Exploring Biocultural Networks: Participatory Processes and Practices in Rural Sardinian Landscapes

This dissertation explores how biocultural participatory approaches can support community reconnection to landscapes and traditional knowledge in rural Sardinia. Biocultural networks—the entangled relationships between people, places, and more-than-human entities—encompass material elements (drystone walls, trails, flora and fauna) and intangible dimensions (seasonal rhythms, craft knowledge, place names, embodied practices) constituting agrosilvopastoral landscapes. Through multi-sited research combining workshops at La Giara di Genoni (October 2023) and Porto Conte Park (June 2024) with four seasonal gatherings in Semestene (January–November 2025), the study investigates how communities perceive, know, and act within these networks, in dialogue with biocultural and decolonial scholarship and epistemological traditions emerging from within Sardinia itself. The framework operates through three mutually constitutive dimensions: perception (embodied experience through walking, working, inhabiting; memory across scales from immediate sensory experience to geologic durations), knowledge (place-based understanding transmitted through storytelling and embodied practice), and agency (collective action through material practice and sustained collaboration). Fieldwork illuminates constellations of communal land-based practices—participatory mapping, storytelling, wool processing, drystone construction, natural dyeing. Four themes emerged: memory as profound link connecting perception, knowledge, and agency, with critical distinction between verbal memory and embodied memory reactivated through material engagement; celebration and ritual as necessary temporal infrastructure; collectivity spanning human cooperation and multispecies kinship; and relationality revealing where ruptures occur and where intervention is possible. Brief workshops and extended engagement serve complementary functions: intensive encounters surface tensions and initiate relationships, while sustained practice reactivates dormant knowledge and builds collaborative capacity. Fundamental tensions persist around generational transmission, economic viability, and what motivates engagement when traditional livelihoods diminish. Supporting regenerative local futures requires sustained commitment to conditions where reinterpreted traditional practices constitute meaningful contributions to contemporary livelihoods—creating reasons for communities to come together across seasons to celebrate the land and each other.