''The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley'' is a classic study of

ethnography Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...

, published in 1974 by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf. The authors studied two

Alpine Alpine may refer to any mountainous region. It may also refer to: Places Europe * Alps, a European mountain range ** Alpine states, which overlap with the European range Australia * Alpine, New South Wales, a Northern Village * Alpine National P ...

villages in the

Non Valley The Non Valley ( or ; Nones: ''Val de Nòn''; ; ) is a valley mainly in the Trentino. Moreover, the (also known as simply , in italian), a subregion, consists of three primarily German-speaking municipalities in the province of South Tyrol, Nor ...

of the Tyrol region, St. Felix and Tret (part of

Fondo Fondo () is a ''comune'' (municipality) in Trentino in the northern Italian region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, located about north of Trento, precisely at the northern limit of the Val di Non. Fondo borders the following municipalities: Bre ...

municipality), only a mile apart and showed that in spite of identical ecological conditions, there were significant cultural differences, one village being

German-speaking German (, ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. It is a ...

and the other Italian-speaking, so that the same physical environment was cast in terms of distinct cultural worlds in either village. Comparison of the two villages showed a clear cultural boundary, in effect that between Germanic Europe and Romance Europe along the southern, alpine boundary of

German-speaking Europe This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the Germanosphere () in Europe, German-speaking minority languag ...

. The German-speaking village St. Felix had the characteristic structure of a

dispersed settlement A dispersed settlement, also known as a scattered settlement, is one of the main types of settlement patterns used by landscape historians to classify rural settlements found in England and other parts of the world. Typically, there are a num ...

(''Streusiedlung'') while the Italian-speaking settlement Tret had a clear nucleus. The authors trace the history of the region through the Middle Ages and down to the current inhabitants and their culture. For the German

Tyrol Tyrol ( ; historically the Tyrole; ; ) is a historical region in the Alps of Northern Italy and western Austria. The area was historically the core of the County of Tyrol, part of the Holy Roman Empire, Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, f ...

eans, the social center is the '' Hof'', the individual estate and its land, ideally passed down the generations by impartible inheritance to the eldest son. For their Italian-speaking neighbors, the center of attention is not the land but the community, not just the village center but by extension also the nearby city, and the land tended to be divided equally among heirs. The study followed an earlier report by Wolf (1962) on his study of the two villages. In the earlier study, Wolf argued for the primacy of culture over environmental constraints, in this case reflecting two distinct and deeply rooted cultural heritages, in the case of the German speakers of the Germanic

migration period The Migration Period ( 300 to 600 AD), also known as the Barbarian Invasions, was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories ...

system of

autarky Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems. Autarky as an ideology or economic approach has been attempted by a range of political ideologies and movement ...

of each family household, in the case of the Italian speakers the Mediterranean

civilization A civilization (also spelled civilisation in British English) is any complex society characterized by the development of state (polity), the state, social stratification, urban area, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyon ...

inherited from the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...

, where rural communities are culturally dominated by the urban centers on the coasts. The 1974 modified these conclusions, as it became apparent that while the division in the cultural ''ideals'' was indeed clear-cut between the villages, in reality the estates in both communities were kept at the same optimized sizes, showing that while cultural differences persisted for centuries even in close proximity, significantly affecting the political sphere, the necessities of the environmental conditions still dictated the same strategies for either community.Henk J. de Haan,
In the Shadow of the Tree: Kinship, Property and Inheritance Among Farm Families
', Het Spinhuis, Amsterdam 1994.

Editions

*John W. Cole, Eric R. Wolf, ''The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley'', New York: Academic Press, 1974. *republished with a new introduction by Eric Wolf, 1999, University of California Press, .

References

*John Friedl, review in ''Ethnohistory'' Vol. 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1975), pp. 90–92. {{DEFAULTSORT:Hidden Frontier Ethnographic literature Culture of South Tyrol History of the Alps 1974 non-fiction books

Editions

See also

References