Fifty years ago, the book “The Hidden Frontier. Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley” by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf was published for the first time. It marked the beginning of family research in the Alpine area, which paid particular attention to diversity. Since 1974, many family studies on the Alpine area have been published, mostly on individual places and regions and a few on the entire Alpine area. The authors came from different directions and had various aims. They were exposed to the changing influences of Western scholarship: economic history, historical demography, household research, migration studies, microhistory, kinship and feminist studies, network approaches, etc. Together, these perspectives show how complex the topic is and how difficult it is to arrive at a picture agreed on by most. 

What interactions took place between these authors? Did they perceive each other, learn from each other, or argue with each other? And what consequences did this have for what we call the “state of the art”? These are the questions explored in the present paper, which can, naturally, only focus on a limited number of such interactions. The starting point is the idea that “dialogues” are not always good while “controversies” are not necessarily bad. For example, the duration of the interaction could be more important. This research could potentially spot some open questions that were generated in the process but then lost.