One of Us. Human-Bear Communitas in Abruzzo, Italy

In the Giovenco Valley, in the heart of the mountainous region of Abruzzo, central Italy, the increasing presence of Marsican brown bears in villages has lately intensified public conflicts over conservation, safety and responsibility in interspecies relations. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines a grassroots initiative centred on restoring and planting abandoned mountain orchards as alternative food resources for bears, deliberately located outside inhabited areas. Moving between institutional conservation policies, scientific controversies over supplemental feeding and local histories of human-bear relations, the paper explores how these orchards enact different politics of coexistence. It argues that they produce a ‘third foodscape’ in which food mediates proximity and distance between species, unsettling the entrenched opposition between wild and domestic. Through practices of mediated sharing, activists and bears are articulated as part of a multispecies community in which boundaries are constantly crossed, reframing coexistence as a continually negotiated political relationship of care.