EtnoAntropologia

Viabilità relazionale: una prospettiva im/mobile delle relazioni nel Gambia transnazionale

Paolo Gaibazzi — 2024-12-30

While anthropologists have long studied how mobility and immobility shape social relationships, this article describes relatedness itself as a form of im/mobility. It draws on ethnographic research among Soninke speakers in the Gambia and in the diaspora who express their relationship to others through images of what could be characterized as “viability”. The conceptual metaphor of viability serves to analyse three aspects of relational im/mobility. Firstly, viability hints at the infrastructural aspects, such as when Soninke speakers imagine kinship as a road or a network of roads connecting and channelling kinsfolk. Secondly, such relational paths are more or less viable, socially, affectively and economically, depending on whether related people travel either collectively or in a scattered fashion, either closer to or away from each other. Thirdly, viability captures the existential aspect of relatedness, for Soninke speakers also perceive others as entering, inhabiting and exiting their own lives and living condition.

I margini d’Italia, un altro futuro: tra progettazione partecipata e rigenerazione culturale

Laura Bonato — 2024-12-30

Oltre i margini: comunità, risorse, prospettive

Laura Bonato — 2024-12-30

Making use of the ethnographic observation that the UR of Turin is carrying out as part of the
Prin 2020 project on four localities in the Piedmontese Alps, an attempt will be made to analyse
the presence of community planning and awareness of the cultural and social meanings of their
actions with a view to producing meaning and culture. While these inland, marginal areas are
still characterised by forms of depopulation, this situation can generate new practices for a more
balanced and sustainable growth. This is a significant ‘growth potential’ still to be discovered
through related strategic elements such as the environment, culture, agriculture, renewable energy and tourism, in order to enable a suitable economic development of local communities
through the preservation of agro-cultural landscapes and historical-artistic heritage.

La forza degli oggetti ricomposti

Elisa Rondini — 2024-12-30

Those implemented by Elio, who lives in Paciano (Perugia), in a farmhouse immersed in the
things of his creativity, are configured as housing strategies defined and continually redefined
starting from the use of heterogeneous tools and materials, collected from contingent circumstances
and adapted to contextual needs. Like Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, he combines skills, expertise
and available resources (things out of everyday use, found waste collection centers and
garages of relatives and friends), configuring an instrumental universe in constantly adapting his
living space based on extra-ordinary and always progressive aesthetics. Elio does not buy and
does not sell, but retrieves and builds, giving new trajectories to the recomposed things and new
meaning to his practices, whether they are family, social, work, or existential.

Paesaggi di coesistenza, ovvero come attorno ad un passeriforme si articola l’abitare in una zona di montagna

Lia Zola — 2024-12-30

Landscapes of coexistence is a term used by a team of zoologists in a 2019 article referring to
the degree of tolerance between a population of lions and humans within three African natural
parks and meant as «the sustainable cohabitation of people and lions within a shared landscape»
[Western et al. 2019, 204). Based on field research carried out in three alpine valleys, Valle
Susa, Val Chisone and Val Troncea, my essay tries to broaden the understanding of landscapes
of coexistence by arguing that they are complex sites of relationships where humans and non
humans alike shape and co-shape them through interactions but also frictions and conflicts that
revolve around a small bird, Petronia petronia.

Pionieri in paradiso

Simonetta Grilli — 2024-12-30

The essay reflects on the processes of redefining the forms of living in a rural community, Trequanda (in the province of Siena), which has experienced a partial repopulation since the 1970s with the arrival of individuals (couples and families of various ages) from diverse socio-cultural and geographical backgrounds. They largely embody the values of the so-called «neo-ruralism» and share a desire to experience the area not as tourists but as genuine inhabitants: they engage with local social networks, participate in political and economic life in various ways, and move towards sharing and negotiating their presence and experiences with the locals. The stories of these «protogentrifiers » in many ways anticipate the arrival of an elite group (comprising prominent figures from politics, culture, entertainment, and finance) who, starting in the late 1990s, will invest significant funds to purchase and renovate farmhouses, transforming them into aesthetically valuable house that represent high social status, thus leading to a radical process of gentrification in the area.

Festa, spazio, territorio

Alessandra Broccolini — 2024-12-30

Which is the relationship we can see between festive phenomena and contemporary processes of locality making? And how do festive phenomena speak to us today about the territories they belong to and define forms of inhabiting? In order to answer these questions, the essay seeks to explore the festivity-territory-inhabitation relation through the spatial analysis of a specific ethnographic case, the feast of the Madonna del Monte di Marta (Viterbo, Lazio), broadening the gaze from the inhabited space of the town-city, where the feast is often (but not always) produced in its ceremonial moments, to the entire territory that the feast encompasses and helps to define, both in the construction of a ‘sense of place’ and in the experience and practical action of the same.

How and why to study mountains: topics and types of research between limits and opportunities

Laura Bonato — 2024-12-30

Field practice in a neighbouring ethnographic context – both culturally and geographically –, of which the researcher is a part, entails specific difficulties, epistemological and practical problems quite different from those faced by classical anthropology. Based on the experience gained in three different projects involving the western Alpine arc over the last decade, we intend to highlight the fact that in some contexts it is appropriate to prefer ‘peripheral’ anthropological research, less localised and based on shorter stays. The research conducted in the Piedmontese highlands, despite their differences in terms of assumptions and concretisation, in fact highlights the predominant thematic strands through which mountains are studied in this area.

Diventare “mappe vive”

Glauco Barboglio — 2024-12-30

This paper discusses the creation of a parish map in Casazza, Italy, that was started to revitalize the struggling Historical-Environmental Museum, spurring debate about local identity. The paper emphasizes the value of participatory approaches in shaping “shared heritage” as opposed to “institutional heritage”, advocating for the local Museum to adopt such approaches. Finally, it explores the role of anthropologists in local contexts, stressing the impact of anthropological methods in community engagement, especially where anthropology is not well known.

Editoriale n. 2 - 2024

Alberto Baldi — 2024-12-30

Rifiuti tossici e scorie umane

Mariaelena De Stefano — 2024-12-30

Rituali islamici e territorialità in una città del Sud Italia

Eugenio Zito — 2025-01-23

Lavoro d’orizzonte e cambiamento climatico

Eugenio Zito — 2024-12-30