Leonardo Piasere | Università Degli Studi Di Verona (original) (raw)
Call for panel & papers by Leonardo Piasere
Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l'anthropologie, 2023
L’article analyse le changement que Samuel Augustini ab Hortis (1729-1792) a introduit dans les é... more L’article analyse le changement que Samuel Augustini ab Hortis (1729-1792) a introduit dans les études tsiganes au regard de la littérature antérieure. Mieux connu pour ses recherches minéralogiques et redécouvert il y a seulement quelques décennies en tant que chercheur sur les Zigeuner, il est considéré comme le fondateur des études modernes sur les Roms. Originaire de la région de Spiš (aujourd’hui en Slovaquie), où il a passé sa vie comme pasteur luthérien, il était étroitement lié aux cercles des Lumières de la Hongrie des Habsbourg, qui étaient proches de la politique de l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse, mais aussi sensibles aux percées « ethnologiques » d’Ádám Ferenc Kollár. Sa monographie sur les « Tsiganes de Hongrie », parue presque anonymement en feuilleton en 1775-1776, dans un hebdomadaire viennois puis « absorbée » par Heinrich Grellmann de manière altérée dans un livre publié en 1783 (qui devint un best-seller européen) fut rapidement oubliée. La structure de la monographie d’Augustini ab Hortis et les données ethnographiques novatrices qu’elle contient ont influencé les études ultérieures sur les Roms tout au long du XIXe siècle et pendant une bonne partie du XXe. Cette littérature ultérieure n’a cependant pas réussi à développer l’approche comparative et déconstructive que la monographie originale avait déjà suggérée, et qui a caractérisé les Romani Studies au sein de l’anthropologie sociale des dernières décennies.
From the European South, 2023
An Italian Racist Among the Prostitutes of Bucharest: Guido Landra’s Anti-Gypsyism. After co- dra... more An Italian Racist Among the Prostitutes of Bucharest: Guido Landra’s Anti-Gypsyism. After co- drafting the “Manifesto of Race” with Mussolini in 1938, Landra lived in Romania from 1941 to 1945, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a propagandist and teacher at the Italian Cultural Centre in Bucharest. In this capacity, he carried out research on the city's prostitutes between 1944 and 1945. This article investigates the resulting study, published in 1949, when Landra had become a 'democratic citizen', revealing the influence of the eugenic theories developed in Romania in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Landra's racism and sexism. The brief reconstruction of Landra's racist biography highlights his transition to radical anti-Gypsyism at the moment when the radical anti-Semitism he had previously 'scientifically' legitimised became politically compromising. Published in a prestigious legal journal, Landra's study is emblematic of the permanence of the most radical forms of racism in postwar intellectual Italy.
Lares. Quadrimestrale di studi demoetnoantropologici, 2021
On 25th April 1942, the Superior Council for Demography and Race approved what should have become... more On 25th April 1942, the Superior Council for Demography and Race approved what should have become the new Fascist manifesto on the ‘Italian race’. The Commission of just seven people who drafted the text (that was made public only after the war), included two of the most prominent academic representatives of the anthropology and ethnography of the time: Sergio Sergi and Raffaele Corso.
Starting from the most recent historiographic reconstructions regarding fascism’s various racist theories, the article analyses the prevailing relations between these theories and the content of the new manifesto. Although politically uninfluen- tial, the existence of this new manifesto demonstrates that Italian anthropologists’ contribution to the racist ideologies of fascism was not only limited to famous names like Landra and Cipriani, but also involved academic anthropology in gen- eral: the history of anthropologies in Italy needs to be amply reconstructed.
Firenze, SEID Editori, 2012
Antigypsyism is one of the most widespread forms of racism in Europe as well as the least studied... more Antigypsyism is one of the most widespread forms of racism in Europe as well as the least studied and least opposed. Starting from certain characteristics of state-nations that have historically enacted specific political mechanisms to favour antigypsyism, the book analyses several unexpected scenarios in which this type of rarely studied discrimination occurs.
L’antiziganismo è una delle forme di razzismo più diffuse in Europa e contemporaneamente una delle meno studiate e delle meno combattute. Partendo da certe caratteristiche degli stati-nazione, che storicamente operano come messa in forma dell’antiziganismo, il volume analizza alcuni scenari, anche inaspettati, in cui si realizza questo tipo di discriminazione di cui ci si indigna così poco.
Antropologia pubblica, 2020
Ethnography and anthropology were born at different times and for different purposes, but from th... more Ethnography and anthropology were born at different times and for different purposes, but from the nineteenth century they began to construct a bond that was to grow stronger and stronger and that gave rise to the socio-cultural anthropology of the Boasian-Malinowskian mold. Because of their different epistemic bases, the relations between anthropology and ethnography have often been schizophrenic, in a sort of struggle for the primacy of one over the other and vice versa. In my speech I will summarize the state of the art of this confrontation-clash in contemporary international anthropology, but I will also try to put it in the context of the new challenges that ethnographic-anthropological research must face today:
1. Ethnography is increasingly used as a "qualitative method" in other research disciplines (and not only in sociology: pedagogy, political science, psychology, marketing...) and experiences a process that often deeply resembles its use and meaning. What posture should the socio-cultural anthropologist take towards the accreditation of this practical-theoretical-experiential knowledge that his discipline has built up with difficulty over decades but which now, thanks to recognition, diffusion and success, risks a process of de-anthropologization and epistemic metamorphosis?
2. The Boasian-Malinowskian anthropology was born at the time when the "primitives" did not read what the ethnographers wrote about them. The author of a monograph or an article could expect the objections made by his colleagues, who were often his only readers, but not by the "ethnographers" themselves. Times have long changed. Your colleagues continue to read you a little or a lot, but today it is also, if not above all, the natives who read you. And colleagues and indigenous people often oppose it. But while the former have as epistemic frame of reference the knowledge and construction of general anthropology, the latter have as epistemic frame of reference their own lives. The work of the ethnographer can be evaluated as the moment of one's own emancipation or defamation, with intermediate situations. Are the proposals for a dialogical ethnography and/or a collaborative ethnography sufficient in times when, in the whirling flow of information, the "ethnographers" rightly want to keep control of the impressions and representations to be offered of themselves to others? Beyond rhetoric, in a "world of objections" in the name of informational self-determination is socio-cultural anthropology really dying or is there room for resurrection?
3. Since 25 May 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in force, for which the protection of personal data has become a fundamental right of citizens. The first comparisons, between GDPR provisions and the way in which an anthropologist usually collects his data during ethnographic research, show a clear contrast that, at the very least, makes ethnography as practiced until now an illegal practice. Is it the death of anthropological ethnography at the moment of its maximum extra-disciplinary success? Especially for research funded by public institutions that provide for forms of computer storage, but not only, requests for informed consent, identity protection (and consequent direct and indirect "anonymisation") and regulation of access to data provide methods that can deeply affect the same process of construction of anthropological knowledge as has been followed until now. The GDPR poses challenges that force the anthropologist to a radical reconsideration of his work and to a close examination with the legal frameworks within which he operates, as well as reconsideration and comparison that must go far beyond the victim's grievances against the process, albeit real, of bureaucratization of research.
Call for papers for the V Conference of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology, "Collaborat... more Call for papers for the V Conference of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology, "Collaboration and Mutualism. Transformative Practices in Times of Crisis", Catania (Italy), December 14-17
Papers by Leonardo Piasere
Indiscipline. Rivista di scienze sociali, 2022
On the occasion of the new edition of Ernesto de Martino's famous book Morte e pianto rituale (19... more On the occasion of the new edition of Ernesto de Martino's famous book Morte e pianto rituale (1958), the author presents a brief methodological critique starting from some considerations on the chapter dedicated to Romanian funeral rituals.
Le culture della parentela. Un approccio cognitivo fuzzy
Il sistema di parentela e il parentado cognatico dei Rom Xoraxané
Fiabe - Michel de Certeau
Au coeur de l'occident : l'amour, la mort, la gitane
Romania's Roma. A Social-Historical Overview
L'ethnographe imparfait. Expérience et cognition en anthropologie
L'organisation productive d'un groupe de Rom xoraxané
Tsiganes provenant d'Europe de l'Est, installes dans la region de Verone. Analyse de leur... more Tsiganes provenant d'Europe de l'Est, installes dans la region de Verone. Analyse de leurs relations avec les autres Tsiganes Sinti, leur organisation sociale et economique, leurs rapports sociaux de production et la division du travail.
Roms. Une histoire européenne
I "plesnora": uomini di pace fra i Xoraxané
Roma and Romá in North-East Italy
The Housing Issue of Roma and Sinti in the Acts and Administrative Documents in Italy
Italia Romaní vol. VI Le migrazioni dei rom romeni in Italia
From Margutte to Cingar: The Archeology of an Image
Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l'anthropologie, 2023
L’article analyse le changement que Samuel Augustini ab Hortis (1729-1792) a introduit dans les é... more L’article analyse le changement que Samuel Augustini ab Hortis (1729-1792) a introduit dans les études tsiganes au regard de la littérature antérieure. Mieux connu pour ses recherches minéralogiques et redécouvert il y a seulement quelques décennies en tant que chercheur sur les Zigeuner, il est considéré comme le fondateur des études modernes sur les Roms. Originaire de la région de Spiš (aujourd’hui en Slovaquie), où il a passé sa vie comme pasteur luthérien, il était étroitement lié aux cercles des Lumières de la Hongrie des Habsbourg, qui étaient proches de la politique de l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse, mais aussi sensibles aux percées « ethnologiques » d’Ádám Ferenc Kollár. Sa monographie sur les « Tsiganes de Hongrie », parue presque anonymement en feuilleton en 1775-1776, dans un hebdomadaire viennois puis « absorbée » par Heinrich Grellmann de manière altérée dans un livre publié en 1783 (qui devint un best-seller européen) fut rapidement oubliée. La structure de la monographie d’Augustini ab Hortis et les données ethnographiques novatrices qu’elle contient ont influencé les études ultérieures sur les Roms tout au long du XIXe siècle et pendant une bonne partie du XXe. Cette littérature ultérieure n’a cependant pas réussi à développer l’approche comparative et déconstructive que la monographie originale avait déjà suggérée, et qui a caractérisé les Romani Studies au sein de l’anthropologie sociale des dernières décennies.
From the European South, 2023
An Italian Racist Among the Prostitutes of Bucharest: Guido Landra’s Anti-Gypsyism. After co- dra... more An Italian Racist Among the Prostitutes of Bucharest: Guido Landra’s Anti-Gypsyism. After co- drafting the “Manifesto of Race” with Mussolini in 1938, Landra lived in Romania from 1941 to 1945, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a propagandist and teacher at the Italian Cultural Centre in Bucharest. In this capacity, he carried out research on the city's prostitutes between 1944 and 1945. This article investigates the resulting study, published in 1949, when Landra had become a 'democratic citizen', revealing the influence of the eugenic theories developed in Romania in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Landra's racism and sexism. The brief reconstruction of Landra's racist biography highlights his transition to radical anti-Gypsyism at the moment when the radical anti-Semitism he had previously 'scientifically' legitimised became politically compromising. Published in a prestigious legal journal, Landra's study is emblematic of the permanence of the most radical forms of racism in postwar intellectual Italy.
Lares. Quadrimestrale di studi demoetnoantropologici, 2021
On 25th April 1942, the Superior Council for Demography and Race approved what should have become... more On 25th April 1942, the Superior Council for Demography and Race approved what should have become the new Fascist manifesto on the ‘Italian race’. The Commission of just seven people who drafted the text (that was made public only after the war), included two of the most prominent academic representatives of the anthropology and ethnography of the time: Sergio Sergi and Raffaele Corso.
Starting from the most recent historiographic reconstructions regarding fascism’s various racist theories, the article analyses the prevailing relations between these theories and the content of the new manifesto. Although politically uninfluen- tial, the existence of this new manifesto demonstrates that Italian anthropologists’ contribution to the racist ideologies of fascism was not only limited to famous names like Landra and Cipriani, but also involved academic anthropology in gen- eral: the history of anthropologies in Italy needs to be amply reconstructed.
Firenze, SEID Editori, 2012
Antigypsyism is one of the most widespread forms of racism in Europe as well as the least studied... more Antigypsyism is one of the most widespread forms of racism in Europe as well as the least studied and least opposed. Starting from certain characteristics of state-nations that have historically enacted specific political mechanisms to favour antigypsyism, the book analyses several unexpected scenarios in which this type of rarely studied discrimination occurs.
L’antiziganismo è una delle forme di razzismo più diffuse in Europa e contemporaneamente una delle meno studiate e delle meno combattute. Partendo da certe caratteristiche degli stati-nazione, che storicamente operano come messa in forma dell’antiziganismo, il volume analizza alcuni scenari, anche inaspettati, in cui si realizza questo tipo di discriminazione di cui ci si indigna così poco.
Antropologia pubblica, 2020
Ethnography and anthropology were born at different times and for different purposes, but from th... more Ethnography and anthropology were born at different times and for different purposes, but from the nineteenth century they began to construct a bond that was to grow stronger and stronger and that gave rise to the socio-cultural anthropology of the Boasian-Malinowskian mold. Because of their different epistemic bases, the relations between anthropology and ethnography have often been schizophrenic, in a sort of struggle for the primacy of one over the other and vice versa. In my speech I will summarize the state of the art of this confrontation-clash in contemporary international anthropology, but I will also try to put it in the context of the new challenges that ethnographic-anthropological research must face today:
1. Ethnography is increasingly used as a "qualitative method" in other research disciplines (and not only in sociology: pedagogy, political science, psychology, marketing...) and experiences a process that often deeply resembles its use and meaning. What posture should the socio-cultural anthropologist take towards the accreditation of this practical-theoretical-experiential knowledge that his discipline has built up with difficulty over decades but which now, thanks to recognition, diffusion and success, risks a process of de-anthropologization and epistemic metamorphosis?
2. The Boasian-Malinowskian anthropology was born at the time when the "primitives" did not read what the ethnographers wrote about them. The author of a monograph or an article could expect the objections made by his colleagues, who were often his only readers, but not by the "ethnographers" themselves. Times have long changed. Your colleagues continue to read you a little or a lot, but today it is also, if not above all, the natives who read you. And colleagues and indigenous people often oppose it. But while the former have as epistemic frame of reference the knowledge and construction of general anthropology, the latter have as epistemic frame of reference their own lives. The work of the ethnographer can be evaluated as the moment of one's own emancipation or defamation, with intermediate situations. Are the proposals for a dialogical ethnography and/or a collaborative ethnography sufficient in times when, in the whirling flow of information, the "ethnographers" rightly want to keep control of the impressions and representations to be offered of themselves to others? Beyond rhetoric, in a "world of objections" in the name of informational self-determination is socio-cultural anthropology really dying or is there room for resurrection?
3. Since 25 May 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in force, for which the protection of personal data has become a fundamental right of citizens. The first comparisons, between GDPR provisions and the way in which an anthropologist usually collects his data during ethnographic research, show a clear contrast that, at the very least, makes ethnography as practiced until now an illegal practice. Is it the death of anthropological ethnography at the moment of its maximum extra-disciplinary success? Especially for research funded by public institutions that provide for forms of computer storage, but not only, requests for informed consent, identity protection (and consequent direct and indirect "anonymisation") and regulation of access to data provide methods that can deeply affect the same process of construction of anthropological knowledge as has been followed until now. The GDPR poses challenges that force the anthropologist to a radical reconsideration of his work and to a close examination with the legal frameworks within which he operates, as well as reconsideration and comparison that must go far beyond the victim's grievances against the process, albeit real, of bureaucratization of research.
Call for papers for the V Conference of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology, "Collaborat... more Call for papers for the V Conference of the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology, "Collaboration and Mutualism. Transformative Practices in Times of Crisis", Catania (Italy), December 14-17
Indiscipline. Rivista di scienze sociali, 2022
On the occasion of the new edition of Ernesto de Martino's famous book Morte e pianto rituale (19... more On the occasion of the new edition of Ernesto de Martino's famous book Morte e pianto rituale (1958), the author presents a brief methodological critique starting from some considerations on the chapter dedicated to Romanian funeral rituals.
Le culture della parentela. Un approccio cognitivo fuzzy
Il sistema di parentela e il parentado cognatico dei Rom Xoraxané
Fiabe - Michel de Certeau
Au coeur de l'occident : l'amour, la mort, la gitane
Romania's Roma. A Social-Historical Overview
L'ethnographe imparfait. Expérience et cognition en anthropologie
L'organisation productive d'un groupe de Rom xoraxané
Tsiganes provenant d'Europe de l'Est, installes dans la region de Verone. Analyse de leur... more Tsiganes provenant d'Europe de l'Est, installes dans la region de Verone. Analyse de leurs relations avec les autres Tsiganes Sinti, leur organisation sociale et economique, leurs rapports sociaux de production et la division du travail.
Roms. Une histoire européenne
I "plesnora": uomini di pace fra i Xoraxané
Roma and Romá in North-East Italy
The Housing Issue of Roma and Sinti in the Acts and Administrative Documents in Italy
Italia Romaní vol. VI Le migrazioni dei rom romeni in Italia
From Margutte to Cingar: The Archeology of an Image
Italia romaní, vol. III: I Rom di antico insediamento dell’Italia centro-meridionale
Approche dénotationniste ou approche connotationniste : les terminologies de parenté tsiganes
Analyse comparative des terminologies de parente de plusieurs groupes tsiganes (communautes rom e... more Analyse comparative des terminologies de parente de plusieurs groupes tsiganes (communautes rom etudiees par M. Stewart et P. Williams, les Roma slovenes d'Italie, les Xoraxane Roma de Yougoslavie et les Kortorar de Transylvanie). L'A. montre comment chacun construit un systeme particulier a partir des terminologies qu'il emprunte aux societes voisines. Cette demonstration conduit a un nouveau regard sur le debat denotation / connotation qui oppose les anthropologues : l'analyse des systemes allocatifs montre des ecarts alors que certaines pratiques sociales auraient fait prevaloir le contraire et l'analyse des terminologies de reference montre des modalites de formations semblables malgre leur heterogeneite apparente
La Chiesa nomade. Per un'antropologia storica dell'evangelizzazione cattolica dei Rom e Sinti in Italia
The research leading to these results comes from MIGROM, "Dealing with diversity and cohesion: th... more The research leading to these results comes from MIGROM, "Dealing with diversity and cohesion: the case of the Roma in the European Union", a project funded by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme (GA319901).
Educazione romanì: uno scarto d'enfasi
L'educazione dei bambini sinti e rom: risultati preliminari di una ricerca europea