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

Abstract

My paper wishes to delve into concepts such as assemblage and sympoiesis 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 beekeeping and bee culture, as they emerge as multispecies 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.

“More than people, honey bees are ‘just part of nature’” (Tsing, 1995, p. 116). This statement was written in an inspiring 1995 essay by Anna Tsing who, together with Tim Ingold, ¹ was the first anthropologist to draw attention to a particular case of human–nonhuman relationship: the one between humans and bees.

Tsing’s essay posited a socio-political comparison between some African bees which appeared in the 1980s in the United States, and border-crossing people: both were perceived as invaders, both seen as a threat to the values of US culture, thus reflecting a never-ending process of making of the Other. However, by arguing that bees were just part of nature, Tsing challenged the issue of “human nature,” triggering a critical reflection that, in the years to come, would be at the core of the so-called ontological turn. Nature, in particular, lay at the center of the debate. Tsing, in fact, stated that

Nature, like God, is both mysterious and lawful: it requires human efforts to know it, yet always slips away from full knowledge. Thus, although cultural analysts over and over demonstrate the cultural shaping of the so-called natural attributes, we can never thus unseat “nature”: it is an aspect of nature to be partially and ultimately wrongly labeled by human cultural efforts. (1995, p. 114)

In the 20 years that followed, reflections about the controversial essence of “nature”, and the importance of overcoming the nature–culture divide, would come mainly from Philippe Descola. In L’anthropologie de la nature (Descola, 2002), he stated that anthropology had ruthlessly tried to measure itself against problems of discontinuity and continuity between nature and culture; therefore, he wondered about the possibility of speaking of an Anthropology of Nature. At first sight, an Anthropology of Nature would appear as an oxymoron, since at least in the Western tradition, nature was understood as the absence of humans, and the latter as the ones that managed to overcome and dominate nature. He went on, arguing that

Nature does not exist as a sphere of autonomous realities for all peoples, and it must be anthropology’s task to understand not only why and how so many peoples classify under the heading of humanity many existents that we call natural, but also why and how it has seemed to us necessary to exclude these entities from our common destiny. (Descola, 2002, p. 14)

Moreover, Descola pointed out the need to go beyond minimizing the importance of the interactions of “diverse biological mechanisms that we share with other organized beings. Our singularity in relation to all other existents is relative, as is our awareness of it” (Descola, 2002, pp. 14, 15). ²

In light of Descola’s contribution, other authors have challenged the nature–culture dichotomy: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed multinaturalism as opposed to Western naturalism (Viveiros de Castro, 1998); Bruno Latour highlighted the importance of interaction and relations between humans and other species by introducing the term “nature culture” (2009); similarly, Fuentes (2010, 2012) and Haraway (2016) labeled “natural–cultural contact zones” the interface between animals and humans and recognized that structural species’ characteristics, as well as individual idiosyncrasies, are both the cause and outcome of the ways individuals act and interact.

In more recent views, a unified “nature–culture” approach, based on Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective (2001) and expanded by other authors who assess the importance of “living with” multispecies actors, has gained more traction and aims at shedding light on the diverse but related processes and questions pertaining to climate change and the Anthropocene, specifically in Alpine contexts.

Entanglements

In light of the ongoing debates about nature and culture, my interests revolve around Alpine areas: I began working in the Western Alpine Chain in 2005, as a parallel research to the one I carried out until 2019 in Eastern Siberia. ³ Unlike my “Siberian” fieldwork, which mostly delved into the revival of shamanism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my “Alpine” research at the very beginning focused on ritual and ceremonial practices in the Alps (see Zola, 2011, 2013); it then gradually shifted toward a more ecological approach to the study of the Alps: since 2017, ⁴ in fact, I have been analyzing the relationship between “new highlanders” and alternative ways of contrasting social and environmental marginality, such as beekeeping or growing ancient varieties of crops (Zola, 2017a, 2017b). I am now at a stage of my research where my interests in Siberian indigenous cultures and those regarding the Alps share some common features. My last fieldwork in Siberia focused on the relationship between hunters and wolves in endangered areas, characterized by changing climate settings; most of my recent research on the Alps examines the connections between beekeeping and a rapidly changing environment. In particular, I understand beekeeping and bee culture as an assemblage of people and things, of human and nonhuman actors which trigger new ways of facing climate changes, as landscape too is increasingly understood as a practice and form of body politics (Krauß, 2018; Olwig, 2018), as an assembly of entangled multispecies actors that comes into being. This resounds well with the issue of sympoiesis, as elaborated by Haraway:

sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making with”. Nothing makes itself, nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing… Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. (2016, p. 58)

The idea of sympoiesis, in its turn, echoes the critical thoughts elaborated by Anna Tsing about independence and autonomy as unique forms of living of the human species:

One of the many limitations of this heritage is that it has directed us to imagine human species being, that is, the practices of being a species, as autonomously self-maintaining—and therefore constant across culture and history. The idea of human nature has been given over to social conservatives and sociobiologists, who use assumptions of human constancy and autonomy to endorse the most autocratic and militaristic ideologies. What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence? Human nature is an interspecies relationship. (Tsing, 2012, p. 144)

It also matches with the notion of assemblages: Haraway, in this respect, speaks of linked metabolisms of humans and nonhumans which are held together by sympoietic ties and relations (2016). As again Anna Tsing states, “assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making” (Tsing, 2015, p. 23). Further, she compares the notion of assemblage to that of polyphony: if we frame it from a farming perspective, which draws us closer to the topic of my paper, commercial agriculture has selected single crops and improved them in order to foster simultaneous ripening and coordinated harvests; however, crop selection has not been the only way of farming. If we imagine that multiple rhythms and other social actors such as pollinators, insects, microbes, and other plants can actively take part in farming, the notion of polyphonic assemblage unfolds as a gathering of different actors.

I think these two key concepts can prove to be very useful tools for anthropologists. On the one hand, as mentioned above, 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 or animism.

I believe that the implications of notions such as sympoiesis and assemblage can be seen to surface in the context of bee culture, specifically in Alpine areas: beekeeping and bee culture, in fact, emerge as multispecies activities where everything and everyone involved can be regarded as a social actor. Bee culture, in this respect, is located at the intersection of four main questions arising from the field of Alpine anthropology: the first one is related to the possible and multiple ways of carrying on research in Alpine contexts.

Multiple Anthropological Approaches to Alpine Research

A closer look at the “history within the history” of Alpine anthropology reveals that there have been consistent “flows” of interest to different aspects regarding the relationship between humans and mountain environments. Starting from the analysis of Robert Hertz’s cult of Saint Besse (1913) and Robert Burns’ Alpine community of Saint Véran in France (1959), “community studies” became the favorite ground for exploring and articulating ethnographies devoted to small Alpine villages where every aspect of their daily life was investigated (see Sibilla, 1980, 1995). During the 1970s and 1980s, along with these works, other topics began to be taken into account, such as the relations between the environment, cultural attitudes, and local and economic structures. Considerable attention was drawn to analyze, for instance, demographic changes within Alpine communities (Viazzo, 1990) and social regulatory mechanisms helping mountain communities to cope with demographic growth within the framework of limited resources (Albera, 1988; Destro, 1984; Netting, 1981). In the 1990s and early 2000s, a renewed interest in intangible cultural heritage, following the approval of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, characterized the works of other anthropologists who focused on problems of persistence and continuity of rituals, festive events (see Bonato & Viazzo, 2013).

In recent years, however, a new area of interest has been devoted to exploring or reexploring the issue of new population trends (see, among other works, De Matteis, 2011; Kofler et al., 2018) ⁵ and the relationship between Alpine dwellers and their environment, with a specific focus on skills and know-how referring to different social actors actively engaging in “collaborative survival” practices. To this extent, the question “Who is entitled to inhabit the Alps?” can be further expanded into “Is there a general Alpine topic that has to be investigated?” showing that upland communities and upland areas are seen as arenas of rapid socio-ecological and economic change. This focus on mutual relationships is also meant as a way to fill in the gaps left by the absence of communication between different aspects and realms of Alpine research: Werner Batzing, to this extent, in a critical comment on the Alpine Convention argues that there is still a lack of communication between economic and ecological studies on the one side and folklore and psychological analysis on the other (Batzing, 2005; Krauß, 2018).

The second issue which features bee culture as a connection point tries to find a reasonable answer to the question “How can fieldwork be carried on in Alpine contexts with nonhuman actors?”

Working with nonhuman subjects, broadly speaking, does not mean that, as anthropologists, we have to embrace and fully adopt the nonhuman actor’s point of view. As Viveiros de Castro suggests, the question “is not one of knowing ‘how monkeys see the world’ (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990), but what world is expressed through monkeys, of what world they are the point of view. I believe this is a lesson our own anthropology can learn from” (2004, p. 11).

Therefore, it is not of primary importance to give voice to nonhuman actors and, thus, to understand how bees think, but to highlight what sort of world is represented through bees, what sort of connections, intersections, and interspecies collaborations are on display. This also resounds with what Bruno Latour argues about dealing with nonhuman actors: he sees parallels between politicians who speak for other people and biologists who speak for nonhumans (2004). Latour’s model for bringing democracy to nature involves consensus building among human “spokespeople.”

To this extent, the most relevant spokespeople for a better understanding of bee culture are beekeepers, recognized as “privileged ecological interlocutors,” as a beekeeper whom I interviewed defined himself. Beekeepers can be of much help to anthropologists not only in terms of bee caring and beekeeping but also regarding how we should look at bees and from what angle, how a set of skills and know-how that beekeepers hold can cope with rapid environmental change. Beekeepers not only are ecological interlocutors but also necessarily have to become multispecies specialists.

The last two issues where beekeeping is involved and which bear parallels with Alpine anthropology are, first, the question of nomadism, which in its turn recalls the practices of pasture and of herding, to such an extent that in some contexts, beekeeping is labeled as “flying herding.” ⁶ Finally, the last issue is connected to urban and Alpine settings, which is a common topic in Alpine anthropology. If, on the one hand, urban and Alpine dimensions have often been opposed, on the other current research stresses the importance of continuity between these two settings which have to be considered in their dialogical dimension rather than in contrast one with the other.

My fieldwork, which has gone on extensively since 2017 mostly in the Susa Valley, has taken into account nomadic beekeepers, such as those specialists who keep their apiaries in the plains or on the hillsides for most part of the year and move them to mountain areas for the summer. The recurrent references to the continuity between plain and mountain and between nomadic and sedentary beekeeping are well-established topics in the beekeepers’ talks, as shown by O.B., who lives in Soubras, a small village at a height of 1,480 m in Susa Valley:

It is my business partner who keeps the bees in Avigliana ⁷ , we’ve been working together since 2008, when we embarked upon this project with bees...The thing is that it is hard to keep them here [in Soubras, author’s note] all year round, so my business partner keeps them mainly in Avigliana, and they could well live in Avigliana 12 months long. Until three years ago, we didn’t even have to feed them, but then we decided to have a defined amount of permanent hives in Avigliana, which can be moved to other places according to the type of honey we want to harvest. For example, some hives are moved to Cascina Roseleto ⁸ in order to have dandelion honey, some others come here at the beginning of June until the end of the month, when the blooming season is at its peak. However, it’s all up to the weather conditions: some years at the beginning of June it’s still cold and flowering stops abruptly, other times the blossoming is gorgeous but the flowers are empty, and bees can’t find any food.... (O.B., Avigliana/Soubras, interviewed in September 2022)

This beekeeper hints at a common problem her colleagues had to deal with in recent years, which is blossoming with no nectar. L.B., a beekeeper who works between Langhe and Roero, a hillside area of Southern Piedmont, has faced the same predicament: the contrast between an apparently rich flowering season and the lack of particular scents indicates an alarming situation. As he claims:

It is a nice sunny spring day, temperatures are between 22 and 25 degrees, no wind, apparently there would be very good conditions for the bees to forage abundantly. However, if you keep an eye out, you will hear just a light buzz lost among other noises coming from the wood. If you smell the air, the acacia flowers’ scent, which is normally pervasive, is only slightly perceivable. So there is a sort of contrast between the flowering, which seems to be so rich, and the lack of specific scents. (L.B. Langhe/Roero, interviewed in July 2022)

Beekeepers themselves cannot find an explanation for this: By observing the facts and figures of the last 10 years of climate conditions, at least in Piedmont, if compared to the previous decade there has been a sequence of springs which have been colder and more windy, sometimes characterized by late frosts. In a word, illusory springs with warmer temperatures and then abrupt cold snaps.

This could be one of the reasons for the lack of pollen, hence showing that, in changing situations, the “hands-on” empirical knowledge beekeepers hold, sometimes is not enough.

Adaptations, or Keeping Bee Culture Alive

The need to adapt their know-how and skills to rapidly changing environmental circumstances is a common topic among the beekeepers I interviewed: a summer season like the one we experienced in 2022 has shown that they have had to adapt to dry climatic conditions and flows of unusual heat, fostering new ways of interacting with bees, for instance, feeding them. Supplying bees with a replacement nectar, called syrup, a mixture of water and sugar, is no new practice; however, 40 or 50 years ago, feeding the bees was out of the question. Providing them with extra water is another way of facing a climatic challenge: Sometimes the beekeepers position the hives very close to water sources, such as springs, small rivers, permanent wetlands, or fountains, especially in extremely dry years. Another practice that emerges as a direct consequence of environmental changes is represented by “hive stocking,” which is creating a hive stock ready to be moved in case of need, as again witnessed by O.B.:

Once, in beekeeping, the timing was good: the first to blossom was the acacia, then came the chestnut tree, but now what happens is that the chestnut trees will start blooming a week after the acacias, while your bees are busy...How can you cope with it? Luckily enough, this year we had ten extra hives that were ready to be moved according to different flowerings. This is a new way of thinking, which implies planning your moves well ahead and be ready to take action at any time. This also implies that the hives are less productive than they used to be, because with a good timing you could have all your hives forage the same flowers, whereas now they scatter to forage different flowers simultaneously. (O.B., Avigliana/Soubras, interviewed in September 2022)

The issue of new sorts of know-how and skills is inextricably linked to that of interspecies collaboration, where humans and bees are just a part of a complex network of actors, but not the only ones: The bees’ health, together with the health of other wild pollinators, is contingent upon the health of the plants and flowers they forage, which, in its turn, depends on the physiology and composition of the soil. All this creates an interspecies assemblage of human and nonhuman actors.

A More than Human Landscape: Soil, Plants, Bees, Humans

In this respect, what does it mean to state that soil is alive, for instance? What is it that helps the soil sustain the thick networks of relations that branch off just like the roots of the trees and plants, that make up for the entire assemblage?

A soil is alive or kept alive when it is interdependent with other living organisms; therefore, all sorts of landscapes and environments depend on the contingencies of different encounters.

Anna Tsing reminds us that “as sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds” (Tsing, 2015, p. 152).

On the other hand, dying soil means that the assemblage has not been efficiently carried on and reflects the failure of interspecies relations and sympoiesis, as reported by two nomadic beekeepers, husband and wife, who live in a hilly area near Asti, South Piedmont, and move their hives in Prali, a village at a height of 1,400 m in Germanasca Valley:

The trees in the woods are not being cut down, these trees [acacia, author’s note] are all old, and chestnuts or lindens have been rooted out when the vineyards were planted [back at the beginning of 20th century, author’s note]. But then the vineyards were abandoned, and the woods gained ground, so in the woods there weren’t any nectar plants anymore. The only such plant growing in our woods is acacia, which could well release a lot of pollen, but if it isn’t pruned it doesn’t produce enough pollen, and then it dies. Several decades ago it was the farmers who took care of the woods, who kept them in order and under control. Nowadays woods are rewildened, the strongest plant has it all and the wood dies...We’ve got ivy, then brambles and bushes, all invasive plants which kill the wood. There was a whole culture behind it, when the vines were there they were sustained by specific espalliers which were carved out of acacia wood, so that the trees didn’t get old, and consequently there was a turnover of new plants. Once there were less woods but there was honey, now there are more woods but no honey (L.D.R. and A.G., Camerano/Prali, interviewed in June 2021).

On the contrary, when sympoiesis is acted out, forms of interspecies collaboration emerge, and therefore the role of ecological informants held by the beekeepers comes to light too.

Langhe and Roero, a hillside area of Piedmont where L.B. has his apiary, is well known for its wine production, in particular of the renowned Barolo and Barbaresco brands; these areas bear the mark of an intense human effort toward monoculture, which wrested away their due space from the woodlands and featured extensive use of impressive amounts of herbicides to free the vineyards of parasites.

Some wine producers, however, have stopped to practice weeding between the vine lines and have started to grow green manure crops such as clover, lupins, and phacelia. Green manure implies leaving uprooted or sown crop parts to wither on a field so that they serve as a mulch and soil amendment. It is commonly associated with organic farming and can play an important role in sustainable annual cropping systems.

This practice is also encouraged both by recent viticulture manuals and by a number of guidelines issued by Regione Piemonte. The Guidelines for Integrated Agriculture issued by Regione Piemonte report that

it is strongly recommended to plant and grow green manure. It has beneficial effects on the roots of the plants and crops, as it allows the roots to grow deeper into the soil to assist with aeration and breaking up heavy soils such as clay. However, they also offer similar benefits in the summer months, with the foliage leafy foliage acting as a defence against the drying effects of sun and wind. (Piemonte, 2022, p. 7)

A viticulture manual, instead, states that “in order to foster the fertility of the soil and to provide it with organic matter and mineral elements, it is recommended to sow green manure mixtures of legume forage crops” (Bottura, 2011, p. 128).

The forage crops in the vineyards help maintain the soil moist and, thanks to the synergic cooperation between microorganisms living in the ground and the vines, the organoleptic properties of the wine resulting from the enriched soil have improved considerably. Once again, an example of sympoiesis is where contamination ends up being also a form of cooperation, as Anna Tsing would state (Tsing, 2015).

Some relatives of L.B.’s own some hectares where they grow vines. He reports that, since they started to reintroduce green manure crops, specifically lupins and clover, the wine they produce has gained “flavours and scents that they couldn’t recall tasting and smelling before” (L.B., Langhe/Roero, interviewed in July 2022). Some green manure crops, when allowed to flower, provide forage for pollinating insects too, and habitat for beneficial predatory insects, which allow for a reduction of insecticides where clover crops are planted. The predatory insects, just like the pollinators, need pollen and nectar in order to feed themselves. Consequently, the most recent guidelines for viticulture suggest introducing flourishing plants in the vineyard; they also recommend for vines be planted close to small woods and fences, the so-called hallways of connection (Alberoni et al., 2021; Zola, 2021).

Plants, microorganisms of the rhizosphere, and pollinators are, thus, considered a biological unity, an assemblage that grows, reproduces, and evolves conjointly.

Another example of interspecies cooperation, back to Alpine areas, is again represented by the case study of Soubras, where different social actors, both human and nonhuman interact: soil, plants, animals, and humans.

Since we started bringing the bees here a month a year from Avigliana, the fields where the bee hives lay have totally changed. Everything seems to have strengthened, and long disappeared plants such as clover, vetch, pheasant’s eye, wild carnation, plantain [plantago lanceolata, author’s note] and wild sage are growing again. The amount and the variety of species in the fields has increased, and the grass itself looks thicker. This has also impacted on the quality of the hay we harvest every year. Last summer, in spite of the dry weather, we didn’t have a significant decrease in hay production: instead of 500 hay bales we managed to have 470. This means that everything that grows in these fields grows mainly thanks to our bees. Both our bees and the meadows have adapted to harsh climatic conditions: last summer it was so dry that some varieties have inevitably dried out, however, there were other species ready to grow, balancing the lack of some species in favour of others.

The thing is that, before placing our apiary here, there were less flowers and more “grass,” but since the bees have started to forage, flowers bloom more frequently and grow in number the following year.

Another good thing about bringing the bees here and having a flowering field is that we harvest and sell hay, but in recent years we faced some problems because of the price of hay. Ours is generally more expensive because it is harvested at high altitudes, but luckily enough a young man from Vazon [the upper village, author’s note] has started to breed two cows and a veal, and next year he’ll have seven. We agreed that he’ll come and cut our hay and will use it for his cows. For us this has a twofold advantage: the fields are mown and the hay will go to Vazon. (O.B., Avigliana/Soubras, interviewed in September 2022)

From a beekeeper’s perspective, quite surprisingly, this sympoietic aspect took place in 2022 too. For many farmers, it has been a terrible year in terms of crops, lack of water, and rains. The few rains of autumn 2021 were followed by only one snowfall in December, then almost no rain until March to beginning of April, when rain was more frequent but not enough to limit the damage of a dry period. These were the premises of a disastrous season, for if the spring was warmer than average, it was followed by an even hotter summer. Considering the particularly negative farming and agricultural season, everyone would have expected similar results for beekeeping as well. On the contrary, the year 2022 has been surprisingly good, as L.B. reports:

For the past ten years, we’ve had an unusual warm weather already in February, then temperatures would drop again abruptly, and it isn’t uncommon to have frosts in April or even at the beginning of May. This affected the whole flowering system, which didn’t have time to complete its cycle. This year, instead, we’ve had cold weather on 10th March and the plants still had to grow. When temperatures began to lift, the first to grow was grass, followed by leaves, whereas last year the leaves grew first, so the grass and underwood had not enough light to grow. The end of winter 2022 and the beginning of spring have followed a more “natural” cycle: rain in autumn, the one snowfall in December, December temperatures quite warm. When the weather has started to be very dry, luckily enough the grass favoured the soil’s thermoregulation and it also preserved the small amount of water that had been absorbed, helping the flowers at the same time. I’m also referring to the role played by plants blossoming after the cherry tree and before acacia. (L.B., Langhe-Roero, interviewed in July 2022)

According to his words, then, there would be a strict relation between some environmental variabilities and pollen production. This would also mean that climatic upheavals could in fact impact the reproductive and adaptation abilities of plants. 2022, in spite of the lack of rain, favored the ideal conditions for grass growing and the soil, as a consequence, has retained the ideal amount of water according to its needs, sustaining itself and also favoring the survival of microorganisms and of plants.

Concluding Remarks

The summer of 2022 with its unpredictable consequences both in farming and in beekeeping contexts, together with climatic variations over the last 10–15 years, has had a strong impact on those activities which rely on a body of empirical and “hands-on” sort of knowledge. As I mentioned earlier on in this paper, skills and know-how relating to bee culture are rapidly evolving and adapting to the circumstances: To this extent, they could be labeled as volatile, as, just like bees, they need to swarm and form a new body of knowledge which keeps changing. This situation is not limited to Alpine areas; however, I chose to take into account beekeeping in mountain contexts because, by virtue of their position as innovation sites rather than barriers, I understand Alpine areas as privileged grounds for observing and assessing new ways of engaging with a specific environment, that is the Alps. Finally, as anthropologists, we need to acknowledge that carrying on research on human and nonhuman actors in upland contexts, thus adopting a multispecies perspective, is in fact opening new paths for exploring the multiple ways of bee-coming.