Parasitizing landscape for UNESCO World Heritage

Geoforum 45 (2013) 337–345

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Parasitizing landscape for UNESCO World Heritage Thomas J. Puleo School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, PO Box 873902, Tempe, AZ 85287-3902, USA

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Article history: Received 4 September 2011 Received in revised form 14 November 2012 Available online 20 December 2012 Keywords: Heritage Landscape Parasite Michel Serres UNESCO

a b s t r a c t The work of Michel Serres has received recent attention in geographic scholarship, particularly his concept of the parasite. In this article I use this model to investigate an area of geographic study that has remained until now unexamined under this lens: the production of heritage landscapes. Through an engagement with a case from the Valtellina, a valley in the Italian Alps, I demonstrate the logic of the parasite that is evident in the actions of a local nonprofit organization that narratively and materially analyzes (culls), paralyzes (eliminates), and catalyzes (combines) local agricultural terraces in an application to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. I do this by parasitizing the terraces and the application myself as I analyze, paralyze, and catalyze them to render a still partial but fuller representation of the valley’s historic terraced landscapes. Parasites are ambivalent agents, abusive in some ways but useful in others. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The Valtellina is an agricultural valley in the Italian Alps, 150 km northeast of Milan, on the Swiss border (Fig. 1). It is known for being unusually fertile for its elevation and latitude, and for the dry stone terraces on its steep hillsides that help make this fertility possible (Fig. 2). Fondazione ProVinea, a local nonprofit that was founded in 2003, has applied to UNESCO to inscribe these landscapes onto its World Heritage list. It represents the historic settlement of the valley as the heroic transformation of barren slopes into fertile fields. I contend that Michel Serres’ concept of the parasite facilitates a more accurate reading of the terrace’s construction and use, including ProVinea’s current engagement with them. Similar to the institutions that came before it, ProVinea plays the parasite by analyzing (culling), paralyzing (eliminating), and catalyzing (combining) the Valtellina terraces to achieve its desired outcome. People have taken their living from the Valtellina’s fragile terraced hillsides for over a millennium, always organized by a series of institutions: the Catholic Church which initiated terraced cultivation (c. 700–1512), the Grisons Freestate that greatly expanded it (1512–1797), the Valtellinese nobility who oversaw its decline (1797–1920), various wine cooperatives that rehabilitated it (1920–present), and now ProVinea that would like to turn the terraces into heritage landscapes for consumption by the global tourist market (ProVinea, 2005). ProVinea’s aim is the same as those of the institutions that went before it: to engage the valley’s landscape in a way that yields a product that is suitable for a desired market. The markets and products have changed throughout the Valtellina’s history, but

E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.024

the terraced hillsides have always been central to each enterprise, making them sites of multiple functions and meanings. I demonstrate how ProVinea narratively and materially parasitizes the Valtellina terraces in its application to World Heritage to make it more competitive by culling what is advantageous, eliminating what is detrimental, and combining what is dispersed. Like all parasites, ProVinea analyzes (culls), paralyzes (eliminates), and catalyzes (combines). The result is a story of a unified people building a single industry on a mutable landscape. A casualty in this telling is a more complex representation, one that I partially reveal by investigating one aspect of the terraces: their spatiality. Terraces existed in many parts of the Valtellina and in diverse forms, not just in the areas and forms that ProVinea designates in its application to UNESCO. Using Serres’ parasite model I build my argument by comparing the representation of the terraces found in ProVinea’s application to an alternative representation that I have crafted through a combination of archival and field research. My aim is not to criticize ProVinea, but to demonstrate the logic of the parasite that is evident in the foundation’s representation of the valley’s terraces. Indeed, parasites are vital to the function and development of systems because they drive their evolution by catalyzing new forms through seizing and changing the relations that constitute the old forms. This is true in terms of biological evolution (Combes, 2005) as well as in a more general material and sociological sense (Serres, 2007), dynamics that I demonstrate in the section that follows.

2. Serres’ parasite logic For Serres, the important measure of anything is the aggregate, the multiple, the swarm. He revels in the undetermined potential

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Fig. 1. The Valtellina in northern Italy and surrounding countries. Source: Jedediah R. Smith, 2012.

Fig. 2. Wine terraces with La Chiesa di San Siro in the center, in Bianzone. Source: T. J. Puleo, 2006.

of chaos and the infinite possibility that exists in disorder. In the introductory essay to a later edition of The Parasite, Cary Wolfe cites Gregory Bateson (2000) in discussing the Kantian notion of creation that derives not from selecting certain facts from a known set of facts, but rather from ‘‘an infinite number of facts (Wolfe, 2007: xxiv).’’ In this vacillating and multivariate sea Serres swims most happily. The reality of the world is a disordered aggregate and chaos is the rule. Within this ocean of chaos our systems, including our landscapes, take form (Serres, 2007). But what causes systems to emerge from this chaotic flow of things and beings to make the reality that we recognize? Serres offers the parasite as one such mediating agent. In both French and English the word ‘parasite’ denotes an organism that lives by exploiting another. A social parasite happily accepts an invitation to dinner but never extends one in return. It ‘analyzes’ its host by taking but giving nothing back (Serres, 2007). A biological parasite enters the brain of a fish, causing it to swim in a way that makes it vulnerable to being caught and eaten by a bird in which the parasite will find a larger, warmer, and more nutritious host (Combes, 2005). It ‘paralyzes’ and ‘catalyzes’ its host by interrupting its usual activity and making it act in a way it would not ordinarily. In both the social and biological examples, the parasite enters a chaotic field of hosts that nurture it at one level and then turns it into a more supportive habitat by analyzing, paralyzing, and catalyzing the hosts who can provide even greater nutrition.

Parasites carve order from chaos by abusing their hosts. I use the word ‘abuse’ here as Serres does, to indicate less a mistreatment and more a syphoning. Serres parses the word as ‘ab-use,’ with the prefix ‘ab-’ signifying ‘away’ to render a meaning of an unreciprocated taking, a tangential redirection. So in this sense, parasites are abusive but they are also useful because through their abuse they disrupt the social and environmental systems that host them, thereby catalyzing their evolution. Parasites are not productive in the sense that they make things. Rather, they are productive in the sense that they make things do things by seizing the relations among them. ‘‘Nesting on the flow of the relations,’’ parasites steer the course (Serres, 2007: 53). Serres uses the parasite model to explain the course of global social and environmental development. He claims that history is not as full of conflict as historians represent it. Peasants rarely rebelled against their lord; most of the time they did not even know where he was. So in Serres’ vision, the history of human relations and engagement with the material world is not configured as opposition (? ) or predation (? ?), but parasitism (" ). Things happen tangentially. Oblique and one-way sequences of confiscations and abuses subtend social, political, and economic systems. The same is true of human engagement with the natural world, especially in modern industrial times. ‘‘What does man give to the cow, to the tree, to the steer, who gives him milk, warmth, shelter, work, and food? What does he give? Death (2007: 5).’’ Most activity on the Earth’s surface occurs in a series of unidirectional parasitic relations. These relations are not reciprocal but abusive, and as such they are more parasitical than oppositional or predatory. By being unidirectional, they cause systems to adapt, leading to their evolution. Serres turns to fables to further explain the dynamics of parasitism, its serial and one-way nature in particular, using Aesop’s ‘‘City Mouse, Country Mouse’’ (Boursault, 1988). Aesop opens the story with the invitation from the city mouse to the country mouse. The country mouse arrives and dines with his cousin on the leftovers of a fancy meal of game birds served on a Persian rug; this is clearly the city, but something is odd. The man who owns the house where the mice dine is a farmer, but he is a farmer only in a legal sense because he produces nothing. He lives off of government subsidies—he is paid not to produce, but to not produce. He eats for nothing, just like the mice. Who has paid for the meal? Those who pay the taxes that provide the farmer’s subsidy (Serres, 2007). Here we see the tangential relation of parasitism in a series rather than as a single occurrence. At the head of the chain is the dirt farmer who struggles everyday in the field. He is parasitized by the tax farmer who is important to the system of agricultural production because by not producing he maintains the prices of agricultural goods. He eats not although he does not work, but because he does not work. The system may not be fair to the dirt farmer, but this is how it has evolved to work most efficiently. The tax farmer then goes upstairs to bed, leaving the remains of his meal on the table. He is in turn parasitized by the city mouse that likewise eats for free by nibbling away at the tax farmer’s leftovers. In fact there is so much left on the table that the city mouse invites his cousin the country mouse over for dinner. As they nibble away however, the tax farmer gets up and makes a noise that scares the country mouse. ‘‘I’m going back to the country where I have nothing to eat but my own chestnuts,’’ says the country mouse, ‘‘but at least I will eat them in peace (Serres, 2007: 53).’’ Serres says that the country mouse is a fool, a rough political character who does not understand how complex social and economic systems work and who ruins them by not maintaining his role in them. As Steven D. Brown makes clear, the country mouse is more committed to maintaining its own principles than to facilitating the functioning of the larger, richer, and more efficient

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system (2002). The relevance of this model to the logic of globalizing projects such as World Heritage is salient: individual (or local) integrity, or as Stanley H. Raffel observes, adherence to general principle over particular relationship, challenges systemic efficiency (2006). In fact, the country mouse is a parasite because it paralyzes and catalyzes the system of which it used to be a part by leaving it, and remains a parasite by returning to the country. It may no longer be a part of the original ‘‘parasitic cascade’’ (Serres, 2007: 179), but it procures its nourishment no less parasitically; it has simply moved closer to the only real producer, which is nature. Serres did not originate the concept of parasitic agency; the social parasite, for example, has long been a common figure in traditional Mediterranean cultural imaginations and social systems. As the noisy and obsequious flatterer who is always scheming for a free meal, he is a stock character in ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic literary and dramatic works. In these narratives and plays, he supports himself by offering lively and entertaining talk in exchange for food. Nevertheless, the parasite is tolerated and even embraced by the host who while vilifying the parasite for his lazy trickery also admires him for his cleverness and charm. For example, both the scholar and allegorist al-Khatib al-Baghadi (1002– 1071) and historian and geographer Ibn Khaldoun (1332–1406) extol the parasite’s ability to adapt and innovate despite also displaying a taste for deceit and subterfuge. So while the parasite has been understood as a morally ambivalent figure, it has also been considered to be absolutely essential to the evolution of systems because by breaking their rules it forces them to change. 3. The parasite and landscape Given its multiple forms, the parasite concept is particularly useful for landscape study. For example, in discussing human engagement with the environment, Serres refers to the ‘‘white domino’’ of agriculture (Serres, 2007: 177). Before the selected and ordered planting can begin, cleaning and purging must occur. The natural terrain, rough with an agglomeration of uncountable species, is stripped down to bare soil. Its multicolor and multiform mottle is reduced to a flat and uniform brown by razing, destoning, and derooting. The first act of the human transformation of the earth was not construction but destruction. Here is the parasite, blasting its horn, driving out the polyphony of noises with its single blaring note. One long blow on the hunting corne and the wild beasts scatter; the parasite crashes the party and then becomes the party, by being louder than all of the other guests (Serres, 2007). The priest swings the incense burner and waves the aspergillium to cleanse and sacralize space. Humans built church and field simultaneously through this same act of purification and whitening. In Italian the relation could not be clearer: cultura-coltura (culture-agriculture). The parasite purifies the surface, turning the variegated matrix of habitats into one smooth Petri dish fit for a single crop. It is not surprising then that the Media Valtellina, the stretch of the valley that lies parallel to the line of latitude (Fig. 1), played host to a number of groups that came from outside of it: the Catholic Church that entered from the west, the Bergamaschi and Bresciani who arrived from valleys to the south, and the Grison Freestate that came from the north, all of them drawn toward an agricultural oasis in a mountain wilderness (Benetti, 1990; Guidetti, 1989). Balmier and more humid than most of what surrounded it, the Valtellina was a perfect place for parasites who were looking for a more prolific and generous host. With a degree of organization and acumen heretofore unknown in the valley, these groups and institutions divided its wild landscape into rational and instrumental parcels. ProVinea continues this tradition with a different kind of parasitic parsing that supports a quite dif-

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ferent yet still similar objective: enrollment in UNESCO’s World Heritage Program. 4. The parasite in geographical scholarship A particular strength of Serres’ work is its wide embrace of multiple forms of agency, a quality that landscape scholars have engaged largely through actor–network theory, an intellectual movement that Serres inspired but in which he has never participated (Bingham and Thrift, 2000). Many of the hallmarks of actor–network theory that have been readily absorbed by landscape geographers such as hybridity (Lulka, 2009; Cloke and Jones, 2001), nonhuman agency (Johnston, 2008; Lorimer, 2007; Perkins, 2007), turbulent materiality (Anderson and Wylie, 2009), and multiple spatialities (Bear and Eden, 2008) have at least oblique precedents in many of Serres’ concepts: the natural contract (1995), the termitarium (1991a), the clinamen (Serres, 2000), and the excluded third (1991b), forms and figures that cross the boundaries between not only the natural and the cultural, but also between the artistic and the scientific, the sentient and the nonsentient, and the animate and the inanimate. Serres’ concept of the parasite is exemplary in this regard and geographers are just now adopting it. The key to understanding Serres’ concept of parasite agency, and geographers’ use of it, is to remember that parasites exist in multiple forms: social, biological, and physical, and while they are agents they do not always act with intention (Serres and Latour, 1995). For Serres, a rainstorm can be just as much of a parasite as a human, a giraffe, a weed, or a virus. In one well-cited article, Jennifer Gabrys uses the parasite concept to argue that sinks, which are elements of the land, sea, or air that act as collectors of pollution, exist not outside of environmental systems but as constituent parts of them (2009). Far from being the stable and inert repositories of toxic byproducts, sinks act as mutable mechanisms that metabolize and transform the waste that accumulates in them as well as the larger scale organic and industrial processes that produce it. Sinks, and the dirt that they collect, contain, transform, and transfer, therefore exist in such a complex dialectic with the natural and cultural systems from which they emerge, that their implication in models that attempt to balance inputs and outputs of, for example, carbon in the atmosphere, becomes highly problematic. In a system that is so variable, how can one establish a condition of balance, let alone recognize it? What are the components being measured and how does one assess a balanced set of relations among them? How can transport be recognized in a field of constant transformation? A better model, Gabrys suggests, deploys Serres’ idea of the parasite as an agent that transforms the system of which it is a part as well as the effluents that the system produces. Such a model may be less exact in a positivist sense, but it is also more accurate in conceptual terms because it correctly accounts for the ‘dirt’ of a system that other models erroneously exclude. Sinks do not remove dirt from a system; they metabolize it back into it, changing both the dirt and the system in the process (Gabrys, 2009). They do this as parasites on the system by analyzing (sequestering), paralyzing (neutralizing), and catalyzing (transforming) the dirt that it produces. Thomas J. Puleo makes a similar argument in his investigation of two earthquakes that struck the Val di Noto in Sicily, one in 1693 and the other in 1990 (Puleo, 2010). He shows how the two earthquakes, which he reads as parasitic disruptions, catalyzed multiple changes to residents’ relations with each other as well as with their natural and built environments. For example, after the 1693 earthquake, citizens rebuilt their towns in a version of Baroque architecture that is unique to the region, a style that combines elements of the Baroque found on the Italian peninsula, but

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in entirely new combinations and configurations. Similarly, the 1990 quake stirred the descendants of these citizens to mount a campaign to restore the crumbling landscapes that their ancestors had built, and then years later to unite across party lines in opposition to an oil company that threatened the newly restored sites, yet another parasitic invasion that triggers an evolution of a system. He uses Serres’ idea of parasite agency to inform a reading of the earthquakes and the events that followed them as agents that disrupt the flow of relations among humans and the environment to produce hybridized landscapes and political alliances. In this way the Sicilian Baroque is both a style of architecture and a mode of social and political mobilization, and earthquakes are phenomena that deliver both negative and positive outcomes by analyzing (sparing), paralyzing (destroying), and catalyzing (mixing) animate and inanimate elements of the landscapes in which they occur (Puleo, 2010). It is an insight that echoes and extends Gabrys’ representation of sinks as mechanisms that mediate nature-culture relations in the discourse on pollution (2009). Javier Lezaun deploys Serres’ parasite model to explicate the complex relations that exist among the cultivators of conventional and genetically modified crops, the bees that pollinate them, the beekeepers that handle the bees, and the legislators that try to regulate them all (2011). Seizing upon Serres’ description of the parasite as the ‘‘uninvited guest,’’ Lezuan details the emergence of the beekeepers as a political force, one that the other players had not expected, but indeed one that was catalyzed by the bees themselves who by nature move equally among conventional and genetically modified crops that legislators try in vain to keep separate (2011: 738). By promiscuously and indiscriminately distributing pollen across the two diverse and politically charged landscapes, bees paralyze the regime of separate fields and catalyze the creation of a new policy that acknowledges and accepts the bees and beekeepers as uninvited but acceptable and even essential residents. Lezaun reveals the transactions among the four agents as a series of exploitations that are so complicated that they destroy the order sought by the farmers, legislators, beekeepers, and even the bees themselves. Conventional understandings of cultural, social, political, economic, and environmental relations fail to provide a model that effectively captures such a complex intersection of discordant needs, proclivities, and intentions. Like Gabrys, Lezaun argues that the parasitic bees drive the growing complexity and sophistication of a politics aimed at regulating a set of relations that is impossible to completely ensnare using standard models both for its mutability and its complexity (Lezaun, 2011). Inevitably, nature always accepts the new system that parasites

Fig. 3. Valtellina cities, towns, and villages. The center area delimited by undulating lines represents the valley floor. Source: Jedediah R. Smith, 2012.

Fig. 4. The 10 zones nominated by ProVinea in its application to the Unesco World Heritage program: 1. Castione Andevenno and Sondrio, 2. Sondrio and Montagna in Valtellina, 3. Sondrio, Montagna in Valtellina and Poggiridenti, 4. Teglio-1, 5. Teglio2, 6. Teglio-3, 7. Bianzone, 8. Bianzone and Villa di Tirano, 9. Villa di Tirano, 10. Tirano. The center area delimited by undulating lines represents the valley floor. Source: Jedediah R. Smith, 2012.

Fig. 5. A group of abandoned terraces in Bratta (Bianzone). Source: T.J. Puleo, 2007.

coax into being; the challenge is to develop a science that models it fully and accurately. My first aim in the discussion that follows is to show a similar parasitizing as ProVinea manipulates the terraced landscapes of the Valtellina in its application to UNESCO World Heritage. Just as sinks, earthquakes, and bees catalyze new understandings of contamination, culture, and cleanliness, ProVinea parasitically catalyzes a new understanding of the Valtellina’s terraced landscapes in its attempt to gain inscription onto UNESCO’s World Heritage list. My second aim is to reinsert some of the landscapes that ProVinea paralyzed into a recatalyzed representation of the terraces that while far from complete, more fully represents them. Whether the driving forces are sinks and dirt, earthquakes and architecture, bees and bureaucrats, or nonprofits and landscapes, Serres’ concept of the parasite offers a model that arranges and elucidates the complex relations between them. To make my empirical argument, I compare two core bodies of documentation: ProVinea’s application to the Italian National Commission for UNESCO (ProVinea, 2005) and a combination of archival and field research which includes a former study of the area (Scaramellini, 1976) and landscape observations of the terraces that I conducted in 2006–2007 and again in 2012 while resident in the Valtellina (Figs. 1–5).

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5. Privileging the DOCG grape ProVinea is a nonprofit organization that was established in 2003 in the town of Sondrio (Fig. 3) under the auspices of the Consorzio di Tutela dei Vini di Valtellina (Consortium to Protect the Wines of the Valtellina). In the application, it claims over 1000 grape cultivators and 100% of wineries among its associates. ProVinea states that its general aim is to unite the groups that have traditionally been at odds with each other: wine grape growers, wineries, and wine research and education centers, all of which it identifies as having diverse but interrelated interests in the wine grape terraces that are located on the valley’s Rhetic slope. It wants to safeguard the Rhetic terraces as well as traditional activities that are associated with them (ProVinea, 2005). So while ProVinea aims to unify the opposing actors of the Valtellina’s wine industry, its focus has always been the Rhetic slope on the north, an emphasis that paradoxically splits the valley in two, as it completely ignores the terraces, whether they were used for wine grape cultivation or not, on the valley’s Orobic slope on the south. Given ProVinea’s explicit interest in the Valtellina’s wine industry, it is not surprising that it privileges the valley’s wine grape terraces and therefore its Rhetic slope, but such a restricted focus greatly limits its declared aim to ‘‘protect and enhance related historical and cultural traditions’’ (ProVinea, 2005: 8). I argue that a more inclusive representation of the Valtellina’s terraced landscapes better represents the historical and cultural traditions of the valley, which grew out of an aggregation of its terraced landscapes. I make a more developed and extensive version of this argument in a monograph on the topic (Puleo, 2012), but in this study my focus is mainly on the spatial parameters of the terraces. ProVinea plans to achieve its goals through two activities. The first is the rehabilitation of terraces on the Rhetic slope as sites of agricultural production, and the second is the promotion of the terraces as historical and cultural landscapes that are sites for tourism. It claims it will realize the first project by attracting and managing public and private donations and investments to fund the rehabilitation work, and the second by applying to UNESCO to inscribe the terraces onto its World Heritage List, the activity that is the focus of this study. I argue that the historical and cultural traditions of the Valtellina, which are of paramount interest to UNESCO World Heritage as activities that give landscapes meaning, are better understood through a wider embrace of the valley’s terraced landscapes. There exists, then, an inherent conflict between ProVinea’s vinocentric representation of the terraces, and its consequent spatial limitations, and its aim to represent the valley’s historical and cultural traditions, a conflict I hope to ameliorate by showing an alternative representation of the terraces that, when added to ProVinea’s representation, makes for a fuller and more complex understanding of not only the Valtellina terraces but also of the traditions of the people who built and used them, although such a hybrid rendering still reveals just a small fraction of the terraces and their significance. In this way, I parasitize ProVinea’s representation of the terraces by analyzing (culling) its designated landscapes, paralyzing (eliminating) its delimiting criteria, and catalyzing (combining) its nominated site with my suggested one. Of course, all representations are reductive by nature, but my claim is that even a highly instrumental project such as World Heritage inscription is better served by a more inclusive approach. ProVinea’s application to World Heritage is impressive, containing 148 pages and listing five authors, each of whom has an academic titles and/or position in a nearby university or professional consulting firm (ProVinea, 2005). The extent to which the cultivators and wineries that ProVinea counts among its members

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participated in the creation of the application or the ideation of the project is not apparent in either the document (ProVinea, 2005) or on the foundation’s website (www.provinea.it). In fairness to ProVinea, the case for the Valtellina terraces as a World Heritage site is not easy to make, as many parts of the landscape do not fit World Heritage’s selection criteria (UNESCO, 2012), including areas surrounding the terraces that have been developed for residential and industrial use since the end of World War II. For this reason, ProVinea cannot nominate the Valtellina’s entire terraced landscape, a difficulty faced by many if not most of the nearly 1000 World Heritage sites, so it must analyze (cull) the desirable, paralyze (eliminate) the objectionable, and catalyze (combine) the preferred into a single property. Here is how it proceeds. ProVinea quickly sets the spatial parameters of the Valtellina terraces at the outset of its application. It first situates the Valtellina administratively within the province of Sondrio, topographically as north of Lake Como, and longitudinally as between the 46 and 46.5 northern parallels. It uses the last coordinate to emphasize the far northerly location of the valley with respect to the practice of viticulture that fares better at more temperate lower latitudes. Immediately the group marks the Valtellina as special because of what it is where it is, the implication being that wine grapes should not grow this well at such high latitudes (ProVinea, 2005). The conundrum makes a good opening gambit. Yet immediately after presenting the Valtellina as the place where grapes should not flourish, ProVinea makes the opposing argument: the Valtellina’s unusual spatial characteristics actually facilitate grape cultivation. The first spatial advantage that the valley has is its southern orientation that allows for maximum sun exposure. The second feature is the protective nature of the Rhetic Alps’ exceptionally high summits and peaks that shield the valley from cold northern air. Third, ProVinea notes the moderating effect of Lake Como, which modulates both temperature and humidity. And fourth, the lower Orobic Alps to the south enclose the valley, forming a kind of amphitheater, a word that immediately imparts to the valley a sense of ancient anthropogenic origins, nicely setting the stage for the theme that lies at the base of ProVinea’s argument that the Valtellina is a hybrid space: half-human, half-nature, and heroic for having achieved the union. After this introduction, ProVinea closes in in on its target, the valley’s terraced vineyards, which it locates almost entirely on the Rhetic slope between the elevations of 300–700 m, the zone where wine grapes grow best (Zoia, 2004). With the setting of a few key dimensions, ProVinea restricts its representation of the terraces to a relatively thin strip of land located on one side of the valley and at its lower elevations. The group wants to define the area even more concisely, however, so it gives the strip beginning and end points: Morbegno to the west and Tirano to the east, a distance of 60 km in a valley that extends over 100 km as measured from Lake Como at its western end to the city of Bormio at its northeastern tip (ProVinea, 2005). Even with these reduced dimensions, the selected site still measures 5250 ha. Of this amount ProVinea estimates that only 1250 ha contain high quality wine grapes of three ascending grades: Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT), Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC), and Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG), shrinking the space even more. It further reduces these 1250 ha by eliminating the zones planted with IGT grapes, leaving only terraces that bear the two higher grades: DOC and DOCG. The best grapes, ProVinea notes, grow where the valley runs absolutely parallel to the equator in the section of the valley that extends from Ardenno to Tirano. This delimiter shortens the total length of the parcel to 45 km in length and approximately 950 ha in area (ProVinea, 2005). ProVinea carves Serres’ white domino from the chaotic aggregate, if not for the first time.

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This parcel represents the three aspects of the Valtellina that ProVinea contends warrant World Heritage status. The first is the exceptional combination of what it classifies as natural properties: water, soil, and the terrace system. The second is the progression of social and cultural developments that perfectly adapted the particularities of the valley’s natural conditions: its northerly location and the steepness of its slopes. The third element is the method of constructing the terraces using dry stone walls to retain the soil on the face of the slope (ProVinea, 2005). ProVinea’s analyzing and paralyzing of space is highly efficient. The group claims that the process individuates the sites that bear the greatest historical, cultural, environmental, and economic value. ProVinea claims its goal is to select the landscapes that represent the uniqueness of the Valtellina’s terraced vineyards, a statement that teems with the irony of the ambivalent parasite that is both destructive and constructive in its actions. After ProVinea defines the candidate area’s external limits, it addresses its internal features. The group divides this next process according to two sets of criteria: those considered and those selected. The first category contains 19 criteria that reduce the terraces to their most fundamental form. The first criterion states that the selected area must be an ecosystem that interacts with the woods and anthropomorphized areas that border it, a representation of the terraces as a hybridized but not quite synthesized system of human and natural components. This is distinct from a purely natural wood that bears no trace of human intervention, and purely human areas that derive from a less organic method of construction than the stones, earth, and plants that comprise the terraces (ProVinea, 2005). Other criteria stipulate the purity of the terraces’ natural elements while others call for cultural authenticity. ProVinea views negatively spaces that contain elements such as cement, inhabited (but not abandoned) residential structures, roads built by local or provincial agencies, and telecommunication and electrical towers. The group accepts trees only if they serve as a decorative border and do not intrude into the vineyards themselves (ProVinea, 2005). Criteria that highlight cultural elements unfold along similar lines. Whereas roads built by government agencies detract from the naturalness of the landscape, roads built to facilitate pedestrian access into the vineyards, especially if they contain dry stone walls, enhance the project. ProVinea especially favors spaces that contain ‘‘sovraumano’’ (superhuman or heroic) elements such as terraces constructed at unusually high elevations or in areas that were particularly difficult to access (ProVinea, 2005). Still other criteria are of a more instrumental nature. Evidence of rehabilitative work already underway is positive. Zones located within economically thriving communities emerge as favorites because their infrastructures would allow them to take advantage of the tourist traffic that terrace rehabilitation would attract. Terraced areas that require too much investment of capital and labor are to be avoided. Finally, the contours of the spaces, as well as their entrances and exits, need to be made clearly visible through the use of existing valleys, gullies, creeks, streams, monuments, pathways, and roads that act as borders (ProVinea, 2005). ProVinea’s selected criteria were even more precise. Each terraced site could not be smaller than 10 ha. It had to be cultivated over at least 80% of its surface with no more than 10% of each site being abandoned, ruined by landslides, wooded, paved by communal or provincial roads, occupied by residential structures, planted with private gardens, or used for any nonagricultural purpose. Finally, only spaces with walls that were 90% stone by sight were acceptable. The final result of ProVinea’s parasitic analysis, paralysis, and catalysis is a collection of 10 discreet sites comprising 250 ha in total, with all of them bearing only DOCG grapes (Fig. 4).

6. More than DOCG ProVinea’s representation of the Valtellina terraces and vineyards includes a small fraction of both landscapes. I say ‘both landscapes’ because not all terraces were used to cultivate grapes and not all vineyards were terraced. Appropriately, the full and official title of ProVinea’s nomination is: La zona dei vigneti terrazzati del versante Retico della Valtellina come Patrimonio Modiale dell’UNESCO (The Zone of Terraced Vineyards on the Rhetic Slope of the Valtellina as a UNESCO World Heritage Site) (ProVinea, 2005). By ‘zone’ ProVinea means the 10 noncontiguous DOCG terraced vineyard spaces on the Rhetic slope that it culled and combined (analyzed and catalyzed) to make its candidate. Like many World Heritage properties, ProVinea’s parasitized site can be engaged only as an abstraction because it eliminates (paralyzes) the spaces that fall in between and outside of the 10 spaces that comprise it and because the 10 now-dispersed sites must be aggregated together conceptually into one property (Fig. 4). Taken together, they form ProVinea’s white domino that they hope will slip easily into the World Heritage list. ProVinea’s paralyzation of terraced landscape also paralyzes the historical and cultural activities they support or once supported, an act that conceptually weakens their authenticity and integrity, two qualities that weigh heavily in UNESCO World Heritage’s evaluation process, but which in practice is quite common and often ineluctable, a paradox that World Heritage’s site evaluation committee, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), adjudicates on its behalf (UNESCO, 2012). In my analysis, I focus on three of the spaces that ProVinea paralyzes: the Orobic side of the valley, private as opposed to commercial spaces, and abandoned spaces. Not only do these three types of terrace space describe the majority of terraced landscapes in the Valtellina (particularly the abandoned spaces), but they also round out ProVinea’s nomination to make it more representative of the terraced space that was and continues to be the home of the Valtellina’s residents. Even in cases where the spatial type represents only a small part of the valley’s terraced landscape space (private gardens, for example), I argue just as strongly for its inclusion in any representation of the Valtellina terraces, favoring the inclusive and irregular aggregate over the exclusive and processed spectacle. Through my discussion that follows, I reinsert these spaces into the portrait that ProVinea drew to create a more complete and complex image of the valley, one that I argue represents the valley’s historical and cultural traditions more broadly and faithfully if at the same more problematically for a project aimed at World Heritage inscription, a dynamic that identifies the UNESCO program as the next player in the parasitic chain, the larger and more nurturing host that ProVinea seeks to enter. There is no doubt that the Rhetic slope bore and continues to bear more terraces than the Orobic side and that ProVinea has good reason to celebrate them. Nevertheless, it is also true that landholders terraced a considerable part of the Orobic slope and planted it with grapevines, including areas that are still maintained and productive and should be included in a representation aimed at protecting and enhancing the Valtellina’s historical and cultural traditions. To demonstrate this, I draw examples from the Media Valtellina during the period that spans from 1880 to 1970. These are the parameters of a map of land use change published by Guglielmo Scaramellini as part of a survey of problems in the mountains of Lombardy, with the Media Valtellina serving as his case study. He punctuates this period with three instances of data analysis: 1880, 1935, and 1970 (Scaramellini, 1976). The survey reveals two large areas and many smaller plots on the Orobic slope devoted to grapevine cultivation at some point during the 90-year period. One of these areas lies between the Orobic Mountains and the Adda River and is bordered to the west by a

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strip of scrubland and to the east by the southward-curving Adda. The triangular tract, which was completely planted with vines in 1880, contains approximately 50 ha and ranges in elevation from 362 m near the riverbank to 470 m at the base of the mountain. Rising approximately 100 m in elevation over 1000 m in distance, the parcel rises approximately 10°, a gradient that did not require terracing but still supported vines. It encompasses the districts of Crotti, Camerati, Caselli, San Sebastiano, and Falcioni in the village of Cavallaro (Fig. 3). Being on the southern side of the Adda at the base of the looming Orobic range, it did not receive the long and intense solar radiation that made the Rhetic slope so conducive to wine grape production. Although converted into meadow or overgrown by scrub and other ligneous vegetation by 1935, it was once a zone of wine grape production (Scaramellini, 1976). Also by 1935, 21 much smaller plots measuring no more than a hectare or two were scattered westward across Cavallaro, along with a handful of residences. Further up the slope and to the west lie two more concentrations of vineyards. These arrive at considerably higher elevations, Castello dell’Acqua at more than 600 m and Briotti at more than 1000 m, each of these locales containing two or three single-hectare vineyards on grades that were steep enough to have necessitated some terracing (Fig. 3). A few residences exist nearby, the rest of the land being given to scrub or pasture (Scaramellini, 1976). The other large parcel lies approximately 10 km east in Stazzona, a district of Villa di Tirano (Fig. 3). A number of vineyards cluster around the main residential center. The total terraced area in 1880 amounted to no more than a few single-hectare plots. The vineyard landscapes of 1935 extended farther, measuring approximately three to four times the original 1880 footprint. By 1970 they had exploded in size as terraces were constructed on 100 ha of land immediately adjacent to the first cultivation, extending as high as 800 m over very steep terrain, particularly at the higher elevations (Scaramellini, 1976). What drove the transformation of this large parcel of rugged wooded terrain into a terraced vineyard? One factor was its position in relation to the sun. Unlike Briotti and Castello dell’Acqua, which sit on the perfectly lateral portion of the Media Valtellina, Stazzona, lies well beyond the forty-five degree turn northward that the valley takes at Teglio, granting it greater sun exposure. The vineyards at Briotti and Castello dell’Acqua have long since returned to wild vegetation, but the vineyards in the eastern part of Stazzona still produce quality grapes, despite the difficulties posed by their extremely steep terracing (Scaramellini, 1976). An investigation into the human factors that drove this development would yield important insights into the development of terraced wine grape cultivation in the late twentieth century. Many other smaller vineyard plots that Scaramellini recorded in the 1935 census but which disappeared by 1970 must be mentioned. Corna and Crespinedo, trans-Adda districts of Teglio which each lie along a separate tributary, held a half-dozen vineyards that measured 1 ha or smaller (Fig. 3). Two larger plots of 2 or 3 ha each existed in Motta, a district of Villa di Tirano, a few kilometers to the east. Finally, two small grapevine fields stood on the road from Cavallaro to Carona, one closer to the large 1880 vineyard but much higher on the Orobic slope at approximately 700 m, and the other closer to Carona at about 1100 m (Scaramellini, 1976). The proliferation of plots that are smaller than 10-ha indicates that ProVinea excluded terraced landscapes that were integral to the valley’s historic wine trade and fundamental to its historical and cultural traditions. Added all together the total area on the Orobic side of the Valtellina that was planted with wine grapes during some period in the Media Valtellina, within Scaramellini’s study area, arrives at approximately 200 ha. At least half of this area is the very steep and intensively terraced section of Stazzona. Measured against

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the estimated 1250 ha of DOCG, DOC, and IGT grapes estimated by ProVinea to exist on the Rhetic side, the Orobic figure is not at all insignificant. The number is even more impressive when held against the reduced figure of 850 ha that represent only DOCG and DOC grapes, and nearly equal when compared to the 250 ha that make ProVinea’s final selection. And these figures do not count the unknown number of terraces that were abandoned and reclaimed by the forest and brush before the first survey in 1880, a date that occurs 80 years after the departure of the Grisons, the group that developed wine grape cultivation to its greatest extent during the period when they ruled the Valtellina, from 1512 to 1797 (Head, 1995). Given the severe decline of the valley’s wine industry following the Grisons’ departure (Zoia, 2004), one can reasonably assume that a considerable number of vineyards were abandoned and disappeared well before 1880. Of course, it would be difficult to determine what percentage of the 100 extant hectares in Stazzona would meet ProVinea’s selection criteria, and certainly the now-overgrown plots would be excluded from consideration because of the poor prospects they offer for a potential tourist industry. Since I am arguing for the inclusion of all terraces and all vineyards as bearers of the valley’s historical and cultural traditions, however, Rhetic as well as Orobic, any kind of measure of this sort is irrelevant. Every landscape has its story to tell, and I argue that those that are on the Orobic side were and are just as ‘heroic’ as any on the Rhetic side, perhaps even more so for the natural disadvantage of the comparatively poor solar radiation they received that made their development all the more difficult. ProVinea also excludes private space. While it is true that the livello, the usufruct contract commonly used in the Valtellina throughout much of its history, generally favored the landholders, it also constrained the ways in which they used their plots. Clauses against growing crops other than wine grapes were common features in contracts for terraced vineyards on the Rhetic side where landowners were eager to maximize wine production. This was true even though an increase in harvest did not cause a corresponding increase in rent paid to the owner, which remained fixed and unaffected by the varying yields of annual harvests. Yet because landowners were also often involved in the wine trade, maximizing grape production by dictating land use was in their best interests. Ground crops, such as grain or vegetables that were cultivated between the vine rows, reduced grape yields by blocking sunlight, diverting water, and attracting pests – in other words, other parasites that were not wanted. They also interfered with the harvest by impeding the motions of cultivators. The rearing of livestock was another activity that was commonly prohibited. Goats, sheep, cows, and pigs ruined vineyards and harvests by eating or trampling vines and fruit (Palestra, 2010; Montaldo, 1995). Deputized sorveglianti delle vigne (guards of the vineyards) denied all access to agricultural terraces during the period just before harvest, even to the plot holders themselves, to prevent them from poaching the highest quality grapes (Marconi, 1990). ProVinea’s restriction of private gardens to 10% of the total area of each of the 10 official spaces echoes the restrictions imposed by landowners on landholders in centuries past, particularly the highly-efficient Grisons (Head, 1995). The private use of the terraces to raise products for home consumption was an important hedge against grape crop failure, as well as a way to remain independent of the cash economy, which was dynamic but volatile. Whatever landholders could cultivate for their own use reduced what they had to buy, a move that mimics that of the country mouse who prefers to take his chestnuts directly from the tree. Once a cultivator secured a piece of land through a livello contract, self-sufficiency through one’s own labor offered the greatest security. Even today virtually all households continue to grow vegetable gardens. Also present are patches of chicory or other fast-growing crops scattered throughout the terraced vineyards.

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One resident I spoke with remarked approvingly on a vegetable garden set in a run of terraces that had been cleared of vines to make room for a dozen heads of cabbage, as it was characteristic of the person who owned and worked the land. The private garden was well ensconced in one of the most prestigious of ProVinea’s selected DOCG sites in Bianzone and easily fit into the 10% privateuse allotment. Whether it ruined the pretty picture set by row after row of orderly grapevines or was one of the more charming parts of that particular landscape is a matter of opinion. ProVinea supports the inclusion of private gardens as they bear witness to one of the valley’s traditional land uses, but its restriction of them mimics that of the Grisons, whose administration was as punishing as it was dynamic, a duplicity that is characteristic of the ambivalent and ambitious parasite. The irony of this position is worth noting, as is duplicity of the cultivators who, far from being helpless victims, used parasitic strategies of their own, such as harvesting the grapes surreptitiously to sell or use outside of the terms of their contracts (Zoia, 2004). Finally, I take up abandoned spaces. In the 1950s landowners began giving up work in their terraces to devote their time to more lucrative activities that were newly available with economic development following the war (Zoia, 2004). Property taxes in Italy are low and do not represent a disincentive to most families to retain inherited property that has been handed down to them. So for cultural as well as economic reasons, most landowners tend to hold onto property even if they do nothing with it. Even if the property contains inhabitable residential structures a landowner is discouraged from leasing them due to laws that make evicting even a nonpaying tenant difficult. Today, terraced vineyards in the Valtellina are not even leasable for a fee; landowners simply grant a tenant-farmer access to a property simply to have someone maintain its dry stone retaining walls so as to lessen the likelihood of a catastrophic landslide (Spada, 1995). When this is not possible, owners leave terraces to become overgrown by the encroaching forests that surround them (Fig. 5). The intertwining roots penetrate the soil and weave through the gaps that are left between the stones of the retaining walls, thus providing a level of stability that is equal, if not superior, to the work of a cultivator (Rapella, 1995). The abandoned sites imbue the landscape with a poignancy and beauty that is absent in the maintained terraces. Kilometers of stonewalls that now snake through dense hillside stands of larch and pine, the thick courses of stones conspicuous for their lack of utility and seemingly out of place, tell a ghostly and enthralling story. And yet at one time their presence was eminently sensible and useful. The abandoned terraces represent a stage of the local landscape history that was as valid and rational as the terraces that are still used to produce wine grapes. The same logical minds that guided the original construction and use of the terraces under social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that favored them also decided on their abandonment when those conditions changed (Torricelli, 1995). They, too, have an important and interesting tale to tell, one that is as representative of the Valtellina’s historical and cultural traditions as those told by the still vigorous and productive grapevine terraces that ProVinea privileges in its World Heritage application.

7. Conclusion ProVinea parasitizes the valley’s terraces by analyzing, paralyzing, and catalyzing them to create a new form of property that becomes its nomination to UNESCO World Heritage. In doing so, it demonstrates the ambivalent, serial, and transformative nature of the parasite in which it both takes from the host above it, which is the Valtellina, and plays host to the parasite below it, which is UNESCO, to facilitate a cascade of goods that structures and

animates our systems (Serres, 2007). In this way, it acts like the city mouse in Aesop’s tale that invites the country mouse to dine on a meal it did not make but which it transforms into its own. This manipulative method is a common feature of other World Heritage properties, so ProVinea’s approach does not challenge the rules that regulate a property’s authenticity and integrity (UNESCO, 2012). In fact, World Heritage easily accepts such a transformation of a candidate property. Playing the parasite myself, I argue that ProVinea’s representation omits more than it contains, however, so I demonstrate how terraces are found on both the Orobic and Rhetic slopes, under private as well as commercial cultivation, and also in abandoned form. The still extant and extensive vineyard of Stazzona on the valley’s Orobic side as well its numerous smaller plots, the small private garden plot in Bianzone, and the relict vineyard landscapes located throughout the valley, testify to a broader diffusion and more diverse spatiality of terrace cultivation as it once was and indicate to some extent its condition as it is now. My manipulations serve a purpose that is similar to ProVinea’s while at the same time challenging it: I aim to transform the representation of the terraces by analyzing, paralyzing, and catalyzing it. The landscapes that I in effect insert into ProVinea’s application might not be the most positive and optimistic representations of the valley’s historic landscapes, particularly its wine industry, but they were integral to the formation of the valley’s historical and cultural traditions and are essential to understanding their evolution as well as the evolution of the landscapes themselves. Since the second of ProVinea’s two goals is to protect and enhance the historical and cultural traditions that were and still are associated with the Valtellina’s terraced landscapes, the inclusion of a broader sampling of the terraces in its nomination would have enhanced the overall project of historical and cultural valorization that lies at the heart of the World Heritage program. Parasites do not produce things. Production is the province of nature, the ultimate host that never parasites anything and is the ultimate source of the goods of the universe that sustain all other agents within it. Parasites are instead translators who catalyze new forms by analyzing, paralyzing, and catalyzing old ones, a dynamic that Gabrys (2009), Lezaun (2011), and Puleo (2010) demonstrate in other contexts. As translators, however, parasites are also traitors (Brown, 2002). The Italian expression traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor) neatly captures this paradoxical relation. ProVinea had to translate the Valtellina terraces to make them viable candidates for UNESCO World Heritage, but in so doing it also had to betray the fullness of their historical development and use by not representing them in their entirety, an impossible task in any context. Appropriately to a discussion that involves the transformation of history into heritage, the words traduttore and the traditore both derive from the Latin tra¯ditio, which means to hand over, as in an idea from one language to another or a secret from one state to another. Here is the parasite’s double agency explained. As the mediator between past and present, ProVinea translates the terraces to fit World Heritage’s standard but also betrays their full nature. As both the useful translator and the abusive traitor, the ambivalent parasite, who as host–parasite is really a single link in the cascading chain of goods, disrupts the system of terraces and forces it to evolve from historic to heritage landscape. Whether this transformation actually develops completely depends upon other host–parasites located further down the chain. To tell the story of parasitized terraces is to tell a version of the most fundamental story of the earth in which ecology, the logos of the oikos, or the logic of the natural environment, becomes economy, the nomos of the oikos, or the normatized relations of the natural world as they have been changed by human agency. Economy in this sense is the logic of the natural world that has been transformed to suit the needs and desires of human beings. The oikos

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