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Politics Within Anthropology

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Abstract

The goal of the chapter is to trace and highlight the effects of the discovery of history and consequently of politics (and ethics) within the production of anthropological knowledge, also, though not only, through ethnography. In particular, the essay runs through Antonio Gramsci’s intuitions regarding the political potential of popular culture, and connects them to the developments of the Italian line of reflection, which are not always linear and sometimes ambivalent. It reveals the impossibility of a “neutral” anthropology and the power of a political sensitivity in the approach, ethnographic or otherwise, to social and cultural phenomena. The text also highlights that the Gramscian conceptualization of popular culture, which had and continues to have a lot of influence on cultural analysis, inside and outside anthropology, all over the world, has been elaborated in the enclosure of a cell.

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  1. Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus, Italy

    Vincenzo Matera

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  1. Vincenzo Matera
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  1. Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Ravenna Campus, Italy

    Vincenzo Matera

  2. Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Angela Biscaldi

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Matera, V. (2021). Politics Within Anthropology. In: Matera, V., Biscaldi, A. (eds) Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51720-5_8

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