Anuac https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac <p><em>Anuac&nbsp;</em>is the international peer-reviewed, open access journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology (SIAC).<br> <em>Anuac</em>&nbsp;fosters and promotes the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and&nbsp;publishes original research contributions in all fields of social and cultural anthropology.<br> <em>Anuac</em>&nbsp;is ranked journal of “Classe A” for academic section 11/A5 by ANVUR (the national agency in charge of evaluating university and research institutes in Italy). <em>Anuac</em> is&nbsp;indexed/abstracted in Anthropological Literature (Harvard University),&nbsp;DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals),&nbsp;EBSCO Complementary index,&nbsp;ERIH Plus (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences).<br> <em>Anuac</em>&nbsp;accepts contributions in Italian, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.</p> Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale (SIAC) en-US Anuac 2239-625X <p align="JUSTIFY"><em>Anuac</em> is published under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> Attribution Licence 4.0. With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy their contribution. The work must be properly attributed to its author. It should be also mentioned that the work has been first published by the journal <em>Anuac</em>.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">Having published these contributions for the first time, <em>Anuac</em> will have the right to publish them integrally or partially as reprints or possibly as part of a thematic issue, in both digital and printed format.</p><p align="JUSTIFY">It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author or the journal. </p><p align="JUSTIFY"><img src="/public/journals/9/cc-by.png" alt="CC-By " /></p><h3>Photographs and other images</h3><p>Photographs and other images marked with the symbol Copyright © cannot be distributed. The readers of the journal or the users of the website can download photographs and other images that are not marked with the above mentioned symbol.</p> Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities from “marginal sites”: An introduction https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6064 <p>In this introduction we map the tradition of thoughts and state of the art on the study of finance and financialization in relation to the anthropological Italian debate. We suggest a particular attention towards ethnographic approaches “from the margins” of finance that can help build a non unilinear and west-centric agenda for studying financial expansion also in the Italian context. Then we discuss conceptual trends on financial expansion that emerged in the international anthropological debate after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), underlining a shift from the “double movement” analysis to the rediscovery and the reframing of relational approach. Thinking of financialization beyond the dualistic interpretative prism that sets finance against society, movement against counter movement, center against periphery we invite to conceptualize financial expansion as the result of a variety of independent but related processes which must be apprehended holistically. We consider ethnography as an opportunity to unravel the multiple spatial and temporal axes and kinds of processes that constitute financial expansion. When analyzed ethnographically, financialization seems to proceed by simultaneous movements and countermovement resulting from the confrontation among increasingly financialized subjects. This interactive practice produces attempts that, despite the power asymmetries, might result in unplanned transformative outcomes.</p> Zaira T. Lofranco Fabio Mattioli ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 1 22 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6064 Bringing dissent to shareholders’ meetings: An investigation into critical shareholding https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/5104 <p>This article deals with critical shareholding, that is, the action of non-profit organizations that resorts to involvement in corporate ownership as shareholders to promote socially responsible corporate behaviours. Based on the combined use of sociological and anthropological tools, I focus on the attendance of annual general meetings (AGMs) as a gateway to understand the potential and the limits of the transformative power of marginal actors in investment capitalism. My findings suggest that confrontation through share ownership exerts transformative pressures not only on companies but also on activist organizations, which over time are called to redefine their skills, actions and intervention logic to pursue their goals more effectively and report them to their stakeholders. Thus, the analysis of the phenomenon reveals the dialectical nature of the processes that take place in and around the AGM, giving them a place in the complex dynamics of movements and countermovements of finance and their mutual relationship.</p> Joselle Dagnes ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 23 50 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5104 State action and the movements of finance during the Spanish housing crisis: Alleviating or amplifying the social impacts of financialization? https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/5122 <p>This paper addresses the entanglements, complicities and collisions between financialization processes and state action during the current housing crisis in Spain, with a focus on Catalonia and the Barcelona area in the last decade. Departing from the assumption that housing financialization has been a major driver of the crisis, state interventions, including housing policies and legal regulations imposed on financial and real estate markets and on landlord-tenant relations, will be interpreted as modulators that may either alleviate or amplify the impacts of financial dynamics on people’s access to adequate housing. Drawing on the cases of several legal reforms, we will illustrate variegated attitudes towards financial extraction adopted by different state agencies. It will be thus shown how, in the rare cases where the state has tried to alleviate the social harms derived from financial extraction, reforms have been superficial, have arrived late, and have failed to reverse the structural drivers of the crisis. We will thus try to shed some light into the nature of state action in the face of housing financialization, contending that states should not be understood as outsides with respect to finance, as, to the contrary, they are part of finance’s very conditions of possibility.</p> Irene Sabaté ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 51 72 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5122 Disruption, interrupted: Startups and social challenges in a government accelerator https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/5106 <p>This article investigates how the dual demands of finance and social impact affect the relationships of founders to disruption, as a rhetorical function, material goal and relational context. Building on recent studies of innovation and entrepreneurship such as Bardinelli (2019), Irani (2019) and Lindtner (2020), the article offers a nuanced view of disruption that complicates unidimensional narratives of financialization as a singular force and accounts for the complexity of reconciling financial and social interests. Based on data gathered at a startup participating in a government-funded accelerator program in Melbourne, Australia, we analyse how the logics of finance impact entrepreneurial experience in an early-stage social enterprise startup. Our data suggests that, in their attempts to attract the attention and funding of financial investors, founders of early-stage startups focus more on proving the value of their disruption in a rhetorical sense than on refining the materially disruptive potential of their products to ensure real world social impact. By analysing disruption through a relational lens, we identify four layers of disruption (product innovation; social value; financial return; and labour relations) to which early-stage startups are aligned, and through which their products and personal lives are transformed.</p> Harriette Richards Lani Sellers Fabio Mattioli ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 73 92 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5106 Sacred residues in museums: A membrane ethnography of Taiwanese religious heritage https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/5853 <p>This article reflects on the existing dynamics between the sacredness derived from the museumification of religious items and the sacredness of those artefacts employed in rituals that survive in museum spaces as a trace or&nbsp;sacred residue&nbsp;(Beekers 2016). Which sacrality predominates, and how do they influence each other? Through an ethnography conducted in several Taiwanese museums, the article probes into a stratification of sacralities: the encounter between Buddhist and Chinese religious practitioners with museum artefacts’ sacred residue reflects complex and unpredictable dynamics. The ethnography presented in this article is defined&nbsp;as membrane ethnography&nbsp;since the relationship between humans and matter is like a membrane that unites and simultaneously separates, filters and subjectifies.&nbsp;This article extends the meaning of sacred residue by examining the reproducibility of religious artefacts through technological or experiential means. The latter, rather than determining the artefacts’ inauthenticity, makes the sacred residue more explicit. Furthermore, the ethnography of the membrane shows how non-European contexts are permeated by porosity and interdependency between the secular and the sacred of religious heritage, thus preventing a dichotomisation between museums and ritual contexts for analysing the implied dynamics between them instead.</p> Valentina Gamberi ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 93 116 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5853 More seats at “The Philosopher’s Table”: The reinvigoration of a multicultural community association in southern Italy during and post-pandemic https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/5760 <p>How voluntary associations promote social interaction across difference and contribute to building diverse communities are questions of relevance in Italy and beyond. To be successful, associations must earn and maintain reputations as groups worth joining. To do so can be challenging, given that they bring together people with different life experiences and languages. To thrive, groups must remain flexible and adaptive. This article addresses an under-considered type of voluntary association that contributes to building relationships and shared sense of community across cultural boundaries: the multicultural social club. The report is based upon early findings from an on-going ethnographic study in Puglia concerning the aspirations, activities, and life-cycles of multicultural clubs. It describes how members of one organization – The Philosopher’s Table&nbsp;– launched themselves on a path of reflection and reinvigoration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their objectives were to discover ways better to serve existing members, assist the community, and increase membership. Among the club’s noteworthy characteristics is that it includes locally-born Italians and expatriates in nearly equal number. Expatriates rarely receive attention in discussions of diverse communities in Italy. Findings from this project help address that knowledge gap, contribute to current interest in conviviality in multicultural settings, and extend understandings of the dynamics and life-cycles of social leisure groups that are diverse by design.</p> Anne Schiller Matthew Zingraff ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 117 132 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5760 A journey between literature and anthropology https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6065 <p>Review article of Andrea Canobbio, <em>La traversata notturna</em>, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2022, pp. 520; Renzo Guolo,&nbsp;<em>Michel Leiris etnologo</em>, Milano, Meltemi, 2022, pp. 274.</p> Carlo Capello ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 133 142 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6065 Francesco Apergi, I mezzadri e i trovatelli: Famiglie e senza famiglia nei poderi del Mugello (secoli XIX-XX), Firenze, Società editrice fiorentina, 2023, pp. 108 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6050 <p>Book review of&nbsp;Francesco Apergi, <em>I mezzadri e i trovatelli: Famiglie e senza famiglia nei poderi del Mugello (secoli XIX-XX)</em>, Firenze, Società editrice fiorentina, 2023, pp. 108.</p> Dario Nardini ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 143 146 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6050 Alessandra Brivio, Serpenti, sirene e sacerdotesse: Antropologia dei mondi acquatici in Africa occidentale, Roma, Viella, 2023, pp. 216 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6053 <p>Book review of Alessandra Brivio, <em>Serpenti, sirene e sacerdotesse: Antropologia dei mondi </em><em>acquatici in Africa occidentale,</em> Roma, Viella, 2023, pp. 216.</p> Valentina Vergottini ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 147 150 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6053 Alessandra Ciucci, The voice of the rural: Music, poetry and masculinity among migrant Moroccan men in Umbria, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2022, pp. 228 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6054 <p>Book review of Alessandra Ciucci,&nbsp;<em>The voice of the rural: Music, poetry and masculinity among migrant Moroccan men in Umbria</em>, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2022, pp. 228.</p> Alessandra Persichetti ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 151 154 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6054 Gabriella D’Agostino, Vincenzo Matera, eds, Storie dell’antropologia, Milano, UTET, 2022, pp. 635 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6055 <p>Book review of Gabriella D’Agostino, Vincenzo Matera, eds, <em>Storie dell’antropologia</em>, Milano, UTET, 2022, pp. 635.</p> Domenico Branca ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 155 158 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6055 Serena Olcuire, Indecorose: Sex work e resistenza al governo dello spazio pubblico nella città di Roma, Verona, Ombre corte, 2023, pp. 236 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6058 <p>Book review of Serena Olcuire, <em>Indecorose: Sex work e resistenza al governo dello spazio pubblico nella città di Roma</em>, Verona, Ombre corte, 2023, pp. 236.</p> Chiara Cacciotti ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 159 162 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6058 Denise Pettinato, Etnografia al bancone: Spazi, corpi, oggetti nelle pratiche del bar, Afterword by Pietro Meloni, Pisa, Pacini, 2022, pp. 231 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6060 <p>Book review of Denise Pettinato, <em>Etnografia al bancone: Spazi, corpi, oggetti nelle pratiche del bar</em>, Afterword by Pietro Meloni, Pisa, Pacini, 2022, pp. 231.</p> Leonardo Piasere ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 163 166 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6060 Antonello Ricci, Sguardi lontani: Fotografia ed etnografia nella prima metà del Novecento, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2023, pp. 237 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6059 <p>Book review of Antonello Ricci, <em>Sguardi lontani: Fotografia ed etnografia nella prima metà del Novecento. Con immagini di Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Griaule, Renato Boccassino, Lamberto Loria e Raffaele Corso, Gregory Bateson e Margaret Mead</em>, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2023, pp. 237.</p> Cecilia Pennacini ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 167 170 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6059 Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the idea of degrowth communism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 276 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6061 <p>Book review of Kohei Saito, <em>Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the idea of degrowth communism</em>, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 276.</p> Onofrio Romano ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 171 174 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6061 Francesco Scotti, Per una storia della riforma psichiatrica in Umbria: Nascita ed evoluzione di una psichiatria di comunità in Umbria, Perugia, Morlacchi, 2021 (vol. 1, pp. 448), 2022 (vol. 2, pp. 506) https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6062 <p>Book review of Francesco Scotti, <em>Per una storia della riforma psichiatrica in Umbria: Nascita ed evoluzione di una psichiatria di comunità in Umbria</em>, Perugia, Morlacchi, 2021 (vol. 1, pp. 448), 2022 (vol. 2, pp. 506).</p> John Foot ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 175 178 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6062 Patrick Williams, Tsiganes ou ces inconnus qu’on appelle aussi Gitans, Bohémiens, Roms, Gypsies, Manouches, Rabouins, Gens du voyage…, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022, pp. 601 https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/6063 <p>Book review of Patrick Williams, <em>Tsiganes ou ces inconnus qu’on appelle aussi Gitans, Bohémiens, Roms, Gypsies, Manouches, Rabouins, Gens du voyage…</em>, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022, pp. 601.</p> Lise Foisneau ##submission.copyrightStatement## 2023-12-31 2023-12-31 12 2 179 182 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6063