Carlo Levi e l’antropologia in Italia negli anni del secondo dopoguerra

From the immediate post-World War II period to the 1960s, Southern Italy was mainly taken as a synonym for an archaic rural world, which was regarded as static and backward in terms of its economic and social structures, and was studied as an anthropological category by means of a process involving the essentialization of certain of its characteristics. Within this framework, Basilicata (or rather Lucania, i.e., the name of the region that most frequently recurred in the literature and the cultural and scientific debate of that period) became a founding space for the epistemological renewal of Italian anthropology. This was due to its being a space that was both mythical and real: the sign of an archaic and isolated society and of a rural condition that was literarily portrayed as almost suspended in time and space, but also the symbol of a desire for redemption and human and social emancipation. It is fairly well established that the genesis of this Othering process can largely be traced back to the suggestions brought about by the publication of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a book that induced more than one scholar to choose southern Italy as their research area on the basis of its archaic characteristics and apparent exoticism. However, Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memorial narration, an anthropological novel almost, also seems to fully respond to the ethnographic writing feature of taking up the word on behalf of others, thus proposing itself as a model for ethnographic fieldwork aimed at conveying, in narrative form and with the tools of literary discourse, a life experience: at providing the opportunity to gaze into another world through a representation where the domains of the social and the symbolic, of the economic and the magical, of politics and everyday needs, of science and traditional knowledge are all harmoniously connected.