Establishing nationhood through heritage landscapes: Bear biopolitics in the Catalan Pyrenees

This chapter discusses connections between national identity, wildlife conservation, rural development, and landscape politics in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain). Conflict around the reintroduction of the brown bear to the Pyrenees works as a starting point to examine how landscapes both shape and are shaped by nation-building practices, conservation, and local debates on rural development. Through the prism of Foucault’s conception of biopower, the authors analyse how shepherding has been revitalized as a cultural symbol which creates unstable consensuses within an area of growing tensions associated with the political management of both wild and farmed nonhuman animals.