engleski

Movement as Ontology: Transhumant Pastoralists in the Velebit Mountain

The Velebit mountain (Croatia) is one of the most significant Dinaric Karst environments. Throughout the long history of inhabitation in this region, the movement was the most crucial element in the constitution of landscape. The onset of modernization following the WWII resulted in the severe depopulation of the area. However, the movement as a defining feature of the region was reconstituted as tourism and mountaineering. The Early Modern period saw the constitution of a particular and distinctive cultural system. Various built and natural features were consolidated into a consistent landscape and the impact of this system is still felt in the landscape today. The basic subsistence strategy during this period was transhumant pastoralism which created a specific landscape featuring various paths and tracks which connected different places such as hamlets, dolines, ponds, a cemetery, mirila (a pseudo-grave built at the place where the funerary congregation rested with the deceased on their way to the cemetery) etc. Traditional literature tended to extract various features of this cultural system and use them to describe and define certain phenomena such as belief, subsistence, customs etc. This literature strived to provide meaning for the different observed phenomena. However, the constitution of landscape is not reducible to discursive representations or cost-effectiveness in a measurable and predefined Cartesian space. Rather, landscape is experiental, embodied and performed and contingent upon the very practice that constitutes a relational and emergent world. The purpose of this paper is to understand this landscape in terms of embodied practice where movement is not simply a means of transportation but an ontologically constitutive element of the everyday life. This landscape will be represented using a case study from the southern part of the Velebit mountain.

transhumant pastoralists ; movement ; Velebit : dinaric alps

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