Pugliese Olive Oil: A Multigenerational Flow of Growing and Making

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To care for olive oil in Puglia is to live and work within a dense ecology of relations between plants and people, atmospheres and rhythms. It is to be attuned to cycles that are not linear but layered, not fixed but flowing. This photo essay explores how traditions of olive oil are cultivated through flow—not merely as movement, but as a lived and situated condition in which people, plants, and practices are entangled across generations.

Flow was the central concept in my doctoral thesis, developed through long-term fieldwork with olive culturalists in southern Puglia, Italy. I used it to understand how olive oil is not only made but occurs, as the emergent outcome of multigenerational practices of living landscape. Flow, as I use it, refers to conditions that structure possibility: an ecology of movement shaped by material, temporal, and affective dynamics. In Pugliese olive culture, flow describes how plants grow and oils become made, but also how bodies move and landscapes shift, as traditions of olivicoltura are lived through everyday practice and deep time ecologies of care.

Flow is not automatic but cultivated through sensory work, embodied knowledge, and seasonal attentiveness. In early spring, for instance, la potatura (pruning) begins. This is not merely maintenance; it is making trees and growing oil, a concept adapted from Stephanie Bunn, who explores blurred boundaries between growing and making, and how humans and nonhumans co-shape form and meaning. In Puglia, pruning is a form of co-creation. Practitioners understand the ordine—the growth zones of the trees—and cut to enhance future fruiting. As Giorgio, an agronomist and first-level taster, told me while sketching pruning principles in my notebook: “Non ce ne sono olive buone senza di cura e coltivazione dell’umano” (There are no good olives without human care and cultivation). Yet care is not control, but a practiced sensitivity to how olive plants behave over time.

Olive oil flows from these plant–human collaborations. In autumn, harvest begins. Olives are collected using various techniques—combing, shaking, hitting—each chosen according to oil makers’ preferences and desired quality. The resulting oil is a condensation of atmospheres, intentions, and rhythms. Whether made through the tecnica tradizionale with stone wheels or through the streamlined metodo moderno, the process is deeply crafted, situated in a landscape of cultivated flows.

A worker trims pruned olive branches on the ground amid centuries-old olive trees under a dramatic cloudy sky in southern Italy. The scene captures seasonal rhythms of care and cultivation.

Credit: Elin Linder

Pruning Olive Trees: Springtime pruning begins not with cutting but with reading the plant. Practitioners understand l’ordine—the growth zones—and shape the canopy to enhance future fruiting. Pruning is both care and creation: an act of making the plant growing tree and crafting oil.

Flow, however, is not always smooth or life-giving. The outbreak of Xylella fastidiosa, a vector-transmitted bacterium that disrupts the vascular systems of olive trees, set off a destructive flow that stall or reroute many others. Transmitted from tree to tree, it spreads like a slow bleed across Puglia, causing millions of groves to desiccate.

An olive harvester stands in a raised mechanical lift, reaching into the branches of a large olive tree, while another worker harvests olives from below. Green nets spread across the ground to collect falling olives.

Credit: Elin Linder

Harvesting Tranquilla: Harvest unfolds with the calm attunement of tranquilla, a local rhythm not just of pace but of value. Bodies move with trees, not against them, as combs, nets, and gestures gather fruit from branch to earth.

Yet even in these withered terrains, new movements take shape. Farmers graft resistant cultivars onto old rootstock, experiment with planting densities, and forge connections across agricultural and scientific networks. This too is flow—disrupted, rechanneled, but ongoing. As Tim Ingold reminds us, making is never solely human but unfolds through lines of correspondence between beings, materials, and environments.

Close-up of a worker’s hands sorting out green and purple olives mixed with leaves after harvest. The work highlights the tactile labor and care in olive oil production.

Credit: Elin Linder

Sorting Olives Post-Harvest: Sorting by hand, makers separate the fruit from excessive material. This tactile labor refines flow, transforming raw materials into intention. Oil begins here, in attention and touch.

Here, flow meets friction, in Anna Tsing’s sense: the awkward, unequal, and generative encounters across difference that make movement possible, but never smooth. The spread of Xylella, and the human and nonhuman responses it elicits, are shaped in frictions between old and new cultivars, between science and situated knowledge, between grieving loss and experimenting with continuity. These are spaces where destruction and care converge—where flow is not only ecological, but ethical, political, and always partial.

A close-up of stacked iron weights and pressing mats soaked in olive paste and oil during traditional pressing. Green liquid drips, evoking older methods of extraction still used in small-scale production.

Credit: Elin Linder

Traditional Mill: In the tecnica tradizionale, heavy weights and hydraulic presses extract oil. The sound, smell, and motion recall centuries of practice, oil made not only with tools but with time.

Throughout my fieldwork, I came to understand this care as not only directed at plants but practiced with them. Drawing on Enrique Salmón, I use the notion of kincentric ecology to describe how growers in Puglia live among olive trees not as resources but as relatives. These relationships are rhythmic, atmospheric, and attuned to weather, soil, light, and memory. One such rhythm is tranquilla, a local sensibility I learned especially through harvesting and pruning, but also by being together while undertaking this work. Tranquilla is not just a tempo but a value—a practice of moving with the landscape.

Inside an olive oil mill, a worker in a blue coat and green cap holds a plastic cup beneath the spout of a modern centrifuge as vivid green oil flows out. He prepares to taste the freshly pressed oil, linking sensory experience to technical process.

Credit: Elin Linder

Modern Centrifuge: The metodo moderno separates oil with streamlined speed, yet tradition flows here, too. Makers adjust the process for taste, smell, and feel, refining flow through calibrated intimacy.

Traditions in Puglia are not held in place; they flow. Shaped by markets, climate, and generational change, they endure not by resisting change but by carrying it. As this photo essay shows, olive oil is a living tradition.

In a Pugliese olive grove, ancient trees stand desiccated, their branches dried as Xylella fastidiosa clogs the xylem vessels, cutting off water and nutrients. The image captures the slow desiccation of the groves and the uncertainty facing olive growers and landscapes.

Credit: Elin Linder

Where flow halts. Xylella fastidiosa moves like a slow bleed through groves, desiccating trees and disrupting multigenerational rhythms. A once-vibrant canopy becomes brittle, spectral.

Each photograph traces a moment in this wider process: pruning canopies, sorting olives, pressing paste, mourning Xylella, grafting branches. These are not isolated events but expressions of a multigenerational ecology of flow—of craft, care, and continuities cultivated anew each year.

A millennial-old olive tree with new green shoots grafted onto its trunk. The practice symbolizes resilience and adaptation, as olive growers combat disease by fusing old rootstocks with resistant varieties.

Credit: Elin Linder

Grafting Resistant Cultivars: In the ruins, life reasserts itself. Olive growers graft resistant shoots onto ancient rootstock, reviving flows through experiment and hope. Here, tradition does not resist change; it carries it.

Flow, then, is not just a matter of the liquid oil. It is a way of understanding life in olivicoltura: as lived history, sensuous material, and relationship in motion. Through such flows, oils grow, trees are made, and traditions move on.

Ariana Gunderson is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.