How to inherit an »old« mountain? Scholars studying environmental justice point out that indigenous heritage and biodiversity conservation belong to the same battleground. And yet inheritance also involves a decision about what form of value is deemed worthy of passing on and what should be left in the past. Read this way, the goal of »continuing to live« always becomes a question of deciding whose life needs to be saved and how. Against this background, this study combines archival data and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the changes in the practices of pastoralists in the Balkan Mountains from the socialist to the post-socialist period. While they were almost wiped out in the days of “revolutionary” ecology, today indigenous breeds of sheep and cattle are proving to be important means of survival on largely depopulated land. Thus, they call for bringing together the stories of intergenerational violence and cross-species care in a single framework.

Ivan Rajković, a Postdoc University Assistant at the University of Vienna, is a social anthropologist with interests in political ecology, moral economy, and multispecies relations. Ivan completed his PhD at the University of Manchester and worked as a postdoc at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Ivan’s first research project, The Gift of Labour, dealt with the politics of deindustrialization and unemployment after Yugoslav socialism. His current project, How to Inherit a Mountain, focuses on the energy transition, environmental conflicts, and multispecies relations in the Balkan Mountains. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he explores the way »life« becomes universalised in ecopopulist rebellion, as well the way that forms other than capital – such as livestock – come to determine human relations across longer periods of time.