"Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe"--
Equivocal locations : being 'red' in 'Red Bologna' -- The anthropology of (double) morality -- Agreeing to disagree : dialogues with the church -- Different differences : queer activism and the 2012 Italian national pride -- Why will recursivity run out of steam? -- Making difference
Abstract This article aims to complicate the opposition between "thick description" and "thin" thought experiments by constructing a thought experiment of its own. It compares the use of examples—thick and thin—in the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, who came to extremely similar conclusions about the importance of context to meaning, the former around a decade before the latter. By imagining the—by no means implausible—possibility that Wittgenstein read Malinowski, the article asks how it might change anthropological views about thickness and thinness if it turned out that one of the major philosophical sources of our disciplinary preference for "thick description" as a generalized prescription for ethnography took some inspiration for such ideas from Malinowksi's more modest and restricted empiricism.
AbstractOrdinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and premier site of neofascist tourism, reveals just how much effort has to go into producing a scaled sense of ordinariness in this extraordinary place. In this way, ordinary life is exposed as the object, not the site, of such work. This suggests the need to reconsider our usage of ordinary life in order to attend to situations in which the category itself—not just its particular contents—has ethnographic relevance.
AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which "ordinariness" can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini's ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town's first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini's ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of "the ordinary," which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of "the ordinary" as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that "the ordinary" may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.
This article begins by examining the status of "difference" in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radically resembling Euro-American thought in its conceptualization of the nature of difference, that is, the form that difference takes as a relation. It argues that in schematic representations of Amerindian and Euro-American cosmologies, difference for both is always a matter of institution and construction, and resemblance is a matter of essence and necessity. Thus, paradoxically, arguments about radical difference may in fact be read to assert an underlying essentialism as to the nature of difference itself. I conclude by proposing that we abandon conceptions of the nature of difference, in favor of a focus on "styles" of difference, and discuss some non-anthropological examples of this approach, as well as instances of different "styles" of difference from my own fieldwork.
This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's 'showcase city' of the left, 'Red Bologna', in which to be 'red' is ubiquitous but each person's 'red' is a different thing: being 'red' (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the 'field' as a location and the 'field' as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the 'equivocal location': a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.
Abstract This introduction situates the trolley problem and other such dilemmas in anthropological debates about contextualization and abstraction both within and beyond the realm of the moral. We highlight some of the criticisms anthropologists have made of the "thinness" of ethical thought experiments while also suggesting some ways in which philosophers might wish to defend them. We also point to a growing interest on the part of a range of anthropologists in formalized, stylized, and abbreviated modes of ethical reasoning, and emphasize the importance of attending to such forms of reasoning, even though they may conflict with our disciplinary preference for the "thick" and the contextualized.
