In the Italian island of Sardinia, the issue of ‘identity’ seems to represent the most popular topic discussed at any level of the Sardinian society. The urge of defining the Sardinian characteristics, the sardità, of any aspect of the living seems to drive the policies of the regional government, including those on the management of the territory and the agri-pastoral sector.

Considering beekeeping as a field that forms part of the agro-pastoral context, the research project aims at analyzing in which ways beekeepers negotiate and (de)construct the hegemonic notion of the ‘Sardinian identity’. During the four years of fieldwork, the researcher developed a methodology that combined various techniques like visual ethnography, net-ethnography, participant observation, and auto-ethnography that enabled her to engage with the various forms of expertise and knowledge at play in the field of beekeeping. For this reason, she created the blog www.fareapicoltura.net that resulted in producing new forms of fields to be explored. The fieldwork showed that the daily multispecies relationship between humans, bees, and the environment becomes the mean by which beekeepers know intimately the territory and build a strong sense of belonging to it. From their standpoint, the territory is perceived as the result of a constant co-work between human and non-human beings, where are clearly visible the traces of the toil of the ancestors. In this light, the policies for the touristic val-orization of the ‘wild’ natural heritage and on safeguarding the ‘authentic’ biodiversity of Sardinia appear to activate formal bureaucratic procedures that strongly affect the daily practices of beekeeping.

Delving into the tensions that arise between beekeepers and policymakers, the research shows why and how the activity of beekeeping connects to the processes of identity construction and the discourses about the sardità of Sardinia’s environment.

Weitere Informationen: www.fareapicoltura.net

e-Mail: greca.nathascia.meloni@univie.ac.at
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Projektfinanzierung: ÖAW Doc-Stipendium