en
Slovenščina
ItalianoARIS code: J6-50196
Project duration: 1. 10. 2023–30. 9. 2026
Project coordinator: dr. Maja Bjelica
Participating institute at ZRS Koper: Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies
The research project considers the traditional craft of salt-making, as an embodied practical wisdom. Salt-making in southwestern Slovenia is known for its scenic landscape and valorised for its cultural heritage. At the same time, it is rarely recognized for the unique and persisting interlacement between the saltern’s human and non-human actors. The research strives towards an understanding of salt-making as a reflection of the cohabitation of the human and the environment. The environment offers and transmits its wisdom to the human, who, experiencing this wisdom, eventually comes to embody this wisdom. The research project opens up a novel understanding of salt-making in the field of environmental anthropology. It shall reveal innovative transdisciplinary insights from perspectives of philosophy, heritage and cultural tradition, community formation and transformative governance towards sustainability.
The central objective of the research is to provide a transdisciplinary account of the present-day heritage of salt-making perceived as an experiential environmental wisdom, that springs from the unique relationship between the salt-workers and the environment. It is based on the following guidelines:
1. Gaining ethnographic insight into salt-making as experiential collaboration between the salt-workers and the saltern;
2. discovering relations between salt-workers and the saltern emphasising their mutual influence in forming as biosocial becomings;
3. revealing potential ecosophies germinating from these relations, considering them as new fertile ground for
4. reevaluating the salt-making’s heritagisation and the saltern’s meaning for environmental cohabitation.