
are some sporadic cases of towns that are shrinking inexorably. The following
towns, region by region, are on a descending trend:
Friuli
Venezia Giulia: Gorizia and Cormons
(Gorizia); Cividale del Friuli, Tarcento, Gemona del Friuli and Tarvisio
(Udine); Caneva (Pordenone).
Veneto: Valdobbiadene (Treviso), Mel and Feltre (Belluno); Asiago, Recoaro Terme
and Torrebelvicino (Vicenza).
Lombardia:
Cernobbio (Como), Lovere (Bergamo), Vobarno
(Brescia)
Piemonte: Varallo Sesia (Vercelli), Trivero (Biella), Barghe and
Peveragno (Cn).
Liguria:
Vado Ligure (Savona).
These
towns are usually in areas hit by serious economic downturns, such as Friuli or
Carnia. Take for instance Tarvisio, a town whose fortune was built on the
customs barrier – which has been since removed – and on the weekly market, or
Gorizia, Cividale, Tarcento, and Gemona, one-time thriving towns that could not
compete with the emerging markets.
In
Veneto, Asiago and Recoaro Terme remind us
that even celebrated tourist resorts may at some point become unfashionable,
when appropriate countermeasures have not been taken. Alternatively, when
something is done to buck the trend, it is already too late: this is the case
of Feltre, where a university has been established, but to little avail.
In
Piedmont, Varallo Sesia, Rimella, Rassa
suffered from the dismantling of the textile industrial base of Val Sesia, without
ever fully recovering. Barghe and Peveragno lost most of their inhabitants
during the past century. In Liguria, Vado Ligure has been affected by
industrial restructuring, which has caused large unemployment and emigration.
In Lombardy, Lovere and Vestone have been hit hard by the crisis of the iron
industry. Finally, the main cause of Cernobbio’s decline has been the trend to relocate or outsource
silk production in China and Eastern Europe
Exceptions that warrant further study: from the
Insubric model to the Giudicarie
One
exception to the thesis that remote municipalities are demographically
declining is the so-called “Insubric model”. Insubria is the region between
Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore which lies on the slopes of the Alps and includes
the valleys north of Bergamo and Brescia. Milan is where a large share of the
workforce of the area commutes to. Workers, often employed in the building
industry, may have to travel 100 km or more every day. Some drive the so-called
“death buses” for 300 km, taking driving-shifts, which is a most hazardous
practice, due to sleep deprivation which may cause car accidents and serious or
even fatal work injuries. Lombardy is the region where safety procedures are
followed most scrupulously, but it is also the region with highest percentage
of work injuries, precisely because construction workers are too tired from
commuting. 45 In Insubria
small firms employ mostly women, underqualified male workers and immigrants,
who are quick to leave when the opportunity presents itself: viz. the family of
Albanian refugees who refused to live in Sondrio. The same applies to Trentino.
Our study reveals that many immigrant families who happened to settle,
temporarily, in small villages, cannot wait to move out. Many local residents,
by contrast, are willing to commute for a well-paid job if this allows them to
continue to live where they grew up. Switzerland is a favourite destination,
since Swiss employers are well disposed towards Italian workers, and
particularly towards those coming from the mountains. As a result, many of them
manage to go on to a brilliant career in healthcare and education. If the
Italian alpine towns and cities offered the same opportunities, many young
professionals would most likely choose to stay and services for local residents
would not deteriorate as they are currently doing.
The
valleys of Fiemme and Fassa are another example of a place where the local
population is not declining. This is easily explained: mass tourism, combined
with the enormous advantages accrued through the adoption of the autonomy
statute, has benefited family-run small enterprises with a well-defined local identity and producing traditional
stoves and furniture, but suited to the modern taste, “Tyrolean” apparel, high
quality local cheeses, like “Puzzone di Moena.” Giudicarie is an altogether
different case. It was and partly still is mostly cut off from the rest of the
country and the local entrepreneurs, with the support of the local authorities,
have succeeded in marketing across Northern Italy a local product like Storo’s
flour, which is produced elsewhere, because the valley is too narrow for a
factory of the required capacity. In this area, specialized training has been
offered to local students and young professionals to guide them through the
application process for EU funding. Such spirit of initiative is particularly
welcome, given that raising standards of expertise and best practice certainly
pays off in the long term, for instance through the creation of a network of small
but enterprising service and production companies and cooperatives established
by young graduates who could live elsewhere but decide to stay and improve the
living standards of their communities.
PROBLEMS AND
PROSPECTS: FIELDWORK FINDINGS
Research methodology: long residence, sharing, and
participant observation
We did the ethnographic
fieldwork in the municipalities of Cimego, Ronzone,
Sagron-Mis, Terragnolo, and Luserna, through comparative, participatory
action-research on a micro-community, so as to learn about the beliefs and
motivations of residents of small, remote alpine villages. We maintain that the
results can be extended to other realities of a similar kind, in the Alps as in
the Apennines, and in other rural regions of Europe as well.
At the heart of anthropology is the study of humankind. On this count,
anthropology has much in common with history, sociology, psychology, medicine,
etc. What sets this discipline apart is the methodological approach: the
fieldwork, its long duration and the close interaction and considerable
familiarity with the people under study. The one thing that all
anthropologists, regardless of their theoretical orientation and political
sympathies, agree upon is that armchair speculation is sterile. Participant
observation is indispensable if one wants to understand human interactions and
relations. Therefore, the
anthropological fieldwork consists in spending at least a few months in place,
interviewing the locals, most of all those that are at the centre of the
investigation – in our case: the local authorities, the entrepreneurs, the
youth and the women in general. Participant observation involves the
willingness to become part of people’s everyday activities, through negotiation
and exchange. Talking with and listening to people raised in a different
culture is what anthropology is all about. Sometimes anthropologists must pay
special attention to what cannot or must not be said and to what is so taken
for granted that people assume that everyone knows that.
There is no such thing as a society that is completely transparent to
itself: much of a culture is hidden in each person, subconsciously, after the
internalization of precepts and values. Responses become
automatic, “natural.” On the other hand, it is
often precisely the unsaid that reveals the most about a community: its actual
needs, unresolved questions, latent contradictions and conflicts ready to
explode. Human beings tend to rationally justify their actions: but large
shares of the rationale behind human behaviour is culturally shaped in many,
complex ways, so that the motives of human actions are not always clear to the
outsider and cannot be lucidly spelled out by local actors. Anthropologists are
expected to interpret the local model of thinking and doing things and to
explain it to those who do not belong in there. They do so by means of
participant observation.
During the years prior to the drafting of the present report,
researchers have done fieldwork in different locations and have kept in touch
constantly, also by visiting their colleagues. Not only that: such locations
have been included in EU-sponsored development programmes run by Cealp, so that
it has been possible to test the reliability of the collected data and of the
relevant conclusions and their usefulness in promoting the local business. As
part of this programme, local residents have enrolled in skills training
courses in entrepreneurship and tourism marketing and promotion, before, during
and after the fieldwork. There is an ongoing partnership with Cimego, which
began several years ago. Sagron Mis is the
only municipality where the partnership has been discontinued.
In the light of these achievements, we can confidently say that our
observations can be used in other alpine villages where local authorities are
planning to embark on a programme of sustainable and participatory
development
Here people are equal…more or less
“You see, here people are pretty much on the same
footing”: this is the self-perception of our informants. This is blatantly
untrue, but it is held as self-evident, and it persists in opposition to a
system of values that has taken shape over the past two centuries, beginning
with the French Revolution, in urban milieus. In other words, even though these
communities are immersed in a liberal-democratic environment, the dominant
rules are of a different order, and arise from a segmentary society, which is
collectivist rather than democratic, and nominally egalitarian but hostile to
diversity and distinction.
The classification of political systems in segmentary and complex, was first set forth by Emile Durkheim46 and further elaborated by E. E. Evans Pritchard and M. Fortes,47 as part of an analysis of the factors involved in maintaining cohesion and internal stability in a clan, tribe, or larger society. In state societies, legitimate political, administrative-bureaucratic, juridical, military and repressive structures provide the necessary cohesion. Instead, in segmentary societies mechanisms of internal adjustment that are not always visible serve the same purpose: only expert analysis can tease out specific determinants and dynamics. This type of social structure is composed of segments and sub-segments (clans, sub-clans, and dominant families) that form alliances or merge, held together by ties of kinship and loyalty; or else, they contest each other, according to consensual rules and, in democratic contexts, also in an entirely peaceful manner, as in the democratic competition for local elections. A system such as this leaves room for informal agreements on codes of conduct that maintain the social order. As a result, statistical analysis of voting generally reveals that people cast their ballots uniformly, by family membership; that is, there exists a general consensus on certain principles and criteria regarding how things should be done that are seldom contested or transgressed, to prevent the dissolution of the community.
Social systems
like these demand structural homogeneity and voluntary adherence to the group
rules and values on the part of their members. The other side of the coin is
that formal equality exacts a high price: the exclusion of any kind of personal
distinction and ambition which may threaten the solidity and stability of the
community. This is because when a person stands out, this is regarded as a
violation of a collective property right. What is more, gender and age
differences do exist and are of considerable importance. The ostensible
egalitarianism conceals a strictly hierarchical and exclusionary organization,
where some hegemonic families and clans monopolize political representation and
are granted liberties and entitlements that the rest of the community can only
dream of. So, for instance, during a mayor and council election campaign, one
of the candidates claimed that he was entitled to be the designated mayor, for
he was the grandson of a former mayor, even though he had spent most of his
adult life working elsewhere, in large cities. His interlocutors did not seem
to take exception to this line of argument. Open confrontation in a democratic
fashion is not without problems, and it is generally shunned. Taking sides is
likewise avoided as much as possible and a conflict on rival election
candidacies is apt to provoke lasting rifts. From an early age, children are
taught to conceal their views and the pursuit of one’s self-interest, not to
express dissent publicly, never to believe that one is superior to the others,
and to make oneself as inconspicuous as possible. It follows that material
comfort cannot be displayed: large investments and purchases are often made
elsewhere to dodge resentful criticism.
Envy
is a major obstacle to social solidarity and, from a socio-anthropological
point of view, an effective mechanism of social control and equalization, for
income disparities remain hidden for fear of gossip and slanders and do not
cause too much discomfort. Its levelling function is even more obvious when it
comes to property transmission: sons and daughters
inherit in equal measure and the estate fragmentation proceeds unchecked, from
one generation to the next, because siblings are more willing to sell to
outsiders and leave rather than sell to their relatives and enrich them.
Another more practical reason is that relatives and villagers are presumed to
sell at a fair price, that is, low, while transactions with outsiders do not
raise the same concerns. The opposite is true: a successful sale benefits the
whole community, directly or indirectly.
Having said
that, envy is not the exclusive domain of alpine cultures. The same mentality
does typify all closed systems: viz. condo meetings and emotional abuse at
work. The official policy promoting egalitarianism is at odds with the other
universally acknowledged value, that is, “roba”, a term which refers to the
economic, symbolic, psychological connotations of personal properties,
especially the house and the estate. Influential families are those who own the
largest estates, who can help their heirs to buy a house when they form their
own families, and who have several cars and purchase new ones every few years.
At the same time, they cannot boast about it: everyone should know about their
prosperity, but it is considered bad form to display it too loudly. A common
faith, culture and the exchange of favours concur to maintain a functional
balance between these countervailing forces.
Authority is
conferred upon the head of the family and of the clan and he, for he is
generally a man, has the duty to see that bonds of loyalty are respected and
that all members of the clan give a hand when the clan needs it (e.g. house
restoration, rebuilding, or building). Those who refuse to help are branded as
reckless failures and the community may well cast the blame on the entire clan.
As a result the clan’s members cannot help but feel partly responsible for the
breaking of rules and ashamed about the whole thing. Sanctions for those who
disobey are of a moral nature, but they are no less dreadful and effective:
“what people say” is a constant source of distress and a deterrent factor, and
forces those people who are too proud, too vulnerable or too outstanding to
comply with the dominant rules to leave. In practice, this mentality
neutralizes most attempts at social change and development based on
self-employment and entrepreneurship. Only the strong-minded and strong-willed
can overcome the powerful means of social control like envy, collective
sanction, gossip and the suppression of debate and controversy for the sake of
harmony.
A
fragmented society
One of the hallmarks of segmentary societies is social fragmentation:
clans, tribes, hamlets that do not share common interests even though
commonalities are self-evident to outsiders. Rival groups that do not seem to
understand that their often unreasonable internecine conflicts are
self-defeating. In order to shed some light on these phenomena, one has to cast
a glance at the past, when alpine settlements were scattered, so as to enable
the community to best harness the local resources. The alpine landscape, far
from being “wild”, was tamed and systematically exploited and inhabited. In
areas with a prevalence of romance culture, people grouped together in hamlets
connected to a larger settlement, as in a galactic polity. When the climate was
harsh, this community became self-sufficient, with their priest, their small
grocery store, their school, tavern, and dairy and, of course, their own
peculiar identities. Weddings were celebrated between members of families who
lived next to each other in order to strengthen their ties of loyalty. As a
further demonstration of their autarchic bent, in some cases, like Samolaco in Val Chiavenna, the
local council was periodically relocated from a hamlet to the next. Distinction
was hardly tolerated, as in the saying “the nail that sticks up will be
hammered down”. There also was need for particularism and localism, as
villagers were reluctant to surrender any room for self-determination to a
modern, centralized administration.
My personal experience may give some
indications of the kind of difficulties that one might encounter in alpine
villages. A few years back, between 1994 and 1998, Cealp had organized an
international festival called “an evening around the fire: seven days of alpine
culture.” This festival was held in Garniga Terme, which comprised half a dozen scattered
hamlets, and initially we thought it would be best to “spread” it over the
entire area, in order to involve everyone. Then, because there were only 400
residents, we decided that the square before the town hall of the main hamlet
was the most suitable location for the event. Little did we know that such a
change would cause most residents not to attend the festival. Administrative
centralization does not seem to be in accordance with the stated desire of
local inhabitants to govern themselves.
One of the major obstacles to the development of alpine communities is
indeed the difficulty that people encounter in overcoming localisms and
parochialisms in order to build up a proactive approach to the solution of
problems which, after all, affect everyone. This kind of close-mindedness is
closely reminiscent of siege-syndrome: “we against them”, “we are not clear about
what they want from us, but what they propose is never really explicit”, “they
always have an ulterior motive”, “what they do, they do it to serve their own
interests, not ours”. Their agenda is therefore suspicious and “we must be
careful not to be tricked by them”. It seems as though their subconscious is
haunted by the inextinguishable fear that someone is out to steal their
hard-won properties and rob them of their traditional entitlements.
Then, to make things worse, there are the endless and seemingly
unsolvable feuds between families and clans, whose origin is lost in the mists
of time. Such rivalries reach their boiling point when, because of
depopulation, schools, which truly represent the spirit, the essence of the
community, probably more than the council house and the church, are forced to
close.
There countless examples of this unwillingness to cooperate in small
villages. In Valle del Chiese there are two networks for the promotion and
advertising of tourism and leisure that seldom work together. In the village of
Sagron Mis everything is duplicated, including
women’s volunteering associations. The inhabitants of Cimego (slightly more
than 400) are loath to work with those of Castel
Condino (about 150), which is only 5 km away. Nobody really knows why. Thankfully,
though, it appears that parochialism is not as endemic among the younger
generations.
Associations and volunteering: obstacle or
engine of change?
Despite the received view that cities are brimful of intense social
activities, the evidence points to a greater participation to community life in
alpine villages. However tiny, every village features its own clubs and
associations, from the “Alpini” (mountain troops) to the parish council, from
the firemen association to the local tourist board, from sport clubs to the
municipal band, involving the vast majority of the population. Indeed, one
could well argue that life in a village is always associated and nobody can
stand a chance to be admitted to the higher echelons of the local civil
service, banks and cooperatives, unless one has first “voluntarily” taken part
in one of these associations. People are accustomed to sharing and
self-government and the “do it ourselves” philosophy is pervasive in the life
of the community, which is founded on a high degree of mutual trust. It is
precisely this trust that could make the attempt to set up local business
enterprises for a sustainable development a feasible undertaking.
Unfortunately, this is hardly ever the case: fear of conflict and responsibilities,
and of a meritocratic and quantitative assessment of individual efforts, leads
to the outright rejection, sometimes exhibited with pride, of earnings and of
the possibility that someone might actually profit from it. When voluntary
associations are ready to take a step forward and become small companies,
psychological and socially induced inhibitions are so strong that people prefer
to renounce rather than become entrepreneurs. This equally applies to all our
fieldwork settings: in Cimego,
Sagron Mis, and Luserna, earnings from work done for the associations are given
to the association itself or to charity, instead of reinvesting it.
For this reason, tourist shops that could have enticed visitors to come
have not been opened and sales of typical products, which would be a valid
means to retain a strong local identity, have never taken off. Paradoxically,
then, the volunteering mentality is apt to retard the economic growth of the
community and to perpetuate the precariousness and vulnerability of certain
categories of residents, especially young people and women.
The question of generation gaps and the incommunicability of aspirations
and values between the young and the aged is probably the root cause of this
socio-economic inactivity. Even when a company is created, it is the elder
associates or full-time employees that run the enterprise, and they are moved
by the belief that their ethos must be one of service, and often a thankless
one, and are not willing to adopt a genuinely entrepreneurial attitude. They do
not need to earn money, because their incomes are already secure, and so they
put a major emphasis on dedication and vocation, and feel entitled to run the
business according to their principles.
When a cooperative enterprise or a small company is formed, which
involves younger professionals, more inclined to seek a steady profit, inner
contradictions come to surface: “they have done nothing so far, and now look
how demanding they are. We used to do things for free.” Because business
management entails responsibilities and older partners don’t feel like running
into too much trouble to increase their incomes, which generally are supplied
by the state or regional governments in the form of retirement benefits or
subsidies, entrepreneurial spirit can hardly establish itself. It thus so
happens that those actors that seemed so indispensable before, are now
perceived as an awful burden.
A further source of conflict, one on which we shall expand more later,
is gender: oftentimes women are the best candidates to run a local business,
but their male partners have a hard time getting adjusted to the idea that
“their women” are entrepreneurs and must spend a relatively large amount of
time, energy and passion to keep the business going, rather than taking care of
the family. The difference between an office clerk with fixed working hours and
a self-employed woman need not be stressed. It can be the cause of violent rows
between spouses, especially when the elderly must be entrusted to nursing home or assisted-living
facilities because women cannot be there to tend gratuitously to their needs.
As a consequence, numerous families fall apart and new disputes arise
within the community, which is little accustomed to open confrontations, to
challenges to culturally ingrained practices and power-relations, and to the
“natural selection” of the fittest and more deserving that lies at the core of
market economy. Eventually, at times, the old customs and generations give way
to the new ones. Or else they don’t, and the process or replacement does not
come to fruition, because the more dynamic forces of society dare not openly
challenge the status quo and fear the social costs of such a confrontation. But
the price to pay for this timidity is that most alpine settlements are bound to
disappear within a generation or two, or to become holiday homes for
city-dwellers who will only live there for a few weeks in summertime.
Needing
someone from the outside: patterns of inclusion and exclusion
People living in small villages on the slopes of the Alps are aware that
envy and fragmentation fray the fabric of the society in which they live and
believe that these problems can only be solved by the intervention of a strong
leader supported by outsiders who, by definition, are thought to be objective.
In these small communities the role of town halls and local civil servants is
crucial, because they are looked to for help and leadership, regardless of
their political orientation. Political disagreements can be set aside in a
milieu in which nearly everyone can become an active participant in the
decision-making process – as opposed to the neat separation of private life and
politics in the cities –, and competent majors enjoy a greater measure of
legitimacy. Even when they do commit mistakes, that is easily forgiven,
provided that their blunders are not too serious and that they display a
sincere commitment to work for the benefit of all and to further their own
agenda. Therefore, if gossip, hearsays and slanders don’t force them to take a
step back and refuse to run for re-election, they are reconfirmed several times
and may profit from this political continuity.
Aside from an acknowledged leader, people also suggest that they would
favour initiatives to bring detached professionals from the outside. It is
openly conceded that rivalries and fragmentation squelch all attempts to
promote an entrepreneurial spirit. This is why alpine communities have proven
far more open to external advice than urban districts. Most interestingly,
patterns of inclusion and integration have worked far better and faster than in
the plains. Needless to say, this does not mean that everything proceeds
smoothly. It is not infrequent that experts from the outside hold on to a
romantic view of rural communities[ii][2] which partially blinds them to the realities of life and work in the
mountains and does not help them understand the actual potential of the region
under scrutiny.
The degree of personal involvement, a disposition to impose one’s own
ideas, the intensity of criticism necessary to effectively interact with people
with whom one must live side by side most of the time, and cannot avoid, (as it
would be certainly possible in a city), may lead to escape from the reality of
conflicts that are both within and without the observer.
When these issues are duly confronted, experts enjoy a degree of
latitude that they could only dream of in an allegedly more open urban milieu.
Differences of gender, race, political and religious affiliation, lifestyle,
etc. are pragmatically set aside when it comes to enhance local standards of
life.
What’s more, local authorities regard it as an honour to be chosen for
experiments of social development engineers by competent outsiders and do their
best to be helpful.
Four of our researchers had a direct experience of this and three of
them, including one who was quite familiar with the local milieu, experienced
what anthropologists call “burn-out,” that is, suffering from a culture-shock
of such magnitude – often induced by their involvement in local disputes and
the consequent alienation and loss of mutual trust – that they refused to deal
any longer with their informants. One developed a nearly pathological hatred
for anything in any way related to the mountains and mountain life, to the
point that she would not go back to Cealp, which is located at 1500 m, on Mount
Bondone. Two researchers declined a formal invitation to continue to work for
Cealp and another one took up the offer on condition that she would never do
fieldwork again.
There is a further instance of alienation among urban-dwellers being
asked to spend some time in a village. During a training course local
development sponsored by the Ministry of the Environment and FORMEZ and run by
Cealp, most classes were held in Cimego, which seemed to be a suitable location
for twenty-odd students examining development process at the sharp end; and
indeed, the experience turned out negative from the start. They spent most of
the time in the hotel because they felt they were being constantly watched.
They did not feel like hanging out with the local teenagers, so that they
failed to build a sense of trust and reciprocity vis-à-vis the
locals, which is the indispensable ingredient of good ethnography. Coming from
the cities, they had a false, somewhat romantic conception of what life in the
mountains would be like,48
and believed that they would enjoy the same kind of entertainment that one can find
in fashionable tourist destinations. When they realised that things were
different, and that the pace of life in a village is much slower, they decided
that they would rather remain in the hotel and play cards. They did not come to
terms with the fact that in a village one must live side by side with people
who may be unpleasant and even hostile, and that there is no alternative to
that. The degree of personal involvement in the everyday life of the community
means that one is forced to examine one’s own assumptions and to deal with
conflict-resolution and anger-management on a daily basis, something that can
be easily avoided in a city. On the other hand, when professionals get their
hand in, they are rewarded with leeway and with a considerable measure of
understanding when they don’t seem to figure out how to go about something that
they are unfamiliar with, and even when their lifestyle and political ideas put
them at odds with the prevalent habits and persuasions. Furthermore, local
authorities are generally genuinely interested in contributing to the success
of the development programme; they sometimes provide office space and
accommodation for fieldworkers, and see that they are given what they need to
carry out the project successfully. Some even come from other villages that
have not been included in the research to ask whether it would be possible to
get involved. Therefore, it would be seriously wrong to presume that mountain
villages can only be described as closed communities. When it comes to talk
about themselves and their community, and offer help whenever they see that it
would make a difference for the ethnographer, they are more generous than the
people of the cities.
Some measure of openness persists even in the face of blunders. Outsiders
are expected to commit mistakes. If they have earned the respect of the
villagers, they may be sanctioned but, after a while, they are re-integrated
into the community, which is characterized by high internal control and social
coercion as well as by defence mechanisms against external aggressions, which
simultaneously facilitate group cohesion. This is hardly the case in the
cities, where human relations are more loose and malleable, and the exclusion
of a member of the group does not normally threaten the stability of the
group. What the outsider is expected to
demonstrate is the willingness to settle within the community.
Otherwise, marriage and stable companionship bring in new members of the
family, who are automatically incorporated into the community. In practice, new
members do not enjoy the same status and privileges of the others, but if they
accommodate themselves to the new situation, they can climb the ladder and even
become mayor. Another scenario is when the outsider’s ancestors came from the
community in which their descendants currently reside. In this case, former
bonds of loyalty and mutual obligations are resumed. The third scenario is when
outsiders buy a house in the village, and settle in the village, showing that
they are willing to take part in the life of the community.
In my own experience, being the owner of a house in Trentino has
certainly helped to make things easier for me in dealing with local authorities
and politicians. Appreciation is also extended to those who demonstrate that
they are self-sufficient, as when they restore an old house to its original
glory by themselves, or when they clean up a garden or when they gather
firewood with the other villagers. Conventional wisdom has it that, for all the
snobbery of urban-dwellers, manual labour is unavoidable and ennobling – lazing
around is, as it were, sinful –, and those who do not shrink from it are worthy
of respect and aid. Therefore, to go gather firewood with other men is
praiseworthy, even if one does not need firewood. The ethos of service is what
truly matters, for it involves all-important rituals of socialization and the
joint use of communal forests, called “part.” Then there are folklore
festivals and other events during which everyone is expected to give a hand,
and volunteer associations of firemen, rescuers, churchgoers, culture and
nature conservationists, chorus singers, and so forth.
Naturally, an adequate knowledge of the region and of its sometimes
partly forgotten cultural traditions and customs is an additional advantage
when research and development projects are examined for approval. In a great
many communities people are painfully conscious of the risk of losing the
recollection of various attributes of the local peasant civilisation and of the
traces of human activities. The expert is often invited precisely for the
purpose of recovering vanishing records: this was the case of Cimego, Ronzone and Lucerna, that devote a large
share of the local budget to cultural activities.
“She knows more about our things than we do”:
this is the kind of comments that express the acceptance of the outsider inside
the community. Furthermore, expertise accompanied by genuine curiosity about
local practices, by a sincere affection for the region, and by a clear readiness
to accept other people’s idiosyncrasies, is likely to remove most of the
obstacles.
Patterns of inclusion:
immigrants
All in all, despite possible preconceived notions, those alpine
communities that we have researched have demonstrated to be more open and
welcoming towards foreigners than city-dwellers. We have measured the degree of
integration of foreigners along the following axes:
·
Proportion of immigrants to the total population;
·
Work and residential stability;
·
Decent and legal housing;
·
Prospects for family reunification;
·
Participation in the village’s social life and
activities;
The foreigners that we have interviewed have a stable and legal job;
more often than not they work as manual labourers, because across Northern
Italy there is a serious labour shortage in this sector, and employers in
mountain villages prefer to legalize their employees, to avoid unnecessary
worries. Working and housing conditions appeared to be better than in
metropolitan areas and the exploitation of immigrants that is so frequent there
was nowhere to be found. Most of all, many had managed to have their families
join them, also with the help and the generosity of their neighbours, who had
donated pieces of furniture and wood, an act that, besides its practical value,
has a considerable symbolic value as well. Some of them, after a few years,
have bought a house and their presence in the community has been seen
favourably. Instead, when some of them chose to move somewhere else, their
neighbours regretted their departure.
Alongside of this - and this is something even more significant and so
rare in large urban areas where immigrants are far more numerous but tend to
group together along ethnic lines and seldom mix with members of the ethnic
majority –is the active participation of immigrants to the life of the village.
Opportunity for socialization in rural settings abound: working together on
something that benefits the whole community, like road paving, collecting
firewood, and organizing festivals, including celebrations of multiculturalism.
If someone is not work-shy, his or her ethnic identity is a matter of no
concern for the other residents. In Terragnolo, immigrant families from Maghreb
were granted the right to gather firewood, invited to throw ethnic parties,
cook their own food for the other villagers. The children of these immigrants
can easily fit in, attend the same schools, play in the same sport teams and
become members of the same associations as the children of the original
inhabitants. They are even allowed to play and study in the church’s premises,
even though some of them are Muslim or Christian orthodox. Only those
immigrants who do not appear to be interested in doing their own part within
the community, are denigrated. This is further proof that open-minded local
authorities could achieve so much more if they realized the immense potential
for integration and enrichment of these intercultural encounters in rural and mountain
communities.
There is nothing in here: commuting and alienation
Traffic
congestion is a serious problem in the alpine valleys. Most cars do not come
from the outside, though. The owners of those cars are residents who refuse to employ
means of public transportation - too inefficient, or simply inexistent, they
say - but are attracted by the many recreational opportunities of alpine towns
and cities.
Cimego
best exemplifies this trend. 20 years of efforts to halt the depopulation
process, efforts that have recently met with success, could not prevent a
rising trend of commuting, especially among youth: everyday, half of the young
workers who reside in Cimego drive 5 to 70 km to go to work. In Trentino, a 30
minute drive is seen as long-distance commuting, and is reason enough to decide
to find housing closer to one’s workplace. Those who stay and work in Cimego
have to make do with what the local job market can offer, which is not much.
Women who stay normally become housewives and look for seasonal
and summer jobs. As a rule, these young men and women
are not very keen on studying, which they see as irrelevant in terms of the
potential impact on their lives. For many adjusting to the life of the city
where they could pursue higher education is simply not worth the candle. They
are not helped to fit in nor do they believe that fitting in is necessary. They
experience discrimination and exclusion, are teased and called names, and
therefore tend to stay on their own. On the other hand, those who work and
study in a city are perceived as different, neither fish nor flesh, and find it hard to hang out with those who do not.
Villages are increasingly turning into functional extensions of the cities and,
even when the population is numerically stable or on the increase, many
complain that “there is nothing in here, no one, everyone is gone, everyone”.
The housing problem
“There’s
no way we can find a place to live”: this is the common complaint of people who
decide to leave. But the evidence contradicts this statement: in many villages
there are plenty of abandoned houses, sometimes even blocks that are left to
fall apart for lack of renovation. Why is that so? There are a number of
reasons.
First
off, partible inheritance
practices may lead to estate and property fragmentation. Some of the owners no
longer live in the village, and yet they refuse to sell or to rent the house,
for fear of usucaption lawsuits. Sheer selfishness and ignorance of the
artistic, historical and cultural value of certain buildings is also an
important factor at play: owners expect local authorities or the State to
intervene and finance renovations, or seek to elude the law’s strict provision
for the preservation of cultural heritage. Civic spirit in Italy leaves much to
be desired, so that the binding force of the law is dramatically weakened
before the personal and family interests. Instead of renovating, some prefer to
build a new house where they are not supposed to, and in so doing they spoil
the landscape. Finally, young people prefer to buy an apartment or a house
rather than rent them. Some wait until their parents can provide one, but at
the same time parents are happier when they can give the apartment to married
children. This of course means that apartments and houses may well stay
unoccupied for years. If children come back from the city, it is often because
they got married and their parents have ensured that they will be given a
furnished apartment.
Psychological relinquishment and
escapism
The choice between leaving and staying, which is also one between
changing and keeping things the way they are, is of an anthropological nature,
and involves people’s mentality. Since the end of the Fifties, massive waves of
emigration took place, which took away with them much of the vitality and
resourcefulness of alpine communities, causing an epidemic of alienation and
uprootedness. The impact of industrial and metropolitan culture is also
destabilizing. Alpine villages have been physically and culturally colonized so
rapidly that changes of conventions, values, and practices have not been
metabolized, also due to a growing sense of inadequacy vis-à-vis city-dwellers,
who oftentimes display little understanding and tolerance of the local culture
and ways of speaking and knowing.
Elderly people are especially affected by these transformations, because
they are the least willing and capable to adapt to new frames of reference and
symbolic repertoires that displace the reassuring benchmarks of their
ancestors.[iii][3]
The new cultural models, imported from the outside, popularized by
schools and mass media is often incompatible with a social fabric that has no
strong identity and resilience, nor means to defend itself.
Of course we are not here to gainsay the evidence of greater prosperity,
literacy, and health that typify today’s Alps. However, the social costs of
this development are high in terms of marginality, dignity, and self-esteem.
Herding and farming are regarded as undignified and unclean and the number of farms
and amount of farmland in Italy is shrinking more rapidly than anywhere else in
the Alps.
[iv][4]
Young people are anything but enthusiastic about finding employment in
the cattle-breeding sector and labour is almost always imported. But then
again, the older generations are also partially responsible for this because,
in a bout of self-hatred, they do not want to see their children follow their
footsteps. Social isolation, periodical disconnection with those peers who
spend the summertime elsewhere, and lack of entertainment are among the reasons
why young people choose not to take that kind of job. This phenomenon is less
dramatic where communities have organized ways to contrast the sense of
solitude: in France government policies and trade unions have helped seasonal
workers to get involved in cultural initiatives. Elsewhere, mountain pastures
are the destination of holiday-makers, some of whom reside in villages for the
rest of the year and own log-houses and cabins on the mountains. This helps
alleviate the loneliness.
The root of the problem is not economic. Those who accept to work in a
shepherd’s hut earn far more money than those who work in hotels and
restaurants and some may well find out that this job is also physically less
demanding. Also, from the point of view of psychological well-being, working
exceedingly long hours without interruption, with little spare time to interact
with colleagues and guests, is definitely less pleasant than having time to
think and read and write, when the daily chores are over and done. But these
advantages are sometimes hard to see, especially when this employment is not
viewed as temporary and is unrelated to other, more “fulfilling” occupations.[v][5]
The question of identity loss is tied to the process of cultural
marginalization, occasioned by a certain path of historical evolution that has
devalued the status of manual workers, especially if they have to deal with
foul-smelling organic matter. These days, the highest aspiration for workers is
to find a stable and well-paid job, congruent with the level of education and
specialization they have attained, with regular working hours, well-defined
goals and little need for further training and refreshing, in a healthy and
clean environment, and with a reasonable amount of spare time. Those who fail
to achieve these standards are pitied.
At the same time, most people maintain that that ultimate goal is almost
unattainable unless one is prepared to leave. Thus the actual abandonment of a
place is preceded by the psychological habituation to abandonment. Those social
categories that are more vulnerable to this kind of pessimistic discourse,
namely women, youth, and the more literate, who often feel discriminated in a
traditional society, end up despising their own culture and identity by
comparing it with the more free, open, sociable and entertaining urban culture,
more attentive to individual needs and therefore more likely to meet great
expectations about oneself and the future.
Having said that, the time of mass-emigration is over and things have
changed. Several alpine areas have become the preferred destination for a tiny
stream of immigration which, however, has yet to compensate for emigration
losses and for the flight of educated people. Likewise, it cannot yet counter
the process of deterioration of the local communities, marked by the closure of
schools for lack of pupils, of pharmacies and post offices for lack of
customers, of health services for lack of patients, of sport facilities for
lack of children, of factories for lack of workers, of associations for lack of
members. The degradation of cultural life produces a vicious circle that makes
these places increasingly less interesting and attractive, both for the
residents and the tourists, but the local authorities do not seem to perceive
it as the calamity that it actually is, in terms of the sustainable development
of these regions.[vi][6]
This situation can only intensify those attributes of alpine life like
social fragmentation, parochialism, and rivalries between hamlets and groups,
between families and individuals that prevent a significant measure of
cooperation on common endeavours. Distrust towards the outsiders may actually
increase and compromise the possibility of receiving aid, advice and feedback from
external consultants, thus involuntarily reinforcing the vicious circle that we
have referred to above.
What people say: social
control
A retarding factor in the social and economic development of alpine
communities is social control, comprising all the measures necessary to keep
the social order intact. If so many communities crumble down, that is because
they have not been able to respond and adjust to changed circumstances and are
still dominated by a mechanism of mutual surveillance monitoring and evaluating
the actions of every member. This mechanism originally derived from the need to
maintain internal cohesion and neutralize most sources of conflict, but it
gradually crystallised codes of conduct and the underpinning system of values,
which are now hardly consistent with modern expectations about freedom and
self-determination, the result of the emancipation struggles of the 1960s and
1970s.
Even today the set of rules that parents and acquaintances instil in children
is meant to provide a safe pathway, from schooling to work, to marriage, and to
parenthood. The infringement of rules is punished by merciless gossip but is
almost inevitable, insofar as the mass media convey an idea of how life should
look like, a portrayal that, especially for women, is completely at variance
with traditional values and habits of the mind. Those who are not ready to bow
must leave, for young women are not presumed to live by themselves in an alpine
village; the others will have to reside in their parents’ home and conceal
their true feelings and frustration as much as they can.
Fear of judgment has another terrible consequence: it stifles frank
interaction between individuals and clans. Behind the façade of a dense social
life, one can discern the unpleasant reality of people who keep other people at
a distance, for those who are not clan-members are apt to misjudge or
misrepresent a family’s lifestyle, and thus destroy their respectability: “the
less we see each other, the less we have something bad to say about one
another”, as one informant remarked.
Inevitably, then, children do not really know each other, because their
parents are not accustomed to hang out together and because, when they go to
school, they are assigned to different classes, in the expectation that, in
this way, they will be able to familiarize with other peers. However, when they go back home from school,
they spend the rest of the time with their family, not with their new
acquaintances. These relationships are shallow, with little emotional
engagement, and go on like this, on and off, for years, seriously restricted by
the need not to arise suspicion, not to look too different from the others, not
to express too straightforwardly one’s own views, for fear of being cut off as
too extroverted, and therefore unreliable.
Lest festivities should lead to feuds between clans and families, people
meet and celebrate on neutral grounds: the garden, the log-house on the
mountain, or the tavern. The household is forbidden territory for outsiders,
even for the children’s and husband’s friends. They have to make do with the
“stube”, that is, a separate room, often behind, underneath or adjoining the
kitchen fireplace.
Not surprisingly, most informants
revealed that nearly all of their friends do not live in the village and tend
to be co-workers, with whom you don’t have to share your private sphere. But
still, relationships outside the family circle are thin and a generalized
distrust has the upper hand. Disclosure of intimate, personal information is
carefully avoided and this may cause people to feel lonely, alienated and
depressed.
As a matter of fact, social control
has been blamed for the high rates of depopulation in smaller villages by C.I.P.R.A, the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps.
One of our main tasks will be to remedy this situation if we want to achieve a
reasonably sustainable development. As long as this vicious circle of harsh
criticisms will endure, change and the emergence of an entrepreneurial
mentality will not be possible. This is all the more intolerable, given that
large amounts of money are left in banking accounts or spent somewhere else,
where nobody knows who the investor is and no one can complain. Therefore,
ironically, one can see houses in need of renovation that are left untouched,
because the owners prefer to buy properties in the city, or abroad, in order to
prevent invidious comparisons with other villagers.
Young people and the fear of change
Social control is more oppressive when it comes to more vulnerable
citizens, such as the younger generations and women, because older people hold
the reins of power and establish what is culturally and socially viable and
acceptable, and what is not. Those who do not abide by the rules are
progressively excluded from participation in the social life of the community.
Since childhood, they are taught not to pursue self-determination and,
because most of rural schools have been closed down to balance the budget,
children do not get exposed to socialization with their peers as often as it
used to be. Most of the time, they stay home and watch TV or play videogames.
When they meet at the local pub, they do not really talk about themselves, for
fear of being misjudged. In a car, that is where youth discuss issues of
intimacy and have their first sexual experiences. This is because in the
countryside and in the valleys young people leave their parents’ home at an
older age than those living in the cities. Instead, festivals and events are
organized and run by adults who also take care of the surveillance of
teenagers, who are openly suspected to be prone to misconduct.
There are notable exceptions to this “iron cages” model, however. In
Terragnolo, the parish priest and the local authorities gave permission to the
local teenagers to set up their own association, called “el bùs”, i.e. “the hole” where they would throw parties,
keep the place clean and tidy and prevent unruly behaviour and discuss the very
meaning of “unruly” and “acceptable” behaviour. Most significantly, many of the
voluntary participants in our project in Terragnolo had cut their teeth in “el
bùs.” Something similar took place in Cimego, where the pub has been reopened
with a view to supplying youth with a place where they could meet.
Unsurprisingly, both municipalities are governed by young men AND women.
Elsewhere, drug and alcohol abuse or car races are a common “break” from
boredom. When crimes are committed by young people, failure to raise
respectable villagers is sometimes imputed to the malign influence of satanic
sects, instead of seeking the root-causes in the malaise of the community
itself. It is as thought adults could not quite bring themselves to trust the
young generations: So, for instance, I was once refused the authorization to
host a festival of Celtic music because adults were afraid that teens would get
stoned. One transgression, or the mere suspicion of it, is enough to take back
what had been granted earlier. Instead, alcohol abuse is accepted as a socially
inclusive activity, despite the inherent risks; and when car accidents happen,
with young victims, it is fate or the winding roads that are blamed, not the
circumstances that made them possible. Paradoxically, many sincerely believe
that drinking and driving is a problem mainly affecting people living in the
cities, when the opposite seems to be far more likely. By the same token,
understanding the causes of teenage suicides does not lead to some form of
self-examination: collective responsibility for an event of such gravity is out
of the question, and researchers who attempt to shed light on this phenomenon
may end up being ostracized.
Social pressure to conform exerts a different influence depending on
whether the target is a boy or a girl. Boys, because of their dominant role,
are the most likely to cave in and trade in their future happiness for some
freedom; they are then instructed on the kind of partner they should look for,
while many girls are prepared to leave as soon as they can. Consequences can be
serious. The gender gap causes many men to remain bachelors, while women, who
really have few alternatives, escape from their native village, and from
priests, parents, brothers and husbands. So many of them have moved out or have
decided not to get married or not to have children that today valleys are far
less populated than they used to and the local economy drags along, while the
social and cultural life has waned.
THE
GENDER QUESTION: AS WOMEN LEAVE, MOUNTAINS DIE
Women are essential for the existence of alpine communities. Decisions
on whether to have children and raise a family, and therefore to settle in a
place, all depend on women’s willingness to do so. It is mostly women who
devise new ways to do things, seek better standards of living, and strive to
revive older traditions. Without them, no development would be possible. This
is why they are at the heart of an ongoing research project that has been
undertaken by a team of anthropologists at the Centro di Ecologia Alpina (Centre for Alpine Ecology) and that has
already produced six international congresses and five major publications.[vii][7]
When women say no: traditional women’s roles
and their rejection
What is the social status of women in the Alps and why is it that people
are loath to talk about it and do something about it?[viii][8]
For centuries, women have managed to survive in limit-situations by
keeping in touch with nature, using natural resources without depleting them,
while protecting the environment, and cultivating a magic and poetic quality to
life, while carrying out the task of recording the memory of past event. The
Alps, that for centuries have been removed from the main communication routes
and development processes, have witnessed the emergence of a feminine culture
and society, mostly due to the men’s absence.
It is becoming increasingly evident that when women leave, because for
instance they refuse to marry a farmer, mountains die. When men cannot find a
spouse from Latin America or Eastern Europe, they have to resign themselves to
celibacy or resettle, as they grow old.
Women have been the first to leave, carrying through a feminist protest
that, even though it has not reached international recognition, has not been
less effective. It was a spontaneous reaction against a culture that regarded
them as little more than servants and procreating machines, unworthy of any
kind of personal gratification. Their diaspora started in the Fifties and has
since reached alarming proportions. Today it is a fact of life.
This migration has ancient roots and it is to these roots that we should
go back to if we want to figure out how to reduce the likelihood that this phenomenon will
persists or, at least, if we are determined to contain it and reduce its
severity. In peasant societies, women were the first to wake and the last to go
to sleep. Girls, like boys, would start working at an early age, for there was
always something to do. Childhood in general would end very quickly, carefully overseen
by parents and priests, who acted as the custodians of morality.
Even though, compared to bourgeois
women, peasant women enjoyed a certain measure of latitude, and could be
promiscuous, conventional morality denied them the right to enjoy life’s pleasures.
From an early age, they were constrained by religious prescription. Sexophobic
priests inculcated into their minds and souls the concept of sinful behaviour
and a sense of unbending duty. Nearly
everything was reprehensible: as late as thirty to forty years ago, girls would
be publicly reproached for wearing stockings or for dancing on Sunday
afternoon, when youngsters used to meet to play, sing and dance.
Transgressions existed, of course,
but every action that broke the prescribed rules produced a deep feeling of
guilt and resentment: social control was especially strong. Awareness and fear
of sin were deep-seated and sexual transgressions were vigorously chastised.
Similarly, talking about sex was regarded as most inappropriate.
Predictably, women’s clothes would
be chaste and austere, in both shape and colours, mostly dark, and fashion
would not change appreciably. [ix][9]
Once married, women’s private
feelings and aspirations were crushed. Their very existence was devoted to
taking care of their husbands, relatives, children and of the household, till
they died. They never really celebrated festivities. On Easter or Christmas, on
Sunday, or on family celebrations, they were expected to work hard during the
night to prepare special meals, and to clean, wash, mend, iron, etc. Everything
would look impeccable. They were forbidden from entering taverns, unless they
were forced to take home their drunken husbands. In wintertime, when their
husbands rested, they kept working and giving birth to babies. Virtually no
money was left for anything other than the essentials, and there was no real
source of entertainment: women aged without having the opportunity to do
something only for themselves, and they seldom experienced love or sexual
bliss.
Still, for all their socially
disadvantaged status, the economy of the family and of the community revolved
around them. Women kept the accounts of the family-farm but, because incomes
were small, they were forced to do odd jobs in order to deal with unforeseen
expenditures. For instance, drawing on the knowledge and skills of previous
generations, which could be traced back to the societies of hunters and
gatherers, they would look for berries, medical herbs, and mushrooms that they
could sell at the market. They would also use the hand loom to make clothes,
linen and other textiles with which they would decorate the household. Some
rooms could be rented to tourists and, in summertime, if they lived near a
tourist resort, many women would also work as chambermaids.
After all, because agriculture alone
cannot support a family, one of the typical attributes of alpine people is
versatility. In the Alps, perhaps more than in the plains and in
the cities, there seem to have existed two distinct, discrete societies, with little
intercommunication: a male and a female society. This separation became
dramatic during the nineteenth century, when men began to spend several months
elsewhere, to earn more money, and their spouses stayed at home, alone, running
the farm and handling the side jobs by themselves, with no prospect of seeing
their dreams come true.
The problem with all that was that, traditionally, before getting
married, girls would work as housemaids in the cities and would get to know a
different world and develop different needs, and perspectives on life and what
to expect from it. When they went back to their villages they would unfailingly
realize that they would have to relinquish the dreams they had previously
cherished and the pleasures they had enjoyed. Yet these aspirations could not
possibly disappear into thin air, and were often transmitted to their
daughters. This caused women to metaphorically leave the mountains well ahead
of their actual diaspora, which began about forty years ago.
The crisis of the extended family, that has dramatically improved the
life of women living in the cities, has worsened the life of women living in
the countryside and in the mountains. Now that longevity is increasing and
solidarity networks are breaking down, women are supposed to nurse elderly
parents, parents-in-law, and relatives as well. Public services are often
insufficient and, on top of that, women feel a sense of moral obligation to do
what others expect them to, and sometimes they conceal their hiring of foreign carers
to dodge the neighbours’ judgment. Seeing all this, it is perfectly
understandable that daughters will do anything they can to avoid that kind of
existence.
These days, they have moved out or have decided not to get married or
not to have children. As a result, valleys are far less populated than they
used to and the local economy drags along, while the social and cultural life
is waning.
A quantitative assessment of the diaspora
On processing the results of the inquiry and drawing the depopulation
maps accordingly, we have realised that we should take a different tack, and
analyse data in gender-based sorted lists to detect possible discrepancies in
male and female depopulation patterns between 1950 and 2001, decade by decade.
While it is true that the two trends seem to run parallel to each other, we
ought not to discount other factors:
·
Women live longer than men, and therefore one would
expect them to be more numerous, in the long term;
·
Studies of demographic changes must take into account
the 20 to 45 age-set, that is to say, the age at which women can still
procreate and are more likely to, and the 20 to 49 age-set, namely the age at
which women are more likely to marry in mountain communities.
When these variables are factored in together, we can fully realise the
seriousness of the women’s plight. Maps show that clearly. Pink-coloured areas
are those where women aged between 20 and 49 are in equal number or more than
men. As anyone can see, they are a tiny minority of municipalities. Across the
Italian Alps, women in that age-set are almost invariably fewer than men. Some
cases are more alarming than others, but the overall picture is by no means
encouraging. Nationwide, women exceed men by 1.60%, but those between 20 and 49
years of age are about 49.88% of the age-set, 49.07% in Trentino. In more than 80% of alpine municipalities,
for every hundred residents there are between 51 and 55 men and, in Trentino,
there are various districts in which the ratio drops to 60 to 40, or even to 65
to 35. Paradoxically, Trentino, which is one of the most virtuous alpine
regions with respect to depopulation, is the one where the ratio is most
lop-sided. Indeed, the part of the map occupied by Trentino is almost uniformly
dark. In nearly 8 percent of municipalities women in this age-set are less than
45 percent. Only in larger towns like Trento, Rovereto, Arco, and Borgo
Valsugana is the ratio more favourable to women. In 10 municipalities, for a total of 4,772
residents, the mean ratio is 0.72 women – 41.91 percent altogether – for every
man included in the 20-49 set.
Our analysis proves that, in the 1990-2004 period, many of the “missing”
women have remained in the same valleys: 52.6% of them have simply moved to
larger settlements. With changes of lifestyle in the settlements of origin, it
is possible that these women would not have left. However, it is undoubtedly
difficult to promote changes that are, first of all, of a cultural nature.
It is undeniable that there is a social and cultural problem affecting
women living in mountain communities that we have detected throughout the
fieldwork and that cannot be by-passed.
It looks like, especially in Trentino, changes in customs, morals,
lifestyles, and in the women’s status have not been completely digested by the
male population. The weakening of the mechanisms of social and family control
on women and a different conception of marriage and love-life are sometimes
ostracised and those women who stubbornly resist this opposition are often
forced to leave.
Hidden
discomfort: the right to a denied pleasure, traditional expectations and
current needs
We have detected a patent discrepancy between
social expectations and women’s claims and demands. Married or aged women are
still required to be the primary caregivers, even though they may have their
own job, and an exacting one at that. People believe that their incomes should
be devoted to family and homecare; their patience is drained by sometimes
abusive if not violent relatives. In a word: they constantly sacrifice
themselves.
Here is an example of what could happen
anywhere in the Alps. In Switzerland, a 40-year-old single woman, the director
of an institute employing 70 researchers, decides to move back to the village
where she grew up, to live with her brother, who is alone. Because she retains
her job as head of the research centre, she hires a maid to help her with the
domestic chores while she is at work. Unfortunately, the traditional view of
things goes like this: a middle-aged woman with an unmarried brother should
behave like someone who is half a wife and half a mother, that is, like some
sort of a servant. She should stay at home and pamper him. Because she is not
like that, gossiping becomes unbearable: why does she pay a housemaid? Can’t
she do those things by herself? Why does she spend so much time away? What does
she do while she is not here? Does not she feel guilty and embarrassed when she
leaves her brother alone? Eventually, her brother could not withstand such an
enormous pressure: every time he walked into the pub he felt like everyone was
gossiping about them. She eventually had to leave and go back to the city.
Rumours sometimes turn into outright
harassment. In one of the villages where we did fieldwork, one of the few young
mothers with a university degree turned down an offer to work as a high-rank
civil servant, which would have allowed her to combine a professional career
with motherhood, because of her fear of what her neighbours would have thought
of her daily commuting.
As a consequence, girls are most eager to look
for friendly relationships outside of their close circles, which can be used as
a pretext for spending as much time as possible away from their constraining
daily routine. Problems worsen when girls get married, that is to say, marry
into the husband’s family and move in with her parents-in-law, that she is
expected to care for, especially when they are no longer self-sufficient, given
that paying a professional carer is regarded as socially and morally
unjustifiable. While money spent on luxurious cars is an investment, money
spent for carers, nursing homes, and baby-sitters is wasted. Women must see
about that by themselves.
Men are usually free to pursue their passions
and hobbies (playing cards, fishing, hunting, going to pubs, etc.), do sport
and volunteering activities, see their buddies (but not at home, which is
unsuitable for this kind of get-together). When a young mother died in a car
accident she was blamed for taking a day off to go skiing. Married women who
dared to go to the local tavern would be labelled as irresponsible, if not
worse. The kind of behaviour that must be tolerated with men (e.g. coming home
drunk at night) is not forgiven when it comes to women. Even today, women
cannot dawdle: they are not supposed to have spare time and when they spend
time together, they must account for the time they have been away from
housework.
When pressure reaches the point of no return
A suffocating social climate, if
unacknowledged, may provoke major discomfort and harsh disputes: over the past
years several cases of “murderous mothers” have been reported, motivated by
seemingly unexplainable depression syndromes.
We have analysed the socio-economic and
cultural context of these tragic events, in connection with the Centre for
Mental Health in Cavalese, an institution specialised in treating and
researching this kind of pathologies, especially when they affect women. The
results are astounding. I have examined infanticides perpetrated by young
mothers with no economic or family problems in Cogne and Montjovet, both in
Aosta Valley, Santa Caterina Valfurva and Casatenovo, in Lombardy, and Meran,
in South Tyrol.
We are talking about “normal” couples, at
their first marriage, financially well-equipped, with no sign of an imminent
separation. They live in beautiful houses with garden and splendid surroundings.
Mothers were young and reportedly still in love with their spouses. By and
large, their husbands are described as “nice blokes, working hard, family men”.
All but one are housewives, and even this one
exception works part-time, while another, a would-be TV starlet, declared that
what she was doing was a past-time, rather than a job. According to a widely
held belief, they have the time and opportunity to devote themselves completely
to their children, with the only help of their mothers, if they are still
alive; if they are not or live too far, these young mothers are left to their
own devices, no matter the number of children.
The common denominator of these dramas is the loneliness of women and
the inability of men to detect signs of the impending tragedy, even though they
are aware that their wives have not been able to sleep for months.
Half
of the women had been under psychiatric care (Merano, Casatenovo, Santa
Caterina, Valmanera.) Their husbands
did not think they needed help at home, even though they did not lack the money
to hire a helper. They simply relied on the traditional presumption that their
wives would know what to do and would toe the line. These women lived secluded
and felt terribly lonely, but their husbands and the whole community made light
of the women’s psychological and physical predicament. One, who used to spend
her holidays in the valley where her husband was born, remained a virtual
stranger to the inhabitants of the village where she stayed.
We should also mention the high consumption of psychotropic drugs among
women in the rural Alps. This might indicate that there is a larger problem
that people have hitherto chosen to ignore.
Matrilocal self-sufficiency
In alpine villages, women are agents of change, also because they have
managed to use clans’ traditional mutual assistance rules to their advantage,
during early motherhood. In Switzerland, a survey has been conducted to assess
differences in behaviour among Swiss nationals and second generation Italian women
living in Switzerland with respect to the problem of managing career and
motherhood. Surveyors expected that Italian women, coming from a culture in
which they are supposed to stay at home after marriage and therefore to quit
their job would be comparatively worse off. Instead, the opposite is true. The
ostensibly “backward” Italian customs actually allow young mothers to retain
their jobs because their mothers are prepared to take care of their
grandchildren, to the point that some even move to live near them. Conversely,
Swiss mothers could not expect that kind of help from their mothers and were
more likely to quit their job.
This type of
clan-networking is exceedingly effective in rural communities in the Alps and
more than compensate for the lack of public services for children. While on the
one hand living close to one’s parents also means being controlled, on the
other hand, if family members are on good terms, this also implies that much of
the burden of having children to look after for most of the day fall upon the
grandparents. This is probably the main reason why matrilocality – i.e. the
young couple settling near the house of the young wife’s mother – is so
widespread, and should be seen as an important development priority. In this
sense, it is even more imperative that basic facilities like gyms or libraries,
as well as cultural opportunities should be provided to those municipalities in
which this sort of mutual help networking comes almost natural. There are
highly promising instances where self-management of public facilities has been
successfully experimented, such as in Terragnolo, where the kindergarten is run
by young mothers
IDENTITY CULTURE AS A
DETERMINANT OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC GROWTH
In the
Alps, culture is one of the few antidotes to depression, estrangement, and
alienation.
During
the past 15 years, our fieldwork has taught us that communities would thrive
where the sense of identity and rootedness was stronger. This is even more true
when it comes to Trentino, where tourism is the largest industry, and it is
closely bound up with the revival of traditional culture.
Commendable examples are Cimego with the House of the Peasant Culture of
Kramsach. Elsewhere, it may be, likewise, a permanent exhibition of the art,
tools, and memories of the peasant civilization or an eco-museum celebrating
the beauty of the local landscape and nature. The one thing that is for certain
is that the human factor is increasingly central to the tourism industry,56 and that first-hand anthropological
expertise is in a position to make the difference and bridge the gap between
rural and urban society. Tourists generally come to the mountains with one well
defined expectation: experiencing authenticity, which has become an important
customer value. This authenticity should not be overtly fabricated, though. It
is by all means necessary to strike a middle-ground between traditional and
appealing, without compromising the delicate balance between stratified memories
and customs on the one hand and leisure on the other hand, by imposing a
patently arbitrary invention of local identity.57
Tourism
development plans that ignore the sheer complexity of the task in question, and
prefer to reapply models that can only be successful in a specific context
(e.g. seaside tourism), are most likely
doomed to fail, in the long run. Instead, local authorities could take
advantage of the sincere and profound emotional ties that bind emigrants to the
land of their ancestors, which is testified by their willingness to undertake
long and expensive journeys simply to attend a funeral or a wedding. 58 Moreover,
many emigrants, if they come back to the place where they grew up, are
among the most eager to plan cultural events in their native village and bring
fresh ideas and proposals. It is also worthy of note that many municipalities
are prepared to spend relatively large sums of money to promote cultural
activities: viz. Cimego’s ethnographic trail, Luserna’s Istituto Cimbro
and Centro Documentazione, Ronzone’s
museums, Terragnolo’s Maso San Giuseppe and the museum that is being
built nearby. In all these instances, cultural heritage professionals
have helped to develop marketing strategies to promote tourism and at the same
time preserve the most valued aspects of the local culture. All in
all, we should not believe that mountain villagers are overly conservative:
they have time and again demonstrated that they are perfectly capable of
re-interpreting and reinventing their traditions when it is done for the
benefit of the community or for the sake of personal growth. A case in point is
the corps de ballet of Cimego, whereby young women have re-appropriated local
gender history and translated it so that it could be made accessible to everyone,
tourists included. When a cultural activity is designed with local residents in
mind, these will rarely let down the organizers. They can discriminate between
something that it is worthwhile and something that is done just for its own
sake. Here is an example. Many education institutes in Trentino complained that
there were far too many IT courses, compared to the number of students, and
because of that some would never get started. But in Cimego things turned out
differently. Local authorities purchased twelve state-of-the-art computers and
set up their own IT course. The attendance was overwhelming and it lasted for
months. When asked, attendees pointed out that this time they were not given
second-hand, outmoded technology. Likewise, when experts were brought there to
lecture on various topics, the turnout was also remarkable. It all goes to
demonstrate that, when people are treated with respect, they respond with equal
respect and enthusiasm.
Dialects as markers of identity
In the Alps, dialect is the
most common identity marker. 59 It defines the boundary
between “us” and “them.” People are almost automatically accepted as insiders
when they can speak the local dialect and the process of inclusion begins when
people start speaking dialect to an outsider. What is a dialect? Technically,
nothing sets it apart from an official language. There are dialects, like the
Occitan, that have been used for centuries as a lingua franca and now are only
spoken in the border area between France and Italy. It is the number of
speakers, its usefulness, and its status that determine how a standard form of a language evolves out of a dialect. Linguistically, the phonetic, lexical and idiomatic
attributes of a dialect, together with its plasticity, practicality and
realism, and its sometimes curt immediacy, reflect the identity of a
community. But a dialect is not confined
to the realm of everyday life: there are certain professions, techniques and
literatures that can only be expressed in dialect. When norms are designed to
define which food is typical of a region, legislators must use terms of the
local dialect, because national languages cannot provide an equivalent
translation. In sum, dialect is the expression of the cultural heritage and
worldview of a people. One can measure the degree of acceptance of a minority
by looking at the measure of respect in which the minority’s dialect is held by
the majority. Even today, people living in the plains regard dialects as
backward, ignorant, and vulgar. Even TV programmes contribute to the
disparagement of certain dialects by portraying their speakers as
characteristically close-minded, if not altogether dim-witted. This creates the
mechanical and involuntary association of a host of negative feelings and
impressions with what is related to that dialect. It is not uncommon to hear
professionals commenting with annoyance on the behaviour of colleagues,
teachers, or students who spoke in their own vernacular, as tough this was a
sign of disrespect.
This may cause distrust and
embarrassment and may also inhibit spontaneous conversation. A teacher from
Tessin, the ethnic Italian Swiss canton, told me that local students hesitated
to speak to Italian teachers for fear of being ridiculed because of their
strong accent.
Still, the revitalization of
a collective identity, which is the foregrounding of a development programme,
can only be based on respect and care for the language, as in the case of South
Tyrol, Valle d’Aosta, Friuli, Occitania, and Ladinia. In Valle di Fassa,
tourists have positively responded to the free courses of Ladin offered by the
local authorities. We do not need to remind the readers of the accomplishments
of Dario Fo, who was awarded the Nobel prize for his hybrid vernacular epic clowning.
Something along similar lines is being currently done by musicians and
playwrights who fuse exotic sounds or rock with dialect. Dialects should be
preserved and special education programmes should be established, to teach the
use of dialect, even to recent immigrants, who will be able to better integrate
into the local community.
There is no one-fit-all solution: the myth of the
local produce
The socio-economic development of the alpine region
can only ride on the back of a comprehensive strategy comprising flexible
measures that must be tailored for specific sites and
conditions. It is not
uncommon to find out that cultural variables matter more than botanic and
agronomic characteristics. One first has to persuade local people that selling
their cattle would be unsound, then one can train the younger generation to
become good farmers. It would be equally unreasonable to gear production and
marketing towards the local market, because networks of distribution are by now
globalized and several goods can be purchased for less, while local populations
are not heading towards higher levels of consumption of the local produce,
which is generally rather expensive, especially butter and cheese, which are inseparably associated
with the mountains in the popular imagery. The only consumers who can afford it in
large quantities come from the outside. Having said that, being able to produce
goods that are in great demand can be a major boost for the residents’
self-esteem, and it is likely to be much more helpful than converting hold
farms into boarding houses or resorts, something that calls for a great deal of
money and for a deep knowledge of tourism provision and management, which are
not always available. Sustainable and participatory development schemes will
encompass new and old vocations, such as mountain pasture that, with the help
of state-of-the-art technology and adequate training, will be made much more
profitable and less alienating. Aside from production, it is important that we
all understand that the profit margins for local entrepreneurs will remain
rather thin; unless residents get involved into the marketing and distribution
of dairies, herbs, meat, honey, flax, etc., and learn how to successfully apply
for regional, national and EU subsidies. Products should be sold where they are
produced, and where they can be accompanied by other services such as
hospitality, the mildness and salubriousness of the
climate, and the wholesomeness of the food, in a pleasant environment.
This goal can only be achieved if petty politics and
internecine strife are left aside, once and for all, and if local authorities
finally realise that investing in the local culture, local resources and local
people is really the only available option.
Women and the identity economy
Recently, a counter-movement striving for change and for the
establishment of economic measures that could prevent emigration has taken
shape. This is what is conventionally called “identity economy”.[x][10]
It is not a matter of “total innovation”: some of the proposed practices are
age-old, but are recast in a more modern fashion, using advanced technologies
and different attitudes. Besides creating new income sources, these initiatives
preserve and regenerate traditional cultures. The local cultural heritage is
re-appropriated and improved, also through insights and contributions from the
outside, and conservative traditionalism is cast aside in favour of a more
diverse and creative future. This is the
task that women, the traditional custodians of the memory of a culture, have
made their own, on behalf of their communities and land. [xi][11] This dynamism certainly accounts for the fact that some of the most
promising entrepreneurial undertakings in the Alps have been undertaken by
women.
Let’s make no mistake: the most lucrative business – i.e. hotels,
ski-lifts and chair-lifts, factories, public procurements, etc. – is still in
the hands of men, as it is political power. But family-scale economy is
controlled by women. Most of the micro-economy and identity economy is run by
women, who generally manage to combine environmental and business concerns,
tradition, innovation and rights claims. This specific sensibility is the asset
on which a new, more socially and culturally concerned entrepreneurial style
should be built: women are the key to change, and to a sustainable, equitable,
and ultimately desirable development.
Tourism, for instance, an activity that has almost replaced agriculture
and zootechnics in the Alps, is mostly managed by women, especially insofar as
medium and small size enterprises in the private sector are concerned. Women
are in charge of virtually everything, from internal design to reception and tourist
information.
Beside the environment, family habits also inevitably change in response
to tourism. For instance, before, households were relatively small, and
families were forced to share almost the same premises with their guests, so
that even the intimacy of Christmas celebrations was lost.[xii][12] In Trentino, the relative shortage of boarding houses and hotels is due
to the disinclination of families to make apartments and houses available to
tourists.
Today, women seem to be more open-minded than men, more willing to
experiment, to learn new things and new practices, even at an older age. They
enthusiastically participate in cultural initiatives where they help, cook,
entertain, etc., grit their teeth, and invest on the future, while men appear more
content with immediate gratifications. If, besides basic services like a post
office, an elementary school, and a grocery store, women were ensured access to
gender-based essential services, for instance those concerning the care of
children and of the elderly, and non-material sources of fulfilment, that is to
say, if women’s needs were not overlooked, mountain communities would blossom
again. This could be accomplished by addressing the issue of culture and
culture identity as a remedy against the desertification of alpine villages
produced by TV-sets.
A growing number of peasant
women…
Increasingly, women are proving their worth and resolve in professional
agriculture and in agro-tourism. In Italy, women comprised 19 percent of
agricultural labour in 1931, 24 percent in 1951, 29 percent in 1971, and
approximately 36 percent in 1981 and 1991.
Some argue that, formerly, couples used to form an economic unit: men
were more likely to find employment in a factory, while women continued to work
in the farm. However, statistic estimates are deceptive: the women’s diaspora
was massive and in some valleys they were the first to leave. Whereas in 1951
there were 2,033,000 peasant women, in 1991 only 589,000 worked in the
agricultural sector. That said, a remarkable change has occurred, as more and
more women started to take an active role in farm management, and with very
encouraging results.
In 1970, 18.9% of rural businesses were controlled by women distributed
as follows: 26.9% of the small ones, 7.2% of the medium-sized, and 8% of the
large ones. If we contrast these data with those of two decades later, we can
appreciate the considerable progress. While the total number of agro-businesses
decreased from 3,607,000 to 3,023,000, those run by women increased from
680,000 to 780,000, that is, from 18.9% to 25.9%. This expansion mostly
consisted of medium- and large-sized farms, unlike in the past, when the
involvement of women in the management of the farm was inversely related to its
economic importance.
Prior to this crucial shift, in rural areas, allowing one’s wife to be a
housewife, instead of working the field or milking cows, was the privilege of
relatively wealthy land-owners, and a status-symbol. In the Alps, this occurred
very rarely. Nowadays, things are slowly changing, and women are attempting to
reverse this trend. This is the real challenge of the “new rurality”.
The 2000 national Agricultural Census described a changed scenario,
where the presence of women in leadership positions was becoming more
salient. While the number of mountain
farms had decreased by 23%, and there were about two and a half million farms
nationwide, nearly 800,000 of these were managed by women, that is, almost one
third of the total. However, while there has been a sharp increase with respect
to farms located in the hills and in the plains, mountain farms run by women
have actually declined by 14%. Still, statistical evidence shows that when women
control an agro-business, this is less likely to go bankrupt. Women managing
farms in the mountains appear to be better organized and more determined than
men, and this is especially true in the case of medium-sized (10 hectares) and
large-sized farms (over 100 hectares).
The Census report tellingly points out that women promote a “new concept
of rurality”, by investing in the land and protecting the environment.
Sustainable development does not come cheap
Despite a common
misconception, sustainable growth exacts a steep price in terms of human and
financial resources; it needs the most favourable conditions to deliver,
requires a high level of professional expertise, and takes a long time to
really get going. And yet
this is what it takes to successfully coordinate a variety of services
and activities in the area of tourism, the stewardship of natural and cultural
heritage, sport, marketing of local produce and handicrafts. 63 For instance, in order to obtain EU funds,
one must be conversant with the rules of the game in Bruxelles, and must be
able to communicate in several foreign languages; and this may still not be
enough, if the local population is not actively involved in this process and
prepared to put time and money into this enterprise, for development training
programmes are neither easy nor inexpensive, and results can be disappointing;
this is especially true if they are undertaken in regions where education
levels are comparatively low. Education is expensive and may not yield tangible
results for years, but it is really the only way to go. Training programmes
should be managed by a staff of professionals with extensive experience in this
specialized field but should also be complemented with long-term strategies
involving the consultation and participation of the public. Now, because, at
least initially, it would be irrational to expect large private investors to
become interested in this area of business, the best bet would be to encourage
startup entrepreneurship. This policy is normally hampered by the desire to
find an easy 9-5 job with minimum hassle and fuss, but then again, as they say,
“no pain, no gain.”
Glocalization and the land
The effects of globalization can be upsetting where
cultural specificities are depreciated: metropolitan suburbs and wealthy
enclaves share in common the scant attention to the universal need for cultural
entertainment and social networking places. What in the mountains used to be
farming land, is now a symbol of underdevelopment and marginalization where young
people survive rather than live and few seem to be ready to face what is going
on “out there,” in the plains. As a result, for some, the globalization process
is not something desirable but an unwelcome imposition of standardizing
criteria, tastes, styles and languages. The response can be as extreme as
outright rejection and self-exclusion, fear of what is new and alien and
obsessive attachment to what is traditional. Normally this is the typical
reaction of groups that feel threatened, that is, those whose identity is more
vulnerable and feel cast aside. Interestingly, increasingly more people are
growing sceptical about globalization, and consequences can be as serious as
the silent marginalization of thousands, possibly millions, of people who cannot
rapidly adjust to the new realities because they lack sufficient mental
flexibility, or are simply happier the way they are.
Alpine communities were less self-enclosed than many
people believe. But the globalization of the market economy and the levelling
of regional socio-cultural idiosyncrasies meant that the peasant civilization
of the mountains became outmoded. Now, the risk is that a culture that has
survived for thousands of years could die out.
This would be an irremediable loss and, by all means, an unnecessary
one. Because globalization also means that more outsiders get to know local
cultures, who are likely to appreciate those traits that locals tend to
disparage, out of an unjustified embarrassment. This, aside from being a
remarkable business opportunity, could also help local residents to gain
self-esteem and to protect their unique heritage, without suspending it in a timeless vacuum.
PART II: “our” municipalities
Municipalities under study
An overview
Overall,
the five municipalities in which we did the fieldwork comprise 2,066
inhabitants, which should be considered a statistically significant sample.
Following a general outline of the region and of the relevant statistics, we
report some of the conclusions that we have reached,
The
depopulation trend in Luserna, Sagron Mis and Terragnolo has not been reversed,
whereas things are improving in Cimego and Ronzone. Aging is also a problem:
Luserna has the unenviable distinction of having three times as many residents
over 65 years of age than teenagers aged less than 14 years. Cimego and Ronzone
are also doing well as regards level of education and number of enterprises per
100 inhabitants. Among people aged 20 to 49, women only comprise 48% of the
total number of residents, Cimego and Ronzone prove to be more attractive to
young women than Sagron Mis, Luserna and Terragnolo. Those women who leave, -
and they are a majority, except in Terragnolo, and with a peak of 62.9% in
Sagron Mis -, normally move to somewhere outside of Trentino (23.3%), to a
nearby village (24%), to a nearby town (26.2%), or to a city in Trentino
(20.2%). More than half of these women choose to live close to their native
village, and it seems safe to assume that many of them would rather stay were
they used to live, if they were given the opportunity.
Together
with the statistical analysis, this section provides a qualitative and
comparative perspective on social life in the municipalities in question. We
also sketch out recent development plans and those that are in the pipeline.
The case of Cimego, so far a veritable success story, will be described in
detail, from the inception of the programme, in the early 1990s. Luserna’s case
will serve to illustrate what has been accomplished in the area to promote the
Cimbri’s culture. Terragnolo is important for its strong stand on and active
recognition of issues related to the welfare of children and youngsters;
Ronzone for its Museums Association. Sagron-Mis instead exemplifies the
difficulty of embarking on the task of creating sustainable growth, locally.
These sections are complemented with bullet points and
factboxes.
A
majority of our informants – 300, 15 percent of the total population – are
relatively young, are women and hold a position of responsibility or manage a
company. Among the non-structured,
free-flowing, open-ended, in-depth interviews, we have picked out only the most informative with respect to
inclusion/exclusion practices and development programmes (114). Statistical
matching has defined commonalities and differences between informants and
municipalities. The one piece of evidence that we think is the most significant
is that where, as in Cimego and Ronzone, local authorities have undertaken
programmes for the cultural and economic development of their municipalities,
people’s conceptions of place and identity have undergone a significant change:
they are more inclined to describe their village as protective and peaceful,
even though, as in all the other villages, parochialism and sectarianism are
still pervasive.
Many
young people are not eager to journey to destinations outside Trentino. Change
is perceived as hazardous; opportunities, including professional opportunities,
are seldom seized; people doubt that they could change the fabric of the local
society and are prone to passively follow the mainstream. Cimego is an
exception: twice as many respondents would go for a change, there. Apart from Cimego and Terragnolo,
depopulation, seclusion, lack of entertainment and infrastructures and
despondency are recurring themes (in almost half of the interviews in Luserna
and Sagron Mis). Most of the people who declare that they are ready to leave
are women, and this is further confirmed by 1990 to 2004 census data. 63% of
those who left Sagron Mis are women. By contrast, in Terragnolo young people
are coming back to live in the houses vacated by their parents. Everywhere,
even in Cimego, there is a widespread tendency to frequent social networking places that are as far removed
as possible from everyday life and the people that
one sees on a daily basis, because many seek to escape from social control.
This may in part explain why several mostly young men are described as uncommunicative
and is probably a symptom of endemic social malaise, especially
among youth and women.
DEMOGRAPHIC
TRENDS IN THE ITALIAN ALPS.
1951-2001 census
data OVERVIEW.
REGION BY REGION
Liguria
This region suffers from a serious demographic downturn, and its population has decreased by 5 percent. The number of men is declining twice as fast as that of women. In small municipalities (with less than 400 inhabitants), the population has dropped by one quarter in 50 years. Municipalities with between 600 and 1,100 inhabitants are stable and those with a population ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 inhabitants tend to grow (this is an exception in Liguria). This is incidentally also where the male-female gap is greater, with 4% fewer men than women.
Piedmont
In Piedmont only those municipalities with a population larger than 1,500 inhabitants report an increase in the local population, while in smaller municipalities – particularly in the 192 with less than 400 inhabitants – the decline is equivalent to that occurring in Liguria. There are fewer men, also because women’s life expectancy is greater than men’s. Women tend to move to municipalities with more than 3,000 inhabitants (that is, 66 municipalities). Piedmont and Friuli are the only northern regions where an across-the-board demographic decline has been reported (400,000 fewer residents in Piedmont).
Valle
d’Aosta
Here the population is growing by 6%, and women are contributing twice as much as men to this growth. In municipalities with a lower density, men are more likely to leave than women. Women normally tend to live in larger municipalities. The population of Aosta, the only city in the region, is declining, and men are the most likely to move out.
Lombardy
216 out of a total of 524 alpine municipalities (40 percent) are growing smaller. This phenomenon is more marked (15 percent) in clusters of municipalities with a smaller population. Instead, those with 1,500 to 5,000 inhabitants attract new residents (an increase of 10%), especially if they are near the suburbs of cities like Varese, Como, Lecco e Sondrio, where housing is too expensive and has caused the heaviest loss of resident population in Lombardy. In these suburban areas, increases may hit peaks of 100 percent. There does not seem to be a demographic imbalance between men and women.
Venetia
This is the region where the redistribution of resident population exhibits the greatest tendency to fuel urban growth. In 49 municipalities with less than 1,500 inhabitants, the average population drop ranges from 7 to 20 percent, and it increases as the number of residents is lower. As a result, there are currently over 60 municipalities with more than 3,000 residents. These are more likely to attract men.
Autonomous
Province of Bolzano/Bozen
A significant increase of the female population, i.e. 11 percent, is reported for South Tyrol. This is more marked in municipalities with a resident population of over 5,000 inhabitants, which have absorbed 40 percent of the local population growth. The increase in the number of women exceeds that of men, but in smaller municipalities women are still fewer than men. This imbalance has persisted for over 50 years.
Autonomous
Province of Trento
Resident population is growing, as in the neighbour province of South Tyrol. There are instances where the resident population has declined, but they are less frequent than elsewhere. They generally occur in the 33 municipalities with less than 400 inhabitants, where men exceed women by 3 percent. Women seem to prefer to live in municipalities with 3,000 to 5,000 inhabitants
Friuli
Venezia Giulia
This region is one of the most severely affected by depopulation. All municipalities experience a decline, and women are leaving in larger numbers than men (minus 9%). This is especially dramatic in the 18 municipalities with less than 600 inhabitants, where resident population has dropped by over one third since 1951. The 25 municipalities with 600 to 1,100 residents lost one fourth of their initial population. Even the 15 municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants have lost 10,000 residents; 60 percent of them were women.
APPENDIX
By ALESSANDRO GRETTER
Data processing, cartography and mapping:
Angela Donini, Markus Neteler and Ferdinando
Urbano
1. Alpine demography
This appendix
presents a summary of the information on demographic data and patterns of
Italian municipalities in the Alps that has been gathered during the study. The
treatment is not exhaustive as we will provide a more extensive account in a
forthcoming Report of the Centro di Ecologia Alpina, which will examine more
systematically and comprehensively the same data, addressing local
specificities as well.
1.1 The number of municipalities
In order to
establish which municipalities should be included in our study we have
consulted the official lists compiled by UNCEM (National Union of mountain
communities and agencies) and by ANCI (National Association of Local
Municipalities). We have not only considered the municipal areas located higher
than 600 meters asl, but also those at a average altitude of 400 meters. The
2001 census indicated that there were 1,851 such municipalities, with an
increase over the past fifty years, due to the creation of new ones. The
complete list will be available on the next report.[1][1]
1.2 Data gathering method
Data gathering
operations have been long, especially due to the heterogeneous sources. We have
accessed the electronic databases of the Italian Statistics Institute (ISTAT)
at http://dawinci.istat.it/, or at http://censimenti.istat.it/html/pop_home.asp,
together with regional and provincial databases.
Prior to 1991,
data in electronic format are few and far between and the available data on the
resident population have been taken from the National Census archives. With
respect to the decades 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, resident population data for
various municipalities of Trento Province originate from local demographic and
registry offices or from census resources available for browsing in the
municipal archives.
1.3 Data processing
Collected data
have been first imported into a previously designed Windows database and
subsequently transferred into the GRASS Geographic Information System for
geomatic data management. The information stored in the database is sorted by
region, province, and municipality and the resident population is also sorted
by gender. Figures and quantitative variations are expressed in both absolute
and percentage values. The remaining database information concerns the
proximity or distance between municipalities.
1.4 Data series
We have brought
together all national census data for the resident population of mountain
municipalities in the Italian Alps in a single database and have sorted them by
total number and by gender. We have processed data for each municipality so as
to provide total and gender-specific values. We have also produced percent
estimates of population dynamics for each mountain municipality, computed for
intervals of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years. Percent variations are as follows:
1951-2001, 1951-1961, 1961-1971,
1971-1981, 1981-1991, 1991-2001, 1951-1971, 1971-2001, 1981-2001, 1951-1981, 1951-1991,
1961-1981, 1961-1991, 1961-2001, 1971-1991
1.5 Trentino
Annual estimates
of the resident population of Trento Province are available for the 1973-2005
period. We have added census data for the 1951 to 2001 decades in order to
develop a comprehensive database for Trentino. Throughout the process of
completion of the database we have paid a special attention to the
harmonization of the two sets of data. It is now clear that data for Trentino
are the least reliable when it comes to the 1951-1961 decade, when a complete
reorganization of the local administrative jurisdictions was effected, which
re-established the boundaries existing before the war and several
municipalities that had been previously incorporated in larger ones.
The next step was
to provide estimates of population dynamics for the entire area. Estimates for
each municipality have then been sorted by gender. Across-time percent
variations have been calculated by multiples of 5 years, starting from 1975 and
1971. The following figure illustrates the time frames we have used in our
assessment:
1975-1980, 1975-1985, 1975-1990,
1975-1995, 1975-2000, 1975-2005, 1980-1985, 1980-1990, 1980-1995, 1980-2000,
1980-2005, 1985-1990, 1985-1995, 1985-2000, 1985-2005, 1990-1995, 1990-2000,
1990-2005, 1995-2000, 1995-2005, 1971-1976, 1971-1981, 1971-1986, 1971-1991,
1971-1996, 1971-2001, 1971-2005, 1976-1981, 1976-1986, 1976-1991, 1976-1996,
1976-2001, 1976-2005, 1981-1986, 1981-1991, 1981-1996, 1981-2001, 1981-2005,
1986-1991, 1986-1996, 1986-2001, 1986-2005, 1991-1996, 1991-2001, 1991-2005,
1996-2001, 1996-2005, 2001-2005.
2. RESEARCH SPECIFICATIONS
2.1 The Italian Alps
Among all the
values that one can obtain by combining these data sets, two values have been
accorded prominence. First, we have analysed the demographic tendencies from
the post-war period to these days, over a 50-year-timescale, between 1951 and
2001. Secondly, we have addressed the issue of the demographic developments
occurred during this period, for each decade under consideration, a decade
being the period elapsing from a census survey to the next. This narrowed focus
has the advantage of revealing important historical trends like the economic
boom, the stagnation, the “tertiarization” - that is, the transition to a service
economy -, post-modernity, and globalization.
The earliest
recorded data (1951) suffer from lack of information about the municipalities
that had been temporarily erased from the map. We have obviated the problem by
estimating the number of residents in the area in which they once existed and
were later reinstated. This operation was obviously far more complicated with
respect to gender statistics.
In the summary
chart municipalities are separated into four categories, depending on the
salience and direction of demographic patterns, e.g. marked or relative
depopulation and population increase:
• Above 15.1%
• Between 0.1%
and 15.0%
• Between -15.0%
and 0%
• Below -15.1%
2.2 Comparison with national data
Between 1951 and
2001, the Italian population has increased by more than twenty percent, from
47,515,537 to 56,995,744, prevalently in urban and coastal areas. When it comes
to Northern Italian mountain regions, it is easy to see that those
municipalities that have recorded demographic trends comparable to or even
greater than the national average are rather uncommon, and generally
concentrated in the pre-alpine hinterland of expanding urban areas and in
regions and provinces enjoying an autonomy statute.
2.3 The “distance-proximity” variable
In order to
achieve a better understanding of the root-causes of the depopulation process
affecting the alpine region, we have considered the distance of each
municipality from a medium-size town centre – at least 5,000 inhabitants, by
alpine standards – as a fundamental variable. This is the size that is
generally judged to represent the lowest limit compatible with the existence of
a number of services like basic healthcare, retailing, primary education,
culture and entertainment that are generally regarded as indispensable to
maintain an acceptable quality of life. Still, these standards can be met in
smaller settlements with tourist or commercial appeal. Owing to the lack of a
standardized roadmap covering the entire alpine mountain range, distances
between municipalities have been measured with www.map24.it,
an online distance calculator.
20 km, that is,
a 30 minute driving distance in wintertime, is the lower limit for a village to
be defined as distant from a medium-size town centre. We have classified every
alpine municipality according to their distance and size:
Large
municipality: resident population greater than 5000;
Nearby
municipality: within 20 km from a large one;
Distant municipality:
more than 20 km from a large one;
3. THE WOMAN QUESTION
3.1 The woman question in the Italian Alps
Depopulation
especially affects the young and the women. This is why we have deemed
necessary to combine the two sets of data, i.e. age cohort and gender. Drawing
on the 2001 census, we have focused on women in the age group 20 to 49 which,
for most women, is the age of procreation, child-rearing and marriage. Choosing
this specific age-set means stressing the effects of prior depopulation
processes on women, beginning from the mid-Seventies – when many young women
moved to the cities –, with a view to other, concomitant factors triggering the
same phenomenon (education, professional specialization, marriage and
relocation) operating in the vicinity of the place of birth.
We have compared
the resulting values with the corresponding values for men, sorted in five
sets, depending on the proportion of women to men:
• More than
50.1%
• Between 45.1%
and 50.0%
• Between 40.1%
e 45.0%
• Between 35.1%
e 40.0%
• Less than 35%
3.2 CONCLUDING STATEMENT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF WOMEN FOR THE MOUNTAIN
As indicated in
the section on the role of women in the Alps, we provide the full text of the
“Concluding statement of the general assembly of women for the mountain” which officially
establishes the “Network of women for the mountain” at the Centro di Ecologia Alpina, to share
expertise and to promote identity-friendly local sustainable development.
Women from the mountains of Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Germany and Lichtenstein, convening
at the Centro di Ecologia Alpina of Monte Bondone (Trento), for the fourth
international symposium “Matriarcato e Montagna, demand recognition for their
role in preserving and conveying memories and traditions, in furthering the
social, economic and cultural development of mountain communities. Women from
and for the mountain also reaffirm the centrality of their local presence, and
involvement in the decision-making process at all levels. They also urge the
public as well as local, regional, national, and European authorities to adopt
and implement specific guidelines aimed at the empowerment and support of women
at all levels; given that:
1) Women do not only perpetuate life, but have
also proven that they can survive in the toughest conditions, making use of
natural resources, while at the same time preserving and nurturing the land. In doing so,
they have not relinquished magic and
poetry and have continued to seek a better quality of life.
2) When women leave, mountains die. Today, most
microeconomic activities, small, identity-based businesses, are still run by
women. Where women stay, mountains survive and flourish in a manner consistent
with a more harmonious approach to the land, one that recognises the
true value to be gained from it.
3) Women are the most active microeconomic actors and have not let go of
their tradition. They have kept it alive without discarding innovation, as a
vehicle of cross-cultural understanding and sustainable change, and have
continued to claim their rights.
4) They are determined to help people gain an understanding and appreciation of the
cultural heritage of mountain communities through all available means, based on
the notions of identity and of continuing education, fostering economic,
cultural and social development in ways that meet local needs and grant
mountain communities equal status with urban communities.
5) They believe in the centrality of a balanced
relationship between development and the conservation of natural, historical,
architectural, landscape, cultural and spiritual resources, so as to ensure the
preservation of an environment that is safe and caring for animals, plants,
etc.
They are pleased with the way the Centro di Ecologia Alpina has developed as a meeting
place where ideas, information, and views are exchanged and new recommendations
and proposals are put forth, in favour of women living in and caring for the
mountains.
Viote del Monte Bondone, Matriarcato e Montagna, December 1997.
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