Biography, Ethnography and Education in Colonial Libya. Panetta’s Papers at Florence State Archives

Collected documents, working papers and the fieldnotes of scholars who worked in Africa, as well as their life trajectories presented through biographic and autobiographic writings, are a rich resource for the social history of Africa. This chapter draws from the personal archive of Ester Panetta (1894–1983), one of the first Italian anthropologists to work and live in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. After her Arabic and colonial studies at the Oriental Institutes in Naples and in Paris, she lived in Libya until the outbreak of the Second World War, when she came back to Italy as a refugee from Italian Africa. Her ethnographic studies and personal writings, recently deposited at Florence State Archives, are a unique resource for a social history of Northeast Africa. Personal archives of scholars who devoted their life in studying African societies have a twofold interest for historians of Africa. From one side, they preserve documents that can be analysed to explore African societies. On the other hand, they are sources revealing the researcher's relationship with the Africanist discipline and the societies studied in that historical period. Personal archives are, thus, particularly rich documents for a focus on Africa in entangled and global history.