Abstract:

How does the construction of fieldwork change when we expand beyond the “village” (in the sense of Malinowski), to investigate and assemble different scales of analysis? In this paper, I explore the role of fieldwork as built and delimited by specific, historically and theoretically situated research practices, making use of evolutions in the framework of my approach to “economic spaces” during my early fieldwork in the south of Italy. I look back at the intellectual environment of anthropology in Rome during the 1980s, paying attention to the kind of fieldwork that we conducted within one of the traditions of Italian anthropological studies. I then examine the “expansion” of fieldwork from my own experience during the study of the economic aspects of social phenomena.

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