Variazioni africane

Fabio Viti (ed.), Variazioni africane. Saggi di antropologia e storia, Edizioni Il Fiorino, Modena 2016.

The essays collected in this volume address the problem of the state, with particular regard to forms of domination, in Africa and the African diasporas. Within this general problematic, several more specific research cores have emerged: forms of domination and the related resistance organised from below in Ghana; colonial wars and local reactions in Algeria and Côte d’Ivoire; colonial imposition and the fight against slavery in Ethiopia; the role of universities in the opposition to the various authoritarian regimes in Egypt; domination relations based on gender and ‘colour’ differences in Brazil.

Dipendenza personale, lavoro e politica

Fabio Viti (a cura di), Dipendenza personale, lavoro e politica, Modena, Il Fiorino, 2008

The publication of the essays collected in this volume marks a further stage in a fruitful experience of research and dialogue conducted within the Ethnology Laboratory, around the research project “Addiction, work, rights. Comparative perspectives’. Without claiming to set rigid boundaries to a vast theme, itself made up of a tangle of broad and complex notions, the seminar and the resulting publications sought to focus on a series of questions that would advance a common reflection fuelled by personal research, sometimes born or continued within the Ethnology Laboratory, sometimes independently of it. Specifically, this volume brings together contributions that illustrate the variety of viewpoints and possible approaches to the common theme, as well as openings for new research. The core of the reflection is work and the social and relational universe that gravitates around it: in particular, work and its representations in the ancient world, in today’s Asia, in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Africa; the work of migrants, not only in Italy, but also in Jordan and Malaysia; contemporary clientelistic networks, slavery and the human pledge of the past; the personalised forms of dependency and the impersonal and anonymous forms of industrial wage labour; these are as many places and themes that make it possible to address the nature of the social connections that develop, transform or disappear around work, in ways and dynamics that always have important political connotations.

Il Brasile tra razzismo e democrazia razziale

Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz (a cura di), Il Brasile tra razzismo e democrazia razziale, Modena, Il Fiorino, 2007

With this volume, the Laboratorio di Etnologia publishes the materials of the conference Brazil: a national identity between racism and racial democracy held in Modena in March 2006. The texts gathered here are intended to give space to the dialogue between anthropology and literary criticism, now consolidated in Brazil and particularly fruitful as regards the study of racism and racial democracy.
The contributions to this book highlight the current process of transformation that Brazilian society is going through, moving from a cultural ideology under the banner of heterogeneity and cultural plurality as the basis of national harmony, to a phase in which some of the social groups that make up this heterogeneity elaborate political and cultural projects under the banner of the recognition of specific, and at times diasporic, identities within the national space. In this process of transformation, the colonial era and slavery are continually reinvested with meaning and constitute the common ground for projects and discourses of resistance by historically subaltern groups (slaves, quilombolas, indios, practitioners of syncretic religions, negros students, favelados).
The research presented here illustrates how working on Brazil represents a challenge for anthropology and literary criticism to grasp what is continually emerging and in flux, a process that challenges the idea of cultural authenticity and produces marginal and powerful practices and narratives that stand in opposition to the dominant narrative of history.

Lavoro, dipendenza personale e rapporti familiari

Fabio Viti (a cura di), Lavoro, dipendenza personale e rapporti familiari, Modena, Il Fiorino, 2007

With this second volume of the series of Quaderni del Laboratorio di Etnologia, the publication of a selection of materials presented during the seminar “Dependence, Work, Rights. Comparative perspectives” that took place in 2005-2006 at the University of Modena.
A significant broadening of the scenario characterises this collection of essays, which presents sociological and anthropological contributions centred on complex societies, from Europe, the Middle East and Central America, and on the processes of individualisation present in societies in transition, such as contemporary Rwanda and its diasporas. What unites seafarers from vast horizons but all transiting through the port of Venice, Rwandan refugees returning home after decades of forced exile, Romanian workers employed in relocated Italian factories, Mexican families grappling with perennially insufficient budgets, and young Jordanian graduates in search of a future, personal as well as professional? It could be answered in a first approximation that they are all figures who can be ascribed in different ways to the processes that characterise the ‘second modernity’ or ‘liquid modernity’, actors who act within processes of more or less wide-ranging mobility or who are in any case affected by the capacity for movement of goods and capital, inversely proportional to their own. It is precisely their mobility, as navigators, exiles, migrants or would-be migrants, that is never entirely free, but is linked to higher demands that condition and constrain it: war and violence that produce masses of refugees and forced migrants, the search for new opportunities that pushes people to emigrate far away, the need for documents that are increasingly difficult to obtain that instead limits voluntary movements and, above all, the general priority of the movement of goods over that of human beings.

Antropologia dei rapporti di dipendenza personale

Fabio Viti (a cura di), Antropologia dei rapporti di dipendenza personale, Modena, Il Fiorino, 2006

This volume, which inaugurates the series of the Quaderni del Laboratorio di Etnologia, presents a selection of the papers presented at the permanent seminar on “Dependence, Work, Rights”, underway at the University of Modena. The thematic interweaving between relationships of personal dependence, work and rights is explored here from different perspectives, through overall reflections and more punctual research, touching on spheres that are distant in time and space (West Africa, India, Senegalese women immigrants in Marseilles), but no less marked by common traits and no less analysable in a comparative perspective. Thus, the case of India, characterised by an encompassing but at the same time marginalising mechanism such as that of caste, lends itself to a parallel reading with other systems, Western, Mediterranean or African, of an expansive type and where slavery was the prevalent system of extra-familial dependence. But even without going to the depersonalising and de-socialising extremes of slavery, ‘normal’ forms of dependency deeply mark the African social, family and community fabric, spheres in which gender and age inequalities serve as a model for the exclusion or subordinate inclusion of relatives as well as outsiders, be they immigrants, women acquired outside the domestic group or children circulating within spheres of solidarity but also of exploitation.

Papers by: Fabio Viti, Pier Giorgio Solinas, Stefano Boni, Simona Morganti, Melissa Blanchard