Storia e storie dei territori. Memorie. Identità. Resistenza

ISSN: 2282-7536

• Historical anthropology series directed by Lino Gambacorta

The meaning of memory that we intend to keep in mind in the construction of this series of studies and research has an essential representation in the works of historical anthropology, especially by Nuto Revelli, as well as various theoretical references in the human sciences of the 900th century. The Memory is understood and treated here as a testimony of life on the part of the human body - the 'scars of the body', of which Baudrillard speaks -, an account of stories or parts of biographies inevitably impregnated with inaccuracies, ambiguities and contradictions but irreplaceable in its authenticity. (and this is the duty of the researcher, to be probed, collected, reported).
Zigmunt Baumann says about identity: Identity refers to the bonds that connect the ego to other people and the need for stability over time of these bonds; to the need for relationships you can rely on, to refer to to define yourself. An accentuation of this need is the search for cohesive identity; that is, adhering to stabilizing rules, judging on the basis of precedents, the known or guaranteed, remaining faithful to a logic of continuity and recognition.
The 'physical' capacity to resist makes sense in this context only in relation and total intersection with the attitude, the intention / tension and the political and cultural practice (the latter terms are ultimately indivisible) of shared resistance. There is therefore the question of 'to whom' you resist and that of 'how' you resist. In the perspective of this series, resisting as an attitude, conviction, construction of social behaviors and practices considers resistance to any political process in the broad sense (not merely institutional) of the term exercised as a (de facto) homologating dominion marked by the elimination of differences cultural, specific and deep-rooted ties with the various territories, baggage: of knowledge, community organizations, forms of economy, relationships with specifically natural environments that represent the 'historical' substance of the identity of organized human realities.
Ultimately, the stories of the territories, the stories lived in the specific territories that they impregnate and where the collective events and their contradictions are articulated, are nothing but the living and permanent flesh of history, beyond the simplifying and therefore mystifying macro-categories and on the other hand, sterile and misleading ideologisms. The central meaning of this publishing initiative is therefore precisely to make this meat of history speak.