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This article takes an ethnographic look at grass in the Italian Eastern Alps. The relationships between the grass of semi-natural grasslands and more-than-grass actors such as humans and animals unfold through ethnographic walking on high-Alpine pastures. The transformation of grasslands into scrub and forest landscapes is revealed through the relationship of grass to dairy monocultures and cereal feed for ruminants. The vulnerability, thriving and dying of grass is closely intertwined with the lives of small farmers and the global agricultural industry. As the history of grass unfolds through its dependence on human practices and ruminants, I propose to speak of grass socialities which extend ecologically defined grass societies as well as correct the calculation of agronomic costs. As a multifaceted actor in a society of humans and animals, grass can serve as an ethnographic compass that tells us not only of destruction but also of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the structural change in South Tyrolean agriculture in the 1960s, the high pastures were important as essential fodder resources for the subsistence farming of mountain farmers, so it was primarily the farmers who were responsible for negotiating grazing rights. The task of the herder, on the other hand, was essentially to observe these rights strictly. Historically, herders in South Tyrol have played a socially marginal role, their activities focusing exclusively on the summer high pastures. But the current situation is different. Drawing on the example of one particular mountain pasture and one herder, the landscape can be understood as a "total social fact." This landscape as a whole is able to give us a condensed account of the comprehensive changes over the past fifty years, expressed as the return of scrub, and the new embodied practices of the herder as well as the grazing animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers brief profile of Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski, founders of modern sociocultural Anthropology. It mentions his doctorate in philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and another study visit in Leipzig Malinowski was drawn to British social anthropology and he completed a post-graduate education at the London School of Economics. It also mentions research generally relies on desk studies that explorers, material collected by missionaries and colonial administrators.

The article reports on relationship networks, ethnological, and historical perspectives on South Tyrolean mountain farmers. Topics discussed include the American Cultural anthropologists on the Alps in the 1960s and 1970s, research on geographically isolated mountain farmers, historical development and documentation, and the individual farms in a time of agricultural political and economic upheaval photographed in the 1960s.

This essay introduces Anuac's thematic section on Malinowski from two perspectives. The first part looks at Malinowski and Elsie Masson's life in South Tyrol, contemplating the historical-political context of the region and bringing to light the Malinowski family's presence and relations in the local setting. The verandah of the villa in Oberbozen is the starting point for a panoramic look on the land and its people, serving as a frame for a reconsideration of Malinowski. The second part traces the development of Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropology (MFEA) at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, a project that since 2016 has been bringing to light new knowledge about the Malinowskis' presence in South Tyrol. The Malinowski Forum is the backdrop to a Symposium that stimulated the articles presented here, with the aim of reflecting on ethnography today in terms of its continuities and discontinuities with respect to the canon established by Malinowski nearly a century ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion on schooling and education for Gypsy children has been running for a long time now. At present this discussion is taking several--sometimes quite opposite--directions. Some authors make a plea for schools which help to rediscover the lost cultural identity of the Gypsies, while others want liberation from school as Gypsy culture expresses itself outside the state apparatus of education. In many of these discussions the emic, or internal, vision of the Gypsy way of interpreting school and education is omitted. This article focuses on a concrete ethnographic example in which Italian Sinti give their own answers to the global dimension of school. The internal perspective is favoured here, and we can see Sinti children and their families interacting with and interpreting school according to their way of thinking. The article shows how Sinti, both children and adults, redefine and reinterpret their presence at school. It shows how school can be defined in relative terms, as a cultural value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]