Taking Stock of Two Decades of Change: The Alps and Alpine Anthropology in the Early Twenty-First Century

This chapter proposes to take stock of the changes undergone by the Alps and Alpine anthropology in the early 21st century and concentrates on the largely unexpected reversal in migration trends and its socio-cultural effects, also in the light of anthropology’s profound disciplinary reshaping in the same period. In order to put these recent or ongoing changes in perspective, however, the first sections revisit the quite different but significant changes experienced by Alpine anthropology in the late 20th century, most notably a growing involvement with history and the development of an ecological approach focused on the relations between human populations and natural resources. Although the demographic and especially climatic changes of the last two decades have brought about a shift from an ecological to a more explicitly environmental anthropology, community studies are nevertheless retaining their methodological centrality. This raises delicate issues about what should be meant by local community (and culture) in markedly changed sociodemographic settings. An analysis of the various kinds of “new highlanders” leads to an examination of the extent to which negotiations between old and new dwellers are affected by structural constraints, social cleavages and the availability of spaces for agency. Particular attention is paid to a topic that has so far been little explored by the anthropological literature on the Alps, namely ntergenerational relations.