Antropologia, a biannual journal published in Spring and Autumn, discusses themes that are crucial in contemporary anthropology. It publishes Special Focus and miscellaneous issues based on free submission. It is available online free of charge. Antropologia publishes original scientific papers following a favourable report by two anonymous reviewers. Titles, abstracts and keywords are also published in English to make works easier to locate and streamline their international outreach. ISSN: 2281-4043 E-ISSN: 2420-8469 Journal Ranking: A for area 11 A5 of the ANVUR classification. To buy print issues and subscriptions, please visit Ledizioni website
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Maria Șalaru, 2025, An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation: The Changing Fabric of a Romanian Block of Flats, London, UCL Press (Emma Fontana) Gaia Cottino, 2024, Cavallette a colazione. I cibi del futuro tra gusto e disgusto, Torino, UTET (Andrea Nichetti)
Making the Invisible Visible. Fetal Ultrasound Images and Oracular Consultations in Southern Benin
Drawing on ethnographic observations and existing literature, this article explores how fetal ultrasound imaging intersects with divinatory practices in Southern Benin. Within religious and oracular contexts, ultrasound images act not only as diagnostic tools but also as mediators between the mother, the fetus, and the spiritual realm. In a setting where individuals may be linked to deities or ancestors, ultrasounds help identify the fetus’s protective ancestor even before birth. By situating this practice alongside other birth-related rituals, the article questions whether spiritual recognition of the fetus also implies its social recognition as a human being. Highlighting the entanglement of biomedical technologies with religious and divinatory practices, it offers insights into local conceptions of personhood, birth rituals, existential continuity, and reproductive trajectories in Southern Benin.
Rhetorics of Invasiveness. Cat Management Policies in Italy, Australia, and Scotland
In many areas of the world, cats are considered legitimate and significant actors within a shared cultural and ecological landscape, but in other areas of the world, concerns over their predatory behaviour and widespread distribution have led conservation biologists and policy makers to list Felis catus as an invasive alien species. This new categorisation and the ensuing debate have had great resonance where there are conservation projects for native or presumed native wild feline species (such as in Scotland) and in areas such as Australia, where several species are considered endangered. In Italy this debate is less well known and has taken shape in other terms. Starting with a brief comparison of some studies referring to the two examples mentioned, the contribution looks at Italy as a case study to examine how policies and practices surrounding the idea of invasiveness contribute to shaping multi-species relations in a scenario profoundly modified by humans.
Special Focus. Anthropological Perspectives on Biological Invasions
Companion Nutria. Proximity, Emotions, and Affective Resistance within a Biological Invasion
Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2022 with individuals who chose to care for nutria (Myocastor coypus) as companion animals, this article investigates the role of emotions in both producing and unsettling the category of invasive alien species. Within a discursive regime that legitimizes eradication through affective and normative devices, everyday practices of care and intimacy give rise to forms of animal subjectivation that exceed and destabilize the managerial ontology of invasiveness. The interspecies relationships observed in the field highlight how emotions constitute situated modes of knowledge and political agency, far from being irrational residues. They generate relational worlds, reconfigure the boundaries between human and non-human, and radically question the distinction between lives deemed worth protecting and those marked for elimination.
Feral Wild Boars. Politics of Nature in African Sewin Fever Crisis on the Appenines (Quattro Province Region)
In a context of entangled multi-crisis, the African Swine Fever (ASF) virus has socially transformed the meanings of wild boars: from a reinvented autochthonous animal deeply intertwined with the social history of the Apennines into an invader within war frames and technical and veterinary reductionism. By undermining the pig agribusiness industry, frames and economies of war return to the fore in a social drama that exposes the policies of nature by multiple social actors: wild boars’ ecological success shows the need to follow the “prospects” of wild boar in the “making of the world”, as they become a feral mirror of our abandonment and ruins in inland areas.
Of Miracle Clams and Doomsday Crabs: A Guide to the Taxonomies of the Capitalocene in the Sacca di Goro
Since the 1980s, the Sacca di Goro (Po River Delta) has undergone a radical socio-ecological transformation, turning the lagoon shared by the communities of Goro and Gorino into one of the largest industrial Manila clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) farms in Europe. In the past decade, however, the climate crisis has emerged in this context through the proliferation of various non-native species, culminating in the recent feral expansion of the Atlantic blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), whose predatory dynamics have disrupted the local production system and triggered deep-seated identity anxieties. This article examines this moment of crisis through an analysis of the political, scientific, and popular narratives surrounding the so-called blue crab invasion, exploring how the biological discourse on invasive species is renegotiated within the cultural framework of an extractive ecology, which has redefined notions of native, allochtonous, and invasive species around the Manila clam. The ethnographic analysis thus highlights the social construction of the crisis and its militarized articulation, exposing the contradictory taxonomic orders that, within the ecological regime of the Capitalocene, are mobilized according to logics that bypass the categories of systematic biology.
Companions and Antagonists in the Anthropocene Ethnography of the Biocontrol of Glycaspis brimblecombei and Beekeeping in Sardinia
This article examines how the spread of Glycaspis brimblecombei (an eucalyptus parasite) in Sardinia has led to a reconfiguration of the concepts of “native” and “non-native” among beekeepers, researchers, and institutions, reshaping narratives about biodiversity and the control of biological invasions. Through a lengthy negotiation process with researchers and policymakers, beekeepers secured a monitoring plan for eucalyptus parasites in 2012. Then, in 2020, they obtained the creation of a Sentinel Garden for monitoring invasive species. Using field data and archival material, the study analyzes the landscape “patchwork” created by the coexistence of “invasive” and “native” species, highlighting the role of technical-scientific discourse in determining which species to save and which to eliminate. It offers a critical perspective on conservation and protection practices in the Anthropocene.
Native, Invasive or Native Invasive? Ixodes Ricinus Ticks in the Belluno Mountains, between Memories, Perceptions and Encounters
As part of a study on the social perception of ticks in Italy (Belluno) and Slovenia (Gorenjska), this contribution focuses on the doubt of the residents of the Belluno province about the origin of the presence of ticks in the area. Absent from collective memory until the 1970s, today these parasites, and the associated risk of disease, are described as an invasion. This contribution first examines the debate within invasion biology about whether a native species can become invasive. It then traces the past of Ixodes ricinus ticks, Lyme borreliosis, and red deer through three historical moments: their presence in the Copper Age, when Ötzi, the man who lived in the Tyrolean Alps, became the first person to date known to have contracted this disease; the five thousand years in which traces of the ticks were lost; and their reappearance, population expansion, and geographic spread in the last fifty years. Matching the biological history of ticks with the memories, experiences, and reflections of the people of Belluno, these animals seem to qualify as both native and invasive. Beyond the labels that can be used to describe this phenomenon, it highlights the profound complexity of ecological relationships and the challenge – scientific, social, political, and economic – involved in what to do of ticks, and with ticks, in the current era of rapid and uncertain socio-ecological change.
Anthropological Perspectives on Biological Invasions: Ethnographies of Conflict and Coexistence between Human and Animals
Biological invasions are regarded by major international scientific institutions as among the most impactful and contentious ecological phenomena of the Anthropocene. Accelerated by globalisation, climate crisis, and ecosystem instability, the introduction and proliferation of “invasive alien species” – or those labelled as such – raise crucial questions about biodiversity loss, human responsibility, and the models of environmental governance at stake. In parallel, social sciences, and cultural anthropology in particular, have reframed biological invasions as multispecies, situated, and relational phenomena, challenging established categories such as nativeness, non-nativeness, and invasiveness. This special issue offers, for the first time in the Italian context, a comparative ethnographic perspective through six case studies, examining how different animal organisms become focal points of conflict, practices of coexistence, and ecological imaginaries, revealing the profoundly political nature of contemporary ecologies.
Lorenzo Alunni, 2025, Le cicatrici di Ulisse. Corpi e frontiere nel Mediterraneo, Milano, Meltemi (by Paolo Grassi) S. Postar, N. E. Behzadi, N. N. Doering, 2024, Extraction/Exclusion: Beyond Binaries of Exclusion and Inclusion in Natural Resource Extraction, London, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (by Gioia Rudilosso Consolo) Agnès De Féo, 2024, The Niqab in France: Between Piety and Subversion, New York, Fordham University Press (by Stefania Spyropoulou) Chiara Cacciotti, 2024, Qui è tutto abitato. L’occupazione romana di Santa Croce/ Spin Time Labs come esperienza abitativa liminale, Verona, Ombre Corte (by Benedetta Tarsi)
Afterword. Anthropology and the interdisciplinary research
Since the mid-nineteenth century, anthropology has focused on the “totality” of human experience in different societies, covering areas such as technology, thought, values and rituals. In doing so, anthropology has generated comparisons and exchanges with other sector-specific disciplines that deal with particular areas of human experience. In more recent years, however, comparisons between different disciplines have sometimes given rise to opposition and misunderstandings over methods of data collection and analysis, as well as over quantitative versus qualitative approaches and whether to focus on normative or diverse values. The most successful approach has been “bi-disciplinary collaboration and exchange”, creating areas of dual expertise such as medical anthropology, legal anthropology, environmental anthropology and urban anthropology. International literature on the subject has also focused on the organisation of multidisciplinary university departments and international projects, which are now almost exclusively of this type. This has sometimes generated innovative and creative conceptions of a new “trans-disciplinarity”. The essays in this special issue mainly deal with cases of relationships between anthropological research and various natural sciences, ranging from eco-biology to medical and environmental sciences. They also carefully document the significant challenges in achieving equal and non-hierarchical exchanges between disciplines for mutual enrichment.
Special Focus. Beyond Collaboration: Toward a Politics of Alliances
Knowledge and power in a “disputed forest” : participatory research in French Guiana Amazonian Park
This paper analyses conflicts and alliances between knowledges in the largest national park in the European Union, the Guiana Amazonian Park, in a peculiar overseas indigenous context. On the one hand, the international objectives of nature protection are realised against the colonial backdrop of the expropriation of land from the Amerindian peoples. On the other hand, the valorisation of cultural heritages, of which anthropological knowledge is an important ally, clashes with decades of assimilationist policies, which have weakened the reproduction of local knowledge. In this “disputed forest” the common objective of preserving biological and cultural diversity is conditioned and affects the fragile local balances, generating conflicts, misunderstandings and unprecedented alliances.
About paperclips (and anthropology). Interstices, traces and interdisciplinary connections
Through an object, the paperclips, the essay reflects on interdisciplinary connections that these human traces found in the interstices of the city have made possible, giving rise to a complex conceptual map. The use of an object like the paperclip, which unites and connects, is a useful pretext, but also an opportunity to talk about relationships, bodies, places, but also anthropology as an exercise in attention, freedom, and humanity in the making.
Anthropology among plants, data, and scientists : in search of context in data-driven interdisciplinary collaboration
In this article we explore interdisciplinarity as a context for doing ethnography both in terms of research techniques and theoretical elaboration. The article presents an account of research conducted by the authors within a team composed of plant pathologists and data scientists. The reflection fits within the theoretical framework of data-driven science, analyzing how anthropology, with its involvement in scientific collaboration processes, can contribute to making interdisciplinarity among contemporary sciences more incisive. We examine how reflection on the ethnographic context can help us understand the concrete role of anthropology in interdisciplinary projects. Context is the result of the intersubjective research process, which leads to diverse and sometimes unexpected forms of knowledge and social relations, as well as the coordination of the roles of co-researcher, observer and writer, along with related responsibilities, ethical dilemmas and challenges. Context reveals itself to be an intrinsically interdisciplinary and political project, involving both the knowledge produced and the research process itself.
Unexpected allies : the conservation of amazonian stingless bees between biological sciences and cultural anthropology
The accelerating loss of biodiversity is causing significant environmental damage and disproportionately affecting Indigenous and marginalized communities. This underscores the need for an interdisciplinary approach to conservation biology. Based on our collaborative work on a stingless bee conservation project in the Amazon, this article explores the role of cultural anthropology in interdisciplinary research, emphasizing its challenges and contributions. We examine the epistemological tensions and methodological obstacles that arise when integrating academic and Indigenous forms of knowledge, and reflect on the cultural and political dimensions of such initiatives, as well as the importance of effectively communicating research outcomes. This case study demonstrates how a critical reassessment of disciplinary boundaries can foster collaboration between diverse research paradigms, enabling the development of multi-epistemic knowledge systems. In doing so, it contributes not only to more effective conservation practices but also to a rethinking of the conceptual divisions between “nature” and “culture.”
Introduction. Beyond Collaboration: Toward a Politics of Alliances
In the national and international anthropological scene, there seems to be a tacit consensus on the need to integrate and collaborate between the natural sciences and the social sciences within research projects and programs that respond concretely to the many contemporary social challenges. The aim of this special issue is to initiate a critical reflection on “interdisciplinarity” by going beyond the conventional rhetoric that celebrates the coming together of different scientific knowledges. In an endeavor to provide substance to the frequently empty notion of interdisciplinarity, this special issue has been established with the express intention of giving space to concrete experiences of anthropologists who perceive interdisciplinarity to be a catalyst for both intellectual innovation and political potential. These scholars, often operating beyond the confines of academia, have established collaborative networks with the aim of addressing the pressing challenges of the contemporary era. This issue thus prompts an exploration of the forms of knowledge that emerge beyond the established boundaries, within the enclaves where contaminated and rebellious alliances become possibilities for shared thought and action.
Dario Nardini, 2022, Surfers Paradise. Un’Etnografia del Surf sulla Gold Coast Australiana (Andrea Buchetti) David Nemer, 2022, Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil(Annalisa Molgora) Laura Menin, 2024, Quest for Love in Central Morocco: Young Women and the Dynamics of Intimate Lives (Chiara Pilotto) Sabrina Tosi Cambini, 2023 (2021), Other Borders. History, Mobility and Migration of Rudari Families between Romania and Italy (Francesco Vietti)
Dancing Power in Porto-Novo: the Adjògàn between Royal Court and Catholic Church
Considered the “traditional” dance par excellence of the royal court of Porto-Novo, the adjògàn owes much of its political and identity relevance to its performance nature and celebratory function. Assuming the role of promoter of the new instances which swept through Porto-Novian society during the 20th century, the dance engaged itself between continuity and change. In continuous and open dialogue with new players in the political, social and religious spheres, the adjògàn finally involved also the Catholic Church. Based on fieldwork materials, the article analyses the changes in rhythm over time, noting its constant expansion towards spaces dedicated to the celebration of power. Thus, the adjògàn emerges as an aggregator and negotiator of meanings capable of coexisting within a socio-political context full of tensions.
Affects, Transgressions and Resistance among Girls, Boys and Families in Times of Crisis (Gallura, Sardinia)
In an altered human environment, childhood and youth can be marked by forms of mental distress and inappropriate social behaviors that enhance the climate of social anxiety. From an economically depressed but socially cohesive area, Gallura has quickly transformed into an exclusive tourist destination for rich continentals and foreigners. The Gallura people have not benefited from so much imported opulence, on the contrary, they have suffered from the perverse socio-cultural alteration that has torn the traditional fabric of relationality leaving behind a desolate social scenario. Following the narrative of boys, girls, and families in times of crisis, this contribution tries to illustrate and discuss their efforts to position themselves on the social scene as political subjects who build the future, facing guilt-inducing categorizations and claiming recognition for their suffering and daily affective labor.
Special Focus. Contemporary relationalities: Between normativity and transgressi
“NO PFAS Moms”: Understandings Parenting and Reproduction in a Context of Life Altered by Chemical Contamination
The NO PFAS Mothers’ movement in the Italian province of Vicenza originated when it was found that their children’s blood contained perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that were produced by the Miteni plant in Trissino and were causing the pollution of groundwater. Confronted by the serious health damages these chemical compounds can induce, they have taken a stance where the care of their children and the remediation of the territory intertwine in a worldview that combines issues of reproductive and environmental justice. Their “resistance” actions against contamination rest on networks of consolidated relations and a shared feeling that mothers have a moral responsibility towards future generations, in a process of rethinking reproduction and kinship that appears to be the women’s burden. My contribution explores these questions in an intrafamilial and intergenerational frame, with the aim of capturing the imaginaries, the asymmetries and the forms of relationality that emerge.
Embryos, Pregnancies, and Transgressions: a Comparative Analysis of Social Representations of Surrogacy and Embryo Donation in Italy
Every year the number of people who use assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to have children is growing. Among the most complex techniques are in vitro fertilization (IVF), which includes donation of gametes, embryos (embryo donation), and surrogacy. This article presents ethnographic cases collected in California (2014-2017; 2017-2020) and Italy (2020-2023) and examines embryo donation and surrogacy, practices that involve social, legal, and moral transgressions. My findings show how social representations of surrogacy and embryo donation influence the perceptions and experiences of those involved, revealing a complex framework of social, moral, and legal norms that are renegotiated within ARTs’ processes.
“But where is your Husband?”.“Matrifocalizing” Connections among the Meshes of the Somali Diaspora
In this paper I propose a reflection on the experiences of single mothers in the Somali diaspora, a very common and socially accepted experience within the diaspora, which illuminates interesting processes related to experiences of mobility and transnationalism. Intersecting the theoretical frameworks of diaspora studies and those of matrifocality, I propose to reflect on the connections that can be detected between the experience of single motherhood and the more profound and enduring familial and social changes among people who identify as Somalis in diaspora around the world.
Relatedness and Non-Heteronormative Subjectivities. Insights from Fa'afafine Experiences
Gender transgressions in non-Western contexts show the role of non-conforming subjectivities, both in the domestic and family sphere, as in the public sphere. For the purpose of this essay, I would like to assume a lateral perspective to focus on several re-arrangements of parental configurations engendered among Samoan fa'afafine. Basing my arguments on data collected during the fieldwork I conducted in Samoa between 2014 and 2015, I would like to show how fa'afafine retain toward their siblings the obligations and responsibilities prescribed by their assigned sex, while they take upon themselves the burden of caring as for their gender. In another respect, incorporating non-related fa'afafine in their household can rebalance the weight of certain social obligations while exacerbating others, and producing different forms of personal dependence.
Violating Statutory Bans: an Ethnography of “Forbidden” Marriages in the Highlands of Madagascar
The academic literature on the legacies of slavery in Madagascar (as in other African contexts) has stressed how marriage interdictions between people of free origin and slave descendants still characterize, in often silent but pervasive ways, the reproduction of local kin networks and contribute to reaffirm the stigma associated to slave origin. This article focuses instead on the stories, difficulties, and experiences of those who have - knowingly or unknowingly - violated these interdictions, creating – often at the risk of being excluded from their respective families – new bonds of kinship and intergenerational care that laboriously attempt to transcend the constraints of local statutory distinctions. Generally not formalized, these “forbidden” unions not only contribute to produce tensions, conflicts, and profound reformulations of local forms of relationality, but also reveal the contradictions that emerge between the need to keep “family purity and honour” intact and the principles of inclusiveness and extended kinship linked to the local concept of ﬁhavanana (lit. “to act like a relative”).
Introduction. Contemporary Relatedness: Between Normativity and Transgressions
In the 21st century, anthropological studies have witnessed new research on kinship understood as relatedness. The authors of the articles included in this issue of Anthropologia show the richness and diversity of contemporary kinship studies. They underscore the vitality of kinship as an ideal model for broader relations of solidarity. Recall the situated relevance that specific relationships – marital, parental, reproductive, among siblings – have within different local contexts. Describe the tension between norms, normality, and transgressions, questioning the processes that give relations meaning and produce hierarchies, marginality, and exclusion. Finally, they highlight the enduring relevance that the analysis of kinship and reproduction continues to have in social and cultural anthropology as a privileged field for understanding the texture of social life and questioning what would otherwise be taken for granted.
Training practices, dietary choices, and resistance strategies in the gym
In this paper I analyse the different ways in which sport and diet are put together in the context of fitness in order to construct a concept of physical ‘fitness’ that also takes on moral connotations. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic study in a Northern Italian gym, I will show how gym-goers elaborate social codes and meanings through training and specific dietary plans that are not exclusively normative – results of notions forged elsewhere: market, neoliberal ethics, common sense, impersonal power embedded by acting subjects – but as spaces of reappropriation of the body that enable processes of subjectivation and meaning attribution that sometimes resist dominant ones. In particular, I will analyse the processes of re-subjectification of certain rhetorics and practices that shape gym culture in order to achieve a state of ‘wellbeing’ that comes from learning the ability to ‘feel the body’.
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Apology of Ethnography: methodological reflections from Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft
In the last years of his life, the French historian Marc Bloch was living in clandestinity as a partisan against the Nazi invaders and, at the same time, feverishly pursuing the work of writing a book on the profession of the historian and the defense of historiography as a fundamental science. But the writing of those pages was interrupted by the tragic fate that history itself reserved for its author: Bloch was captured by the Nazis and executed in June 1944. That interrupted manuscript, however, has reached us: The Historian’s Craft (In the original French: Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien). The influence of that book went beyond the circles of those who practice historiography. Precisely because of its interdisciplinary character, and through the experience of translating a new and augmented edition of the book in question, this article explores some suggestions and directions that can be drawn from it for the practice of ethnography. What reflections and lessons might ethnographers reading The Historian’s Craft draw for their own fieldwork? This is the fundamental question of this contribution, which focuses on three of those possible suggestions and parallels: observation, transmission, and the defense of ethnography.