Fieldwork and changing scales: The analysis of different economic spaces
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3523
Come si modifica la costruzione del terreno di ricerca quando estendiamo il nostro sguardo oltre il “villaggio” (nel senso in cui lo intendeva Malinowski) per indagare e comporre diverse scale di analisi? In questo testo, esploro il ruolo del fieldwork in quanto costruito e delimitato da specifiche pratiche di ricerca, storicamente e teoricamente situate, prendendo in considerazione i cambiamenti nel mio proprio approccio agli “spazi economici” durante il mio primo lavoro sul campo nel Sud dell’Italia. Ripercorro l’ambiente intellettuale dell’antropologia a Roma negli anni ‘80, prestando attenzione al tipo di lavoro sul campo che abbiamo condotto all’interno di una delle tradizioni degli studi antropologici italiani. Esamino quindi l’“espansione” del lavoro sul campo partendo dalla mia esperienza personale nello studio degli aspetti economici dei fenomeni sociali.
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Valeria Siniscalchi
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Fieldwork and changing scales: The analysis of different economic spaces
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Valeria Siniscalchi
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Fieldwork and changing scales: The analysis of different economic spaces
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                                            2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 71-94




Fieldwork and changing scales
The analysis of different economic spaces
Valeria SINISCALCHI
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales




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 article, 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.

KEYWORDS: FIELDWORK, SPACES, SCALES, ECONOMIC ANTHROPOLOGY, ITALY.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Valeria Siniscalchi
Fieldwork and changing scales: The analysis of different economic spaces
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 71-94.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3523
72                                                                            VALERIA SINISCALCHI



   How does the construction of fieldwork change when we expand beyond
the “village” to investigate and assemble different scales of analysis? In this
article, 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 Italy1. Fieldwork is probably the first specific
element, both distinctive and controversial, of anthropological practice. The
empirical dimension is not a prerogative of anthropology; other social
sciences also take qualitative and ethnographic approaches. The proximity
with other qualitative postures requires us to clarify the relationship with
the «reference reality» (Olivier de Sardan 2008) in each discipline.
Malinowski considered and presented fieldwork as a unique moment in
which anthropologists do anthropology, living with real people, sharing their
activities and language:
      In Ethnography, the writer is his own chronicler and the historian at the same
      time, while his sources are no doubt easily accessible, but also supremely
      elusive and complex; they are not embodied in fixed, material documents, but
      in the behaviour and in the memory of living men (Malinowski 1972 [1922]: 3).

   The radical critique of anthropology during the 1980s involved writing
and authorship, and also ethnography (Clifford, Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988),
producing changes in the way we conceive fieldwork. Clarifying the
conditions of research and taking into account the presence of the
researcher in the analysis, are now seen as necessary elements to make the
anthropological work credible (Kilani 1995): the field exists only through the
presence of the researcher and by his extended observations. It is probably
even more clear today that the field does not exist outside the delimitation
and framing employed by the anthropologist during the research. This
framing, which changes depending on the observer, the object, the
theoretical perspective adopted, and the characteristics of the terrain itself,
also reveals the arbitrariness of our ethnographic choices. But arbitrariness
does not make this spatial and temporal fragment of reality less relevant for


1. This text is a rewriting of the first part of my Habilitation à diriger des recherches, defended
at Aix-Marseille University in July 2017 (Siniscalchi 2017b). A first draft of this text was
presented during the Third Biennial Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol, the symposium
o n The Malinowskian Legacy in Ethnography (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, September
21-22, 2017). I have been able to improve this text thanks to the exchanges we had during
the symposium and the critical comments and suggestions of Susana Narotzky and Paolo
Viazzo.


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                              73


understanding social phenomena. In the late 1990s, Akhil Gupta and James
Ferguson extended the debate, analyzing the field as the site, method, and
the specific location of the anthropologist (1997b, 1997c). Introducing the
collective book Anthropological Locations, they asked «What are we to do
with a discipline that loudly rejects received ideas of “the local”, even while
ever more firmly insisting on a method that takes it for granted?» (1997c: 4).
In this article I return to the intellectual environment of anthropology as it
was practiced in Rome during the 1980s, with particular attention to the
delimitation of the fieldwork that we conducted within one of the traditions
of Italian anthropological studies. I then look at the “expansion” of the
fieldwork in my own experience, realized through the study of the economic
aspects of social phenomena, and through concepts of scale, economic space
and industrial districts.

Going back the Roman school of ethnology
   In 1986, when I began my studies at the University of Rome La Sapienza,
the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia offered Italy’s only ethno-anthropological
program leading to a doctorate. The Istituto di Etnologia (Institute of
Ethnology) was located on the ground floor of the main building of the
Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. Its physical presence at the university
constituted a visible mark reflecting the history of the discipline and its
institutionalization in the university in Rome. In 1975, Vinigi Grottanelli –
the first to hold the title of chair of ethnology of La Sapienza – changed the
name of the Istituto delle Civilità primitive (Institute of Primitive Civilizations)
to the Instituto di Etnologia, but the ancient name was still inscribed above
the entryway. He had contributed to its creation after the Second World War,
in 1947, as well as that of the Scuola di perfezionamento in scienze etnologiche
(a post-graduate school in ethnological studies). During several decades, the
Scuola di perfezionamento, directed by Raffaele Petazzoni2, had a similar
function to the later doctorate of research 3, and represented the
anthropological training of a number of Italian scholars (Ernesto De Martino,
among others). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Istituto di Etnologia of Sapienza
thus became one of the important centers of Italian anthropology and

2. Raffaele Petazzoni held the chair of history of religions and that one of ethnological
studies, before the creation of the first chair in this discipline.
3. The doctorate of research in Italy was instituted later (see DPR 382, 11 July 1980). It was
only in 1986 that the first doctorate in anthropology appeared in La Sapienza, with three
positions. Few universities in Italy offered doctoral positions in anthropology. This number
remained constant until the budget restrictions of recent years, making La Sapienza one of
the important training centers for anthropological studies.

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ethnology (Gaillard 2004: 201; see also Alliegro 2011; Viazzo 2017). In the
1980s, the institutes were absorbed by the university departments and no
longer existed formally in the university's organization. But the places
haven't changed: there, in the institute's cramped spaces, submerged in the
books and journals that cover the main room's walls from floor to ceiling, the
leap towards other societies and other universes was almost immediate.
   At that time, the choice to frequent the Istituto di Etnologia was not simply
the start of your training in anthropology. It was also the choice,
unconscious, of an academic field – in Bourdieu's sense – precisely situated,
that of ethnology of the scuola romana d’etnologia (Roman school of
ethnology). This “branch” of Italian anthropology differed both
intellectually and institutionally between the study of tradizioni popolari (the
history of “popular traditions” or folklore) on one side, and the Italian
cultural anthropology on the other4. For those who, like me, began their
training in the framework of the Roman school of ethnology, the distance
between these branches of Italian anthropology became evident gradually,
over the course of the lessons and required reading that was primarily
comprised of works from the literature in English and French.
   It wasn't until several years later, after the retirement of Bernardo
Bernardi – a well-known Africanist, specialized in age classes (see Bernardi
1990) who maintained an independent position at the heart of the Roman
context – that the existence of factions became flagrant inside the Facoltà di
Lettere e Filosofia. An ideological and methodological border existed between
the researchers associated with the Istituto di Etnologia and a second chair in
ethnology. Bernardi was succeeded by another scholar, Luigi M. Lombardi
Satriani, who was the nephew of folklorist Raffaele Lombardi Satriani, and
likewise a specialist in popular traditions, and belonged to another academic
faction. Two ways of conceiving and practicing anthropology faced each
other on either of this border5. One was a product of the Italian trends in
demologia (the study of popular traditions) inherited from Ernesto De
Martino and studies on the studies following the tradition of historicism. It
reflected a Gramscian reading of the “working/popular classes” and the
Italian “ethnological” contexts. Signorini (1992: 21-24) denounced the near
absence of field investigations in this branch of Italian anthropology, the
4. Represented by Tullio Tentori, who was strongly influenced by the North American
culture and personality school at the time (see Viazzo 2017).
5. These clashes between specialists of “popular traditions” and “ethnologists” were not
limited to the sole area of La Sapienza's Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia: they were the local
expression of conflicts and power struggles nationally in recruitment policies and in the
distribution of university positions (see Palumbo 2013).


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                           75


demologia, and the application of rigid interpretative frameworks that did
not allow us to grasp the contextual complexity of social studies. The
tradition on the opposite side of the border was inscribed with the
theoretical frameworks of British social anthropology, traditionally
functionalist or structural-functionalist, oriented towards the English-
speaking world, and partially to French anthropology. This second tradition
considered history not as a human condition – the «being in history» of De
Martino – but as an objectifiable history, an ensemble of the traces of the
past (see Pavanello 2012: 18). It privileged fieldwork in countries outside of
Europe, following that of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and
Raymond Firth. Italo Signorini – who supervised my tesi di laurea and then
my PhD thesis – was a relentless defender of an anthropology founded on
thorough knowledge of contexts, one that requires a rigorous study of the
literature and extensive immersion on the terrain 6. More generally, the most
important element that this second tradition defended was a specific
conception (and imagination) of fieldwork. This also acted as an element of
differentiation from other Italian perspectives.

Ethnological missions: terrains of research and training
   Italo Signorini led different missioni etnologiche (ethnological [research]
missions, according to the “local” terminology), in Africa and in Mexico. In
1983, he opened one more, the Missione etnologica nel Sannio, in the Italian
region of Campania. All these missions were conceived as collective terrains
– even when some work was differentiated in time from others – in order to
enable these students to advance new hypotheses in direct dialogue with the
anthropological tradition that had preceded them. How was the South of
Italy analyzed and what kind of place did it have in this particular
anthropological framework? At the time, doing research on an Italian terrain
was something new for the scholars of the Ethnological Institute. But for
Italo Sgnorini, opening this research field did not indicate a rapprochement
with the Italian approaches to the history of folklore (demologia and storia
delle tradizioni popolari). This research location – particularly the small town
of San Marco dei Cavoti – situated in the Apennines, less than 400 km from
Rome, was primarily conceived as a nearby terrain for initiation and
experimentation in Americanist and Africanist anthropological research
methods. It was not specifically intended as an opportunity to examine

6. Starting at the end of the 1960s, Italo Sgnorini conducted his fieldwork on the Nzema in
Ghana, the Hauve on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and then the Nahua in the Sierra Norte of
Puebla, Mexico.

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southern Italy with “exotic” perspectives. As Maria Minicuci remembers it,
«[Italo Signorini] opened this type of space with the precise idea […] that a
certain research field and its confrontation with the [anthropological]
tradition could contribute to a rethinking of the anthropological categories
and concepts acquired elsewhere» (1994: 646).
   San Marco dei Cavoti was effectively a research space conceived to be
complementary to the Ghanaian and Mexican terrains. The anthropology
practiced there needed to have the same characteristics as the research in
foreign countries: as if we were working in Ghana or Mexico, we were
required to spend longer periods in the field, aligning with Malinowski’s
legacy on fieldwork (see Malinowski 1972 [1922]: 2-11) 7. Our perspective was
formed primarily from studying classic texts from British anthropology, such
as Firth, Radcliffe Brown and Leach, but also Gluckman or Turner. These
authors would allow us to find the best ethnographic distance within this
close context, even if the geographic and cultural proximity of San Marco dei
Cavoti was misleading8. The anthropology of the Mediterranean, as well as
the ethnological works from France constituted our comparative framework 9.
   San Marco was not conceived simply as a training ground to familiarize
students and scientists with the difficulties of ethnographic research. The
choice of themes, “attributed” to one or the other, responded to a
“monographical” finality. From the perspective of scientists in the Roman
school, we were contributing to a recomposition of the puzzle of this society
and this place. At a distance in time of a few years later, we were like other
teams that had, in the same spirit, done this for the Huave (Signorini 1979)
or the Nzema (Grottanelli 1977, 1978), following the model of what Vinigi
Grottanelli called a «grande monografia etnica integrale» (a large, integral

7. «[…] As they knew that I would thrust my nose into everything, even where a well-
mannered native would not dream of intruding, they finished by regarding me as part and
parcel of their life, a necessary evil or nuisance» (Malinowski 1972 [1922]: 6).
8. San Marco dei Cavoti (alt. 700 m), around 4,000 inhabitants in 1990, is located 40 km from
Benevento, in the center of the Campania region, close to Apulia. The difficulty and scarcity
of roadways and railways between the capital and this small Samnium city, as well as the
distinct dialect of the region, contributed to a pronounced spaesamento (disorientation).
9. If the works on France were included in this range of references (Zonabend, Verdier,
Bromberger, Ravis Giordani, Augustins, Segalen, Salitot), those of Italian anthropologists on
Italy (Lombardi Satriani, Faeta, Signorelli, Gallini, De Martino, etc.), except in some cases,
were excluded. Even though they were not part of my training, I have read the studies of
Italian anthropologists that worked in the theoretical framework of Marxist anthropology.
The impression that I took away from these studies is that, in a part of them, often the
fieldwork, only fed and confirmed the theoretical framework.


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                             77


ethnic monograph) (Pavanello 2012: 20). This model influenced the general
approach to fieldwork of researchers working inside these ethnological
missions, including that one where I worked in southern Italy.
      This terrain [San Marco dei Cavoti] became a center where diverse
      competencies and interests converged, where techniques, research
      perspectives, and different methods were tested. It is without a doubt the only
      community where, in recent times, we have the largest number of publications,
      new theses, articles, and monographic works, concerning the same place as
      seen from several angles (Minicuci 1994: 646).

   We did not work in teams, and exchanges between us, when they existed,
were based on friendship, or personal and intellectual relationships. Each
researcher conducted her or his own fieldwork, and a chronological distance
separated the work of one from that of the others. But the previous research
conducted by those who had preceded us was considered a starting point for
each of us in our own work. Thinking back to the work we did in the
Samnium, we were actually operating within a framework that recalled
Signorini’s Gente di laguna (1979), even if the pieces that composed it were
combined over time. Most likely, Italo Signorini had never thought of our
research in a unitary way, nor had he really envisaged a Gente di montagna.
More than a concrete editorial project, the case of San Marco represented a
posture of research. But our ethnographies contributed to the construction
and delimitation of San Marco as a “place” in itself10.

The missing element, or the place of economic anthropology
   After the research on the local kinship system and the spiritual kinship
(Palumbo 1991), other researchers were interested in local therapists,
conceptions of the disease (Pandolfi 1991), and religious rituals in San Marco
dei Cavoti11. In this collective “monograph”, one field remained unexplored:
economic relationships and activities.
   The work on economic anthropology – which can be traced to
Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific – was most prolific and visible
in the decades between 1950 and 1970. At the time, the controversies
between substantivists and formalists focused the international debates

10. At that period, event if we read Geertz (1988) or Clifford and Marcus’ works (1986)
among others – this literature was progressively acquired by the library of the Istituto di
Etnologia – the radical critique of anthropology was not still integrated in our training and
in the fieldwork perspectives of the Roman school.
11. Other young scientists from the research team of Italo Signorini – as well as Signorini
himself – conducted periods of research there before going to other countries.

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around the possibility, or not, of exporting conceptual frameworks
elaborated from the occidental market economics, and economic science, to
contexts outside of the Europe. In Italy of the 1970s, the confrontation with
Marxian theories structured the scenario that would be, over the course of
the 1980s, characterized by a historiographical and anthropological interest
in substantivist perspectives and later, in the publications and translations,
of formalist works. French economic anthropology, which was a Marxist
economic anthropology, received particular attention. Italian approaches
found a fertile terrain in the studies of demologia that had already integrated
the Marxian and Gramscian perspectives, producing theories (Cirese) and
ethnographic research on economic anthropology issues (Papa, Solinas,
Clemente, Angioni, Meloni; see Siniscalchi 2002). Sharecropping was one of
the privileged fields of research.
   The research theme that I was “assigned” for my investigation in San
Marco dei Cavoti concerned agrarian contracts – the contracts of parsenale –
and the social relationships that support them or are formed by them. Linked
by a contract of “co-participation” (tenant farming or sharecropping), the
landowner and the farmer who works the land use the term parsenale to
designate and address each other. The significance of a complex social
framework in the contracts that I would study appeared implicitly in
previously conducted works on spiritual kinship (Palumbo 1991). My
research in San Marco responded to the need to study these aspects of the
social system, and the network of complex relationships. Italo Signorini’s
attitude toward the economic dimension – which had remained unexplored
in San Marco – probably stemmed from the historical perspectives of
economic anthropology in Italy and the predominance of Marxian
interpretation frameworks from which he kept a safe distance. The
ideological weight of those frameworks often prevailed over the fieldwork
and seemed to prevent any fine understanding of the ethnographic contexts.
This did not prevent him, however, from being sensitive to the social bonds
that were established from economic activities and relations, and he
considered economics as an important dimension for understanding local
contexts, in the tradition of British structural-functionalist anthropology.
   The relationships of parsenale, while approaching the links of spiritual
kinship, were situated in the field of economic activities, and that of
sharecropping in particular. In the specific form found in the Samnium, the
proximity to the spiritual kinship system conferred a particular comparative
interest to these agrarian relationships.


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                         79


   The agrarian contracts “naturally” pushed me to interact with other
Italian anthropological traditions, primarily in the field of kinship and
economic anthropology. The economy that I was preparing to study in
southern Italy was an agricultural economy, the most “classic” sector of
activity and the one most studied in both Mediterranean and economic
anthropology. To venture towards southern Italy, it was necessary to know
the classics of Mediterranean anthropology which filled the shelves of a
small room of the Instituto d’Etnologia. Much of this work involved economic
questions: tenant farming and financial relationships, social stratification,
the "under-developed" economic conditions of southern Italy, and
pastoralism.12 At that period, the "long term" had become a fundamental tool
of analysis and explanation for social, political, and economic configurations,
influencing my own perspective. But I didn't go to San Marco to study the
memory of lost practices. The relationships of parsenale continued to equally
regulate and structure both the local economic life and important aspects of
social life. Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their magic (1935), together with
Firth’s Primitive Polynesian Economy (1939), still constituted a sort of
fieldwork manual on economic issues that concerned agriculture, land
tenure and the organization of rural space. But the research I conducted
brought me closer to the study of African economies and the Marxist
economic anthropology of North America, to which the seminars of Anthony
Wade Brown, also a researcher at the Istituto di Etnologia, had introduced
me.

The «Ethnological mission in Ghana»
   San Marco dei Cavoti – where I spent six months in 1990, for my first
period of research – gave me a taste of field research and the desire to
extend the theme I had addressed to other aspects of the local society. At
this time in my training, I had integrated the need to become a “true”
anthropologist, to do research in distant societies. A large new national
project – financed by the Ministero dell’Università e della ricerca scientifica –
had been developed by three teams, in Pisa, Siena, and Rome. This project
was aimed at reviving the research of the Missione etnologica in Ghana
(ethnological mission in Ghana), initiated originally by Vinigi Grottanelli in
the 1950s and situated in southern-occidental Ghana, in Beyin (district of
Jomoro, Western Region), the capital of the ancient pre-colonial kingdom of
Nzema. The reopening of the site was, in part, the opportunity to reaffirm

12. Among the studies concerning Italy, several works could be associated with political
economy (see Roseberry 1988) and the world system theory of Wallerstein (1974).

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continuity with the research tradition of the scuola romana di etnologia, and
also a way of allowing the second generation of researchers, of which I was
part, to elaborate new hypotheses and enrich the knowledge base, while
simultaneously exchanging ideas with previous work. In the region of
Benevento, during my first fieldwork, I was not only interested in agrarian
contracts, but also in the model of stratification and social status. In light of
this initial research, Ghana represented the occasion to approach another
kinship system, not agnatic as in San Marco, but matrilineal combined with a
patrilocal system of residence. Nzema’s marriage and divorce as well as
kinship terminology (Signorini), games, rituals, and power structures (Wade-
Brown), the transmission of women’s property (Rocchi), the linguistic
system (Cardona), and agriculture (Lanternari and Cerulli) were
progressively and systematically explored during the 1970s. In a more recent
phase, a second generation of scholars (Pavanello, Palumbo, Valsecchi)
focused on the land tenure system, the political system and property
devolution. They were also interested in the strong presence of market crops
(cash crops), and in questioning the effects of economic transformations on
the kinship system, within the perspective of more recent work, especially
Anglo-Saxon, on Akan populations. In this renewed ethnographic setting,
my contribution once again concerned the economic sphere, while paying
particular attention to the dimension of gender. The object of my research
o n Women, Society and Power among the Nzema of Ghana was the social,
political, and economic organization as seen from the women's point of
view. The aim was to investigate their status as well as their perceptions of
the social and economic structure, with particular attention to the areas in
which their role appeared to be central (genealogical memory and kinship
management, marriage strategies, inheritance) or in which they seemed to
have high degrees of autonomy (management of the domestic economy, food
production, market activities). In the domestic economy, the cultivation and
commercialization of food crops and the purchase of food for the
“compounds” (groups of houses) were specifically female activities. I had
planned to analyze the channels by which money arrived to the compound,
along with women's market activities (such as the sale of smoked fish), but I
was also interested in the wider trade channels, such as those related to the
production of copra oil. The core of the research was no longer just a
“village” but the circulations of goods, and the commercial and political
networks established by women belonging to the same population and
located in a large area on the Ghana coast.



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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                      81


   Research sometimes takes unexpected paths, and that project never
materialized because of the premature death of Italo Signorini 13. Thus I
decided to develop a different PhD project, but still focusing on the
economic dimension of social relations. Even though the related fieldwork in
Ghana remained at the stage of a potential project, the comparison – explicit
and implicit – between southern Italy, where finally I conducted my PhD
research, and the African contexts, were real, and not only with respect to
kinship, but also to economic activities and the place of women in society.
What I had meant to do in Africa – investigate with the methodological and
theoretical tools of my first Italian fieldwork – I was finally able to do in the
fieldwork in southern Italy, taking advantage of the Africanist knowledge
that I had acquired during the first two years of my PhD training. When I
returned to San Marco, having worked on the Africanist literature and a
research project that was not located in a specific locality but was designed
to observe economic and social circulation, encouraged me to explore not
simply a “place” but the economic network extending beyond the "limits" of
the municipality. At the same time, I no longer considered that I was
investigating a specific “cultural area” delimited by these circulations and
economic links. The social history and the Italian microstoria gave me a first
model for how to work on different scales of analysis (Grendi 1977, Levi
1985, 1991, Revel 1996).

Practices and representations of the economy
   A second long investigation in San Marco dei Cavoti began in 1994. The
objective of my PhD research project was the analysis of the social and
economic organization, beginning with the study of a set of exchange
circuits – for goods, work, provisioning, services – that appeared to link the
family groups and the different social strata in the local population. In
particular, I envisioned analyzing the form and function of the economic
relationships and exchange systems, and exploring the logics that organized
them. My interest in the systems of exchange grew out of the study of the
parsenale relationships. The farming families proved to be capable of using
the tenant farming and sharecropping contracts in a strategic fashion and in
different periods of the developmental cycle. The work of Gluckman and
Leach, and their attention to social changes, had encouraged me to consider
the perpetual instability of agreements between individuals or groups. I

13. The funding of the national project he directed, which should have financed my
fieldwork was blocked for several months.

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interpreted social stratification as a language allowing individuals to place
themselves in the local social scene in a situational and conjunctural way, to
negotiate and confront each other in a process of permanent redefinition of
identities and social relationships (Siniscalchi 1993). I showed that the
parsenale represented an economic and relational mechanism, not simply a
category of farmers, but a link that goes beyond the strictly contractual
limits generally prioritized by the majority of anthropological and
historiographical work dedicated to agrarian co-participation in southern
I t a l y (Siniscalchi 1995, 1996). Moreover, these particular agrarian
relationships seemed to be a part of a system of broader social and economic
relationships between families and individuals. I wanted to address the
“challenge” of producing a true work of economic anthropology in a context
situated in southern Italy, long marked in terms of underdevelopment by the
interpretations of classical analyses of the history of the Mezzogiorno
presented by certain branches of Italian anthropology and by the
anthropological studies of the Mediterranean. Marxist economic
anthropology – the prevailing French (Meillassoux, Terray, Godelier), but
even more, the North Americans (Wolf) – was an important reference for
considering the relationship between human groups and their environment
in terms of constraints and adaptation. The «world system» of Wallerstein
helped me understand the economic relationships, the overlaps between
town centers and the peripheries, and the role of the semi-periphery played
by the regions of southern Italy until recently. Most of the approaches to the
political economy concentrated on larger dynamics and the historical
dimension of social phenomena. Eric Wolf’s analyses of “peasantry” which
take account of social, economic, and political institutions as well as exterior
forces, in the (peasant) context, was particularly pertinent 14. The
comparisons with the Alpine regions were also useful for different scales in
the analysis of practices. Studying the “hidden” frontier that separates the
region of Trentino from that of South Tyrol (1974), John Cole and Eric Wolf
exposed the relationships that link the economy, ecology, and politics. In
doing so they underlined the need to situate practices (economic, place of
residence, kinship, and inheritance) and local ideologies into broader
frameworks, incorporating a diachronic and spatial viewpoint from which
they take their meanings. Notably, they also emphasized situating these

14. The variability of situation and historical realities prompted Wolf (1966, 2001) to refrain
from considering “peasants” as “category of class” nor the rural farming populations as
“closed corporate communities” except under certain historical conditions.


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                       83


practices in the long history of economic relationships, relationships with
the market and the successive periods of political domination to which the
region was subjected. Taking account of the long durée seemed important to
me for considering the diversity of political and economic situations that
characterize Italy. Although I largely shared the perspectives of political
economy and the need to look at the interrelations (political and economic),
I wanted to understand the point of view of the social actors, their daily
practices, and the meanings they gave to their economic practices. The
analysis of economic networks connecting families and social groups
revealed different dynamics of agnatic logics, and it allowed me to highlight
some of the regulatory mechanisms of economic interactions, particularly
the relationship of solidarity among family interests and commercial
interests (Gudeman 1986; Gudeman, Rivera 1991).

“New” economies
   This was also the beginning of a change in my approach to the research: I
became more attentive to both the extended temporalities and the overlaps
among different analytical scales15. I no longer considered this place of
research independently from the larger social, political, and economic
contexts in which it was situated. At the same time, the spatial and temporal
expansion (involved in my fieldwork) led me to look beyond the
monographic framework in which I had initiated my investigation in
southern Italy. The death of Italo Signorini marked the end of this
“collective” research period that had lasted more than fifteen years. I was
the last researcher working in the framework of the Missione etnologica nel
Sannio. This position of being “alone” on the terrain allowed me to alter the
perspective even more. My research took a different direction, far from the
idea of the «grande monografia etnica integrale», allowing me to go beyond
the limits of the small town. Situated in the North East of the Campania
region, this terrain was at the junction of several “historical” and
administrative areas that deserved to be considered. Between the end of the
1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, at the Ecole française in Rome, the
seminars of the EHESS coordinated by Gérard Delille constituted a rich space
of dialogue between anthropologists and historians that encouraged me to
always be attentive to historical processes. The agricultural practices,

15. Not only in the sense of the microstoria, but also of the political economy (cf.
Roseberry 1988, Wolf 1990, 2001); see also the collective work on Puerto Rico
(Steward et al. 1956) where the notion of scale was already used.

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political logistics and exchange networks, have encouraged me to constantly
compare my research with the works of economic history (Giorgetti,
Gribaudi, Grendi), as well as with the new approaches of the Historiography
of the Mezzogiorno (IMES) and the microstoria (Levi, Raggio, Ramella,
Merzario) developed in that period16. Moreover, they required me to address
the different scales, ranging from the community and the province in which
it was situated to the Campania Region and to the European Parliament.
   Little by little, I began to explore other economic areas, such as the
industrial sector where I had never dared to venture at the beginning of my
ethnographic work. Collectively, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of
the 1990s, we had never envisioned the expansion into those sectors as
possible or practicable. However, in spite of the major significance of
agriculture, other sectors of activity were more characteristic of San Marco's
economy in the second half of the 1990s.
   The most dynamic sector was that of confectionery, which began
developing at the end of the 1970s with the birth of a dozen artisanal
factories specialized in the production of nougat. This trend continued with
the addition of two factories at the turn of the twenty-first century. This was
followed by the textile sector, which began developing in the 1980s when the
large industrial production in central and North Eastern Italy was being
relocated. In the second half of the 1990s, the notion of industrial district
began to be used to analyze certain phenomena of the South of Italy where a
concentration of small and medium-sized enterprises were appearing, which
until then had been almost invisible 17. Some years later, the notion of
“industrial district” became a label, too. After my PhD thesis, the analysis of
the establishment of an “industrial district” led me to pay more and more

16. For a presentation and a recent analysis of that literature, see Revel 2006. The book is
partially a translation of the previous Jeux d’échelles, published in France in 1996, but some
chapters were added in the Italian translation, ten years later. Among others, see Palumbo
2006, in this collection.
17. According to the definitions developed from the analysis of specific Italian regions and
in the wake of what Marshall had highlighted for the English districts, a district is a
geographical area within which the production cycles are divided into phases. Small and
medium-sized enterprises, independent from one another from the economic point of view,
but interdependent as regards the organization of production work and each one with a
specific role in the production system constitute a district (among others see Bagnasco
1977, 1988; Becattini 1998; Trigilia 1988). The Italian economists and economic sociologists
studying the industrial districts in the North and Central Italy underlined the links between
history, “cultural traditions” and economic dimensions in these areas, in a problematic way
from an anthropological point of view (Siniscalchi 2010).


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                    85


attention to the spatial dimension of this phenomenon. These trans-
formations were not the result of an interruption or brutal rupture of
“modernization” in an “archaic” context as certain recent works in other
areas of southern Italy seem to suggest. They were situated on a longer
timeline, and needed to be understood as a process.
   The interpretative frameworks that I derived from reading the work of
Jane and Peter Schneider on Sicily, or John Cole and Eric Wolf on the Alps
protected me from the spread of dichotomous visions that had begun in the
late 1990s when the industrial development in San Marco and other areas of
southern Italy became noticeable. The South seemed to be cornered between
two stereotypes: one of underdevelopment, which had characterized
numerous interpretations of the Mezzogiorno, and another of a sort of
redemption that this unexpected industrial development seemed to
incarnate (see Meldolesi 1998, among others). The notions of a «world
system» and «world economy» encouraged me to examine the economic and
political reasons that have allowed the appearance of workshops and then
textile factories in a region where there seemed to be no existing base
favorable to industrial development. I explored the logics of this
industrialization: the internal dynamics in the social context (the strong
agricultural presence that industry did not completely replace, a
longstanding peasant smallholder ownership of land and property, the role
of women in the economy, etc.), and the pressures linked to the larger
context (the political and economic situation at the end of the 1970s and the
1980s, the Northern companies' need to reduce production costs, etc.).
During the same period, other “industrial areas”, often specialized in
textiles, developed in diverse regions of the Mezzogiorno. These forms of
industrialization were perceived as “original” forms of the economic
“development” of Mezzogiorno. But in order to understand these industrial
spaces and re-situate them in the history of these regions, it was necessary
to take into account the intermediary analytical scales that are found
“between” local and global. These scales are often forgotten in approaches
to the phenomena of globalization, but they can help us to discern the more
“obscure parts” of economic changes. To understand the careers of
entrepreneurs and their strategies, it was very important to change the
analytical scale and follow their links with other productive area in
Campania or other regions bordering it. “Playing with scales” allowed the
placement of an accent on the interconnections between different economic
areas. I approached the study of the economic phenomena in the South by
questioning the way social groups were formed, as well as the role of
individuals and their capacities of action within political, professional, and

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kinship networks, and by trying to connect the local and supra-local
dimensions of the (political and economic) phenomena I observed. At the
end of my PhD thesis, my approach to fieldwork changed again: San Marco
remained the center of my observations, but increasingly, I included the
surrounding communities in a more conscious way than at the beginning of
my research. It is precisely this exercise of changing perspectives and scales
of analysis, which meant taking account of the dynamics occurring in other
economic regions and the ways they overlap directly and indirectly with my
research terrain, that lead me to expand the notion of "economic space".
   The growing and unexpected development of industrial activities in these
southern regions could be interpreted as an irruption of modernity destined
to profoundly alter the local society, or as some economists thought at the
time, perhaps it was the result of the creativity of these same regions. But an
ethnographic approach made it possible to go into the factories and analyze
the logics and practices of the workers and entrepreneurs, as well as the
close links with other sectors of the local economy. It also made it possible
to reveal the know-how of illegality – based on some forms of circumvention
of the law (tax rules and workers’ social security) – which was an important
element of this recent industrial development in the South (Siniscalchi
2010). By adopting a linear perspective, the development of industries as
well as of tourism in the late 1990s could have been interpreted as the last
stage of a predictable evolution of contemporary capitalism. But the
construction of the town of San Marco and its history as a specific economic
place (through the label of “industrial district”) could not be studied simply
in terms of tourism or linear development: it was linked to deeper changes in
local politics and to structural relations of power (Wolf 1990, 2001;
Siniscalchi 2012)18.

Economic spaces in Europe
   In the 2000s, the analysis of the process of spatial construction as a
political and economic issue led me towards my second fieldwork. This
fieldwork in southern France allowed me to elaborate and refine an
anthropology of economic spaces. In the French Alps, I explored the political
and economic mechanisms of the construction of spaces and places, moving
to another level of analysis that was based on a “province” (the department
of Hautes-Alps) rather than a small town. In this new fieldwork undertaken

18. Wolf analyzes “structural power” as a kind of power «that not only operates within
settings or domains but that also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves, and
that specifies the distribution and direction of energy flows» (1990: 586).


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                          87


to analyze political and social transformations, the main points of
observation were the processes of envisioning and constructing places
through a redefinition of history, urban space, and the economy. Focusing
on the construction of the territory, this new ethnographic research required
learning about French policies and legal regimes that were different from
those that I had known in Italy; these required even more cross analysis and
variation in scales. At the time, questions relative to the “location,”
“localities,” and the production of spaces and places animated the
anthropological debate in Europe and across the Atlantic. Close to the
perspectives of Appadurai (1996) Gupta and Ferguson (1997a, 1997c), Low
and Lawrence-Zúñiga (2003), I interpreted location and affiliation as being
relational and contextual, constantly subject to changes in shape, tensions
and conflicts (Siniscalchi 2003, 2008). By studying the dynamics of power in
protected areas, I examined the relationships between the State,
institutions, and social groups in their processual dimension (Donnan,
Wilson 2003; Tsing 2005), using the different aspects of the economy to
define the territory. It was at this moment that what I call today an
anthropology of economic spaces began to take form.
   I use the notion of economic space not only for analyzing the construction
of places or the spatiality of economic forms, but also, and above all, as an
analytical instrument that allows me to define the spaces of economic and
political action, and study their connections. I consider it as a flexible tool
that helps me look at the economic and social transformations in shorter
temporalities (than those considered by Wallerstein 1974, 1981)19.
   In 2006, I started to sketch out a new research program to analyze the
forms of action in the field of food production and consumption, and the
emergence of mobilizations (farmers, anti-OGM, consumers, etc.) and
transnational political movements aimed at elaborating new economic
forms. Whatever the scale – local, national or international – the
mobilizations and protests linked to food bring together a large range of
practices from collective actions of producers or consumers to social
movements and structured politics. The places of production and
consumption become places that elaborate social and political values,
resulting in new economic forms. I chose to examine these questions
through a case study of Slow Food. The work on the Slow Food movement,
carried out first with the French Slow Food association and then inside the

19. For a economic interpretation of the notion of economic space see Perroux 1950.
According to Perroux, an economic space is defined by economic relations, and therefore
the balance of power. For a review of Perroux’s work and geographical uses of this notion,
reintroducing the material dimension of space, see Couzon 2003.

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movement's headquarters in Northern Italy and various international hubs,
obliged me to again change the focus and the places of my research (even if
the main part of the fieldwork was conducted inside the movement's
headquarters)20. I began to question the political definition of production
spaces through the labeling projects implemented by Slow Food. The Slow
Food movement encourages the production of spaces through different types
of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). These “communities” are
made up of groups of consumers (known as condotte in Italy or “convivium”
in the rest of the world), and a global network of producers associated with
objectivized and localized products (known as “presidia” production or
“presidia”). The articulation of these levels permitted an understanding of
the relationships between the new economic forms, the relationships of
power (at the heart of the movement as well) and the modalities of resource
control (Siniscalchi 2013, 2017a; Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014). The spatial
dimension also revealed its usefulness as an analytical key to understand the
political forms that the movement assumed on the terrain. I have not
attempted here to do more than outline these two field studies. What
interests me is to highlight how these different studies have continued to
affect the way I approach fieldwork and how this has changed over the
course of my research. This is particularly visible when returning to observe
San Marco today.

Moving economic spaces
   At the end of the 2000s, the sub-contracting system in southern Italy was
in crisis and most factories closed or activated the cassa integrazione
(technical unemployment). Today, many buildings constructed with State
subsidies have been abandoned and only a few workshops still resist.
Although the industrial income lost in this crisis had previously contributed
to maintaining family agricultural activities, agriculture is still a structuring
element that represents solidity in the local economic and social system.
Individuals, while maintaining close symbolic and economic relations with
agriculture, have been able to move from one economy to another in a back-
and-forth that demonstrates as an ability to reconvert, to grasp
opportunities, and to absorb constraints. At the same time, looking at these
phenomena through the notion of economic space(s) allows us the put the

20. The fieldwork itself was conducted on several sites: in Bra (in Piedmont), at the national
and international headquarters of Slow Food where 170 employees work, and where its
private university and publishing house are located; with the political authorities of the
movement, located at different sites in Italy and abroad; at the offices of the board of
directors of the French structure as well as two of its local units.


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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                            89


accent on the structural relationships of power and the interconnections
between different economic areas. The industrial activities which
disappeared from the district of San Marco have now moved further south to
North Africa or to the east toward Romania, Moldavia, or China. The
confines of centers and peripheries are constantly moving, producing new
forms of inequity and new economic relations and power (Wolf 1990;
Comaroff, Comaroff 2000; Narotzky, Smith 2006). In the same fashion, the
boundaries between economic spaces also change.
   The notion of “economic space” appears useful for analyzing the
construction of places or the spatiality of economic activities, but above all it
can be an analytical instrument for defining the limits of economic and
political action21. Then it becomes a useful tool for thinking about the
interrelationships between different geographical areas and for identifying
and comprehending the connections and reconfigurations of the economy at
different scales. It is a flexible analytical instrument that helps to
understand diverse and localized phenomena by situating them in larger
contexts. It makes it possible to simultaneously take into account both the
industrial development in the interstices of southern Italy in the 1990s and
the shift of productive activities in Eastern Europe twenty years later, or the
conflicts and reconfigurations in the field of artisanal and agricultural
productions. It makes it possible to grasp the links between productive
spaces and political arenas in which networks of actors negotiate and fight to
define, regulate, and circulate goods and merchandise.
   «Small places, large issues» suggests Thomas H. Eriksen with the title of
one of his works (2001), where he affirms the capacity of anthropological
approaches to seize a broad range of questioning from a micro scale. Even if
we continue to practice fieldwork according to some of Malinowski’s
principles, and even if we look at articulations and connections, we can no
longer conceive fieldwork today as Malinowski did. Starting from local case
studies is not (or no longer) synonymous with the artificial creation of social
isolates. It is rather a way to “weave the threads” of social complexity, in an
effort to get us as close as possible to the perspective and the logic of the
individuals who are the subject of our observations.
     The world as it is studied by anthropologists is not characterised by clear,
     “digital” or binary boundaries, but rather by grey zones and differences in
     degree – analogic differences. It is not an archipelago of isolated cultures, but
     an unbounded system of multiple interrelationships (Eriksen 2001: 305).



21. See MacLeod (2001) among others, for a recent reflection from the new regional
geography on the politics of scales and economic spaces.

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FIELDWORK AND CHANGING SCALES                                                         91


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                                           2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 71-94




 Valeria SINISCALCHI is Directrice d’études (full professor) of Economic Anthro-
 pology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre Norbert
 Elias, Marseille. Valeria Siniscalchi is co-editor (with Carole Counihan) of
 Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy (2014, Bloomsbury) and she
 is currently publishing the monograph, Slow Food. The Economy and Politics
 of a Global Movement (Bloomsbury). Her work focuses on economic anthro-
 pology, food, mobilizations, and the circulation of food products.
 valeria.siniscalchi@ehess.fr




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Valeria Siniscalchi
Fieldwork and changing scales: The analysis of different economic spaces
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 71-94.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3523
