More Than Human Altitudes: Exploring Assemblages of Bees, Flowers, and People in the Italian Alps

My paper wishes to delve into concepts such as assemblage (Tsing 2015) and sympoiesis (Haraway 2016, Tsing 2015) and examine them within the framework of my ethnographic fieldwork on beekeeping in the Western chain of the Italian Alps. I believe that the implications of notions such as sympoiesis and assemblage can be seen to surface in the context of bee-beekeeping and bee culture, as they emerge as multi-species activities where everything and everyone involved can be regarded as a social actor. In this respect, the most relevant issues I would like to tackle are referred to knowledge production and know-how among beekeepers who keep their apiaries in the plains for most part of the year and move them to mountain areas for the summer.