Listening Section 4: Note & Table Completion: Question 7

Transcript-based practice (no audio).

Lecturer: This week we're turning to transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock between two distinct grazing areas, typically a lowland winter pasture and a highland summer pasture. Anthropologists have long been interested in transhumance not just as a farming technique, but as a social system that shapes kinship, land rights, and community identity.

The practice has existed for thousands of years, but some of the best-documented modern case studies come from the Pyrenees, on the border between France and Spain, where entire villages still organise their yearly calendar around the movement of sheep and cattle to high mountain pastures each summer.

One of the central anthropological questions is how access to shared pasture is regulated without a formal legal deed to the land. Fieldwork in the region has shown that grazing rights are typically inherited through the male line, passed down within extended family groups, and disputes are usually settled not in court but by a locally elected pasture committee.

The seasonal move itself, often called the "transhumance," usually takes place over roughly two weeks each way, with herders walking the flock along traditional droving routes that in some valleys are centuries old and are legally protected from development.

Now, one figure worth noting: a survey conducted across three Pyrenean valleys found that the number of families still practising full transhumance had fallen from around four hundred in the 1960s to fewer than sixty today, a decline of more than eighty-five percent.

Why the steep drop? Researchers point to three main factors. First, younger generations increasingly move to cities for education and employment, breaking the chain of skills passed from parent to child. Second, rising land prices in lowland valleys have made it more profitable to sell winter pasture for holiday housing than to keep it for livestock. Third, and perhaps most significantly, EU agricultural subsidies were, for many years, calculated in a way that favoured large, sedentary farms over small mobile herds, though this policy has recently been revised.

Despite the decline, there's renewed interest from an unexpected source: rural tourism. Several valleys now run guided "transhumance walks," inviting visitors to accompany the herders for a day, generating income that is helping a handful of young families return to the practice.

I'll be posting the reading list for next week's seminar, which focuses on comparable pastoral systems in the Atlas Mountains, on the course page.

Complete the notes below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

TRANSHUMANCE: LECTURE NOTES

Location of case studies

• Region discussed today: the 1 __________
• Villages there move livestock to 2 __________ pastures each summer

Land & inheritance

• Grazing rights are usually inherited through the 3 __________ line
• Disputes are settled by a locally elected 4 __________

The seasonal move

• Each leg of the move takes about 5 __________
• Old droving routes are legally protected from 6 __________

Decline in numbers

• Families still practising fell from around 400 in the 1960s to fewer than 7 __________ today
• One driver of the decline: rising 8 __________ prices in lowland valleys

New trend

• Tourism income now comes from guided 9 __________