Take a Walk on the Shepherd Side: Transhumant Narratives and Representations

Based on an ethnography of the shepherds in an area of central-southern Italy, the chapter outlines representations of this traditional breeding practice—the seasonal movements of shepherds and herders with their animals in search of grazing land. Ethnographic accounts and narratives evoke the Deleuzian themes of the rhizome, “nomadic thought” and “becoming animal” as well as socio-anthropological concerns, such as the notion of “two sides of historicity” and the ethnographic construction of the “sense of places.” Pastoral routes are somehow represented as flows of narrations while walking human-animal rhythms resemble punctuation in the narration of this deeply embodied experience of a cultural landscape. At the same time, the chapter analyzes representations that the process of “heritagization” produce, and that recently transformed transhumance into a cultural and fascinating object. Traditional and vagrant pastoralism is useful for thinking and narrating in the new global heritage framework.