Storie e geografie dell’antropologia italiana

This is a review article that examines a recent book (L’eredità rivisitata. Storie di un’antropologia in stile italiano, edited by Antonello Ricci, 2019), where forty Italian scholars propose critical revisitations of texts published between 1950 and the early 1980s that played a key role in a distinctively Italian tradition of studies of popular culture, largely inspired by the works of Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto de Martino. One of the aims of the book is to make the younger generations of Italian anthropologists more aware of the existence of an extensive theoretical and documentary heritage that is running the risk of being neglected or utterly forgotten, mostly because of the increasingly international orientation of anthropological training in Italy today. This prompts a number of reflections on the historical developments of different anthropological strands in Italy, on the past and present danger of theoretical colonization faced by peripheral anthropological traditions, on the strengths and weaknesses of what has been described as the Italian style of ethnographic research. The book also lays bare fault lines in the academic geography of Italian anthropology which originated in the second half of the 20th century and still persist.