History of Italian Anthropology

This idiosyncratic term refers to a process of historical construction, whether within the dynamics of knowledge formation and circulation on a European scale or withdrawn into relative insularity. More than a date of birth, the 1870s were a landmark in distinguishing the two main orientations that somehow remained in conflict, albeit in creative ways, until after the Second World War. The first borrowed a model of scientificity from the natural sciences which was reinforced by adherence to Darwinism in order to insert the study of the Italic peoples into a comparative psychology of the human race. The second favoured the historical sciences through their link with philology in order for the new discipline of folklore to be recognized in the academic field. Between these two centres of institutionalization and intellectual sociability, the boundaries are all the more tenuous as, following opposing styles of scholarly life, they both claimed the rights to the definition of the discipline, standardization and centralization of research.

With regard to the establishment of a natural science of man in Italy, the enterprise led by Paolo Mantegazza had a primary role: to affirm the complementarity of the natural and historical sciences in order to reach a general anthropology based upon physical anthropology. The ambition was to coordinate several forms of knowledge, some oriented towards criteria of hominization, others towards the study of cultures and their diversity. Political links with intellectuals involved in the Risorgimento and scientific links with the École anthropologique de Paris made it possible to attract the international intellectual capital of the new kingdom, doctors, zoologists, lawyers, historians, geographers and orientalists to Florence. They organized expeditions and, a few years later, established other chairs in Rome and Naples, created other specializations (such as Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology in Turin), and other museums, including one in Rome, the new capital of unified Italy. They developed survey instruments for a comparative psychology of human races and wrote the first manuals of anthropology and ethnography – in the sense that this term then took on to distinguish the surveys conducted in Italy.

As for the diversity of Italian folklore, it entered the fields of interest of Florentine society in terms of “superstitions” and “prejudices”. At the same time, the philological model dominated the process of affirming the autonomy of the study of European cultures in the Italian context of national unification, either from the perspective of comparative mythology or from that of the science of folklore. In the first half of the 19^th century, the collection, transcription, translation and publication of songs and oral traditions were part of the romantic perspective of cultural renewal as a premise for political renewal. In a divided and occupied Italy, it was a question of rediscovering the common heritage that constituted unity of the people. From the 1860s onwards, the transfer of German philology to the Italian context supported the construction of a new science by integrating the study of sung poetry and folk narratives to complete the study of all literatures. At the same time, the explanatory ambitions of comparative mythology ensured the transition between philology and ethnography. Names such as Domenico Comparetti or Angelo De Gubernatis are obvious references.

However, it was in Sicily, with Giuseppe Pitrè and Salvatore Salomone-Marino, that “demology” was systematically constructed in relation to the main European centres – setting the categories of social life that fell within its domain for a long time until its university recognition in Palermo, in 1911, under the name of “demopsychology”. The historical depth of the discipline was delimited and its thematic axes were fixed: it focused on the social life of the present, a view informed jointly by Edward Tylor’s sociocultural evolutionism and Friedrich Max Müller’s comparative mythology, as two complementary knowledge programmes to define the autonomy of its object and methods.

Long before and long after the crystallization of these two Florentine and Sicilian poles, and in parallel with the structuring of knowledge they put into place, there is an interest that can be described as ethnographic in a broader sense, within progressive or conservative institutions in local societies. These are, to a large extent, dependent on the complex process of political unification that distinguishes Italy within the Europe of nations. It is also necessary to revisit the plurality of conceptions of “folk” or “popular” that have been expressed since the 1880s, in exchanges between scholars with diverse identities, whether they were medieval philologists, orientalists or ethnographers of contemporary oral tradition, among others.

Restoring the existential and intellectual trajectories of the figures of founders or re-founders by exploring and crossing the various archival collections available leads to a rethinking of key moments in this history of the knowledge of Otherness, internal and external, under continuous construction. Thanks to the opening of the archives and the amount of biographical data now available, historians of the Italian “anthropological” tradition are also invited to rethink the status of certain figures, from Lamberto Loria to Raffaele Pettazzoni, without forgetting lesser-known, even obscure, characters, for example ethnographer-missionaries. Pettazzoni, at the head of the scientific construction of an Italian path of religious anthropology which was clearly differentiated from Durkheimian sociology was, moreover, the very active craftsman of a university establishment of ethnology.

Needless to say, the Mussolini regime gave remarkable academic recognition to the study of folk traditions, notably through the creation of three university courses. The break with this paradigm was to be epistemological, ideological and aesthetic. In a word, the fall of fascism led to a political conversion of ethnological studies. Revisiting, by crossing several archival collections, the life work of Ernesto De Martino, a figure retrospectively perceived as the founder of ethnology at home after the Second World War, leads us to rethink the continuities and breaks produced by the twenty-year journey of fascism. The debates on folk culture based on the Gramscian opposition between hegemony and subordination fuelled the mobilization of left-wing intellectuals in the 1950s for the renewal of values and expressive languages. Ethnomusicology collections, neo-realistic photography and the rewriting of narrative traditions by literary avant-gardes are all ways of recreating poetics.

At the same time, the history of religions and ethnology at home replaced the essentialization of nations/peoples with a comparative study of the “compromise formations” that run through the religious history of Mediterranean societies, but also of the syncretic formations that accompany decolonization movements outside Europe. Chairs were created in the history of religions and ethnology at the universities of Bari and Cagliari, which belatedly gave a university foundation to a number of researchers. Those, like De Martino and Vittorio Lanternari (1918-2010), who trained at the Pettazzoni school built an Italian path in the international field of the study of religious syncretisms, a path that maintained a privileged dialogue with French ethnologists and sociologists. In parallel with this renaissance, several young Italian researchers were hosted at American universities while American researchers undertook community studies in Italy. In the 1960s, these first encounters gave rise to a North American-inspired cultural anthropology that took over from community studies, often conducted in the 1950s by foreign researchers with links to Italy in their biographical careers. At the same time, the Vatican continued to invest in ethnological training for its missionaries.

Since the mid-1980s, much work has made us aware of the institutions, intellectual traditions, working tools and achievements of these many “demo-ethno-anthropological” enterprises. These historiographic achievements can be renewed, particularly in the context of BEROSE and the research theme “History of Italian Anthropology”, through an ethnographic reading of the archives and biographical trajectories. It is centred on the interaction between, on the one hand, the experience of cultural Otherness and intimacy, and, on the other hand, the choice of models that allow them to be thought upon. The study of correspondence and anthropological journals may be combined with the reconstruction of networks of professional and militant sociability beyond the national framework. Along with the attention paid to individual mobility, they allow a more detailed approach to the political, intellectual and cultural commitments of scientists, whether academics, scholars or amateurs. In a nation that was not constituted as a state until 1860, the alliances and antagonisms between all these actors drew strong regional polarizations that lasted for nearly a century.

Giordana Charuty

This presentation is an abridged version of Charuty, Giordana, 2019.« Histoires croisées de l’anthropologie italienne (XIX^e-XXI^e siècle) » , in Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris.