New Anthropologies of Italy by Paolo Heywood

New Anthropologies of Italy by Paolo Heywood

Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organised crime and heritage. This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe.

“Heywood has done an admirable job in compiling this collection of essays… The overall quality of the selections is very good, and they all share a standardized format—an introduction, a discussion based on textual sources and fieldwork, and a conclusion, followed by endnotes and bibliography — making them ideal for advanced students and scholars… An afterword, succinct but insightful, brings together the common threads emerging from the varied essays and valorizes anthropological research as a useful tool in combating fake news and racism” • Choice

“This is an outstanding and very timely collection that will make a notable and innovative contribution to the field of Italian studies and to the anthropology of Europe more generally. The volume gives a really clear illustration of how classic themes in the anthropology of Italy/Southern Europe/the Mediterranean remain salient (e.g. organized crime, politics, heritage) but have evolved with new and emergent trends...For this reason the volume will be a valuable resource beyond the localized field of Italian anthropology, for anyone interested in key themes in contemporary modernity like migration, populism and heritage.” • Paola Filippucci, University of Cambridge

“This is a necessary, well-organized and timely book. It tackles a set of conceptual and methodological concerns thoroughly and comprehensively that are central to anthropology and Italian history.” • Hannah Malone, University of Groningen

Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory (Berghahn, 2018), Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism (Cornell University Press, forthcoming), and the co-editor of Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (Cornell University Press, 2023).