According to an implicit but wide-spread view, the Alpine area occupies a peculiar place within the history of Europe as well as the anthropology of Western societies. Assumptions that Alpine communities were evolving at a slower pace in comparison to lowland societies firstly pushed anthropologists and scholars in folklore studies in engaging with the study of Alpine cosmologies and social structures, and then to document "alternatives" ways of life, thus transforming the previous pre-modern Alpine space in an anti-modern one. Although calls to decolonize the ethnology of European rural societies are far to be recent (e.g. Fabre and Lacroix 1972), attempts to critically study modernity in the Alpine area are still scarce nowadays. An anti-modern stance seems in particular to having prevented many scholars to resort to critical development studies and science and technology studies in their study of the interactions, exchanges and micro-political practices that shape contemporary social life in the Alps. In the light of this, this paper re-frames the ways in which processes of planned social change in the Alps are often explored. Based on a research project on the history of agricultural and economic thinking in the Italian Western Alps, it will consider how modernization process resulted from heterogeneous and competing societal projects, as well as economic and technical arrangements rooted into wider, European debates on science, politics, and environment. Moreover, by practising a “disoriented history” (Fressoz 2013) of Alpine modernization, it will propose a different perspective on how such “European” Alpine-ness can be studied and experienced.