Renegotiating situativity: transformations of local herbal knowledge in a Western Alpine valley during the past 40 years.

The findings show a renegotiation of the situativity that for centuries forged the embeddedness of local communities in their natural environments, probably heavily informed in the past by prevalent pastoralist and forest-centred activities and thus by a deeper knowledge of higher mountain and forest environments. The re-arrangement of a more domestic and more "globalized" herbal knowledge system was possibly inspired by new urban residents, who started to populate the valley at the end of the Seventies, when the original inhabitants abandoned their homes for the urban centres of the Piedmontese plain. The current study suggests that future directions of ethnobiological research should more carefully look at the adaptive capacity of LEK systems.