Tra il dire e il fare c'è di mezzo il sentire: le emozioni nella letteratura e nell’etnografia di Giulio Angioni

Carlo Maxia

2020-01-01

---

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to examine the interrelationship between anthropological essays and literary writing, with Giulio Angioni, one of the pioneering figures in Italy who integrated anthropological texts with the composition of short stories, novels, and poems, serving as a point of reference. His scientific production, which began in the second half of the 1960s, absorbed the author's commitment until the end of the 1980s, when literature became his main means of expression and reflection. The literary field seems to collect and revive not only the author's anthropological knowledge and theoretical reflection, but also certain attitudes and approaches that have proved particularly productive in the ethnographic experience, such as sensitivity, emotions, feelings, empathy, traditionally excluded until then from the toolbox of the anthropological method, at least in Italy. Angioni, who, thanks to this attitude, had succeeded in effectively documenting the self-representations, lifestyles and work of the people of rural Sardinia, seemed at a certain point to need to go beyond descriptive systematisation and project these collective experiences into more specific trajectories, paradoxically into more 'true' stories. The horizon of literary histories, in fact, while guaranteed by an anthropological background, allows the emergence not only of voices, bodies and feelings, but also of those phenomena that hardly find space in the order of ethnographic representations: the inconsistencies, the provisionalities, the contradictions, the uncertainties, the afterthoughts.