Tra reale e virtuale. Il contributo antropologico al progetto CLAPie

In the past few decades the Alps have experienced significant and not wholly expected developments, as economic and technological transformations have been accompanied by a widespread trend reversal in demography: after a century and half of severe decline, the population of many municipalities is now growing mostly because of the arrival of new inhabitants from outside the Alpine space. These changes raise issues of continuity and discontinuity that are important both to linguists and socio-cultural anthropologists and have been tackled as part of the CLAPie Project by focusing on high-altitude pastures in an area (the upper Pellice Valley) where pastoralism is still thriving. On the anthropological side the aim was twofold: to document changes and continuities in material culture and linguistic usage, but also to investigate such crucial socio-economic aspects as access to pastoral resources, the role of familial and communal structures, or the division of labour between genders and generations. Accordingly, research was subdivided into two phases. The first one consisted in an accurate exploration of ethnographic collections preserved in several museums in the Pellice Valley. This resulted in the production of records. The second phase entailed intensive ethnographic fieldwork and has yielded findings that point to the enduring centrality of the family as work group amidst change in the cultural and economic setting of mountain pastoralism. The adoption of two styles of ethnographic inquiry has proved useful not only to integrate different pieces of information, but also to reveal the strengths and weakness of old and new tools and methods when trying to connect the virtual and the real.