THE WISDOM OF THE FLIES. SOCIETY, ENVIRONMENT, AND METABOLIC JUSTICE IN RURAL SARDINIA.

This PhD thesis in Environmental Anthropology explores the mutually reinforcing effects of industrialised food production on humans, nonhumans, and their environments. To do so, it employs the ethnographic data collected over the course of a 12-month fieldwork in Barbagia, rural Sardinia, by living and working alongside local shepherds. It adds a socioecological analysis to the political economy of Southern Europe, showing how changes in the economic/political landscape provoked transformations in people’s subjectivities, and the withering of the local social and ecological fabric. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the diffusion of industrialised foodstuffs and their replacement of traditional foods not only jeopardised food sovereignty but also produced dramatically different bodies and embodied capacities for both humans and nonhumans. In this way, by showing how my interlocutors fostered a form of metabolic justice in their environment, this thesis presents it as a key tool to assess, preserve, and reproduce collective continuance in a local ecology; similarly, shepherding lifeways in Barbagia and the more-than-human food sovereignty they entail are shown as a force of reproduction for said environment. Finally, it describes metabolism as a process preceding the formation of individual bodies, and indeed founding the possibility for said bodies to emerge in a given environment: through the constant exchange of meat, fluids, and inorganic matter, living and non-living entities emerge as precipitates of a broader connectivity unevenly linking foods, bodies, communities, and ecologies.