Eating Rocks: Multi-scale confluence of industrial expansion and mobile labour in an alpine extractive industry

Stone extraction in the Trentino province’s Italian Alps has witnessed various phases of industrial development during the past century, growing from commons with community based rights of use, to a hierarchical constellation of enterprises in an Industrial District model that exported half of the extracted material in global markets linked to the construction economy. Different industrial periods have been characterized by different modes of workforce inclusion. Natives, internal migrants from southern Italy and more recent international ones experienced differently structured ways of emplacement. Differentiated structures of opportunities in which those pathways of inclusion have been rendered possible also meant different modalities of contentious positioning in the relationship between capital and labor, with special reference to the processes of workforce externalization. Social and economic unevenness and inequality and their combined nature have concretized in the locality at the confluence of a need to expand extractive production for international demand of building material, and the increase in international migrations towards Italy. A new wave of dispossession in the alpine district, begun with the Great Recession of 2008, opened a new phase of economic collapse in the locality that caused a realignment of those structures that is still under way. This paper is to be intended as an initial inquiry at the beginning of a social anthropology PhD research that will look at the modalities of emplacement of both mobile and local labor in the locality with the explicit avoidance of the use of an ethnic lens or methodological nationalism.