Framing Beekeeping, Environmental Change, and Adaptation in the Italian Alps. An Anthropological Perspective

My paper illustrates how beekeeping and bee caring can be seen as an assemblage of people and things, of human and non human actors which trigger new ways of facing climate changes. I believe that, from a theoretical perspective, issues such as assemblage and entanglement can prove to be very useful tools for anthropologists. On the one hand they appear to be the most recent outcomes of almost two decades of reasoning about the nature-culture divide, on the other they can be adapted to European contexts. The "ontological turn" and its related debates, at the very beginning, mostly referred to extra-European areas, nevertheless, in recent years, a growing body of works produced by scholars and based in Western regions is gaining more ground, thus showing the efforts which are being made to try to reconcile these theoretical insights with contexts where there is (at least apparently) no shamanism, nor totemism nor animism. My paper focuses on my fieldwork researches on beekeepers and bee culture which I have been carrying out in the Western Alpine chain on the border between Italy and France in the last five years.