Pastoralism in Central Sardinia

">5: thesis describes the social organisation of shepherding in a hill community, of 3500 inhabitants in central Sardinia. Its focus is on the consequences of the two major changes in the pastoral economy of the late 19th century: the conversion of public land into private property and the establishment of the dairy-processing industry in Sardinia. The landowners of the village were enabled to reinforce their dominant position and to draw shepherds into a network of patronage ties based on the access to land and the marketing of livestock produce. Among shepherds themselves new relations of solidarity and conflict were created in the countryside. The community became more rigidly stratified. These consequences are contrasted with the effects of the same changes among the villages of the central highlands of Sardinia where transhumant shepherds became more geographically and socially mobile. Relations set up in the course of this century between the shepherds of different communities are illustrated in the practice of livestock-rustling which constitutes at the same time a mode of prosecution of conflict in one community and an opportunity for capital accumulation by outsiders