| Abstrakt: |
This article explores the evolving concept of terroir, broadly understood today to designate a grouping of territories within a region that yield one or more characteristic food products or wine. Through a case study of sheep's milk cheese made in the western French Pyrenees, my analysis moves beyond contemporary articulations of terroir, which are described here as the promotional, the scientific, and the culturally constructed. I show that Pyrenean landscapes linked to sheep's milk cheese are the product of historical and ecological shifts that have joined human consumption to community regulations, structures of property ownership, fire, livestock, flora, and soil profiles. Such a view neither romanticizes terroir nor renders it static; more than a cultural construction, Pyrenean terroir emerges as contingent and, at times, unstable. Furthermore, the twentieth-century history of sheep raising and sheep's milk cheese production in the western Pyrenees reveals the dramatic short-term changes in terroir that have resulted in the wake of demographic and economic mutations. By the early twenty-first century, however, Pyrenean pastoralism in the service of sheep's milk cheese had emerged as a beacon of sustainability, illustrating both long-term continuities and a turn away from the twentieth-century norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
