Wild Sardinia: Ethnographic provocations. Research report and reply to critics
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-75
The author of Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism (University of Washington Press 2010) offers a summary of research and reply to critics. The work is contextualized in the context of contemporary debates in anthropology and environmental studies. The article discusses misunderstandings that might arise from reading across languages and disciplinary traditions, in order to broaden the scope of meaningful debate.
application/pdf
2239-625X
1639
1
en
Tracey Heatherington
Anuac
Wild Sardinia: Ethnographic provocations. Research report and reply to critics
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
2
Comments
2015-06-28
2015-05-12
2013-01-01
2015-05-12
156-164
1
Tracey Heatherington
2013
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-75
156
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, United States
2239-625X
1
en
164
Wild Sardinia: Ethnographic provocations. Research report and reply to critics
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/1639/1388
2
                      Wild Sardinia: Ethnographic Provocations.
                        Research Report and Reply to Critics


                                                                              Tracey Heatherington,
                                                                 University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
                                                                                 pistoccu@uwm.edu


Abstract
The author of Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism
(University of Washington Press 2010) offers a summary of research and reply to critics. The
work is contextualized in the context of contemporary debates in anthropology and
environmental studies.\ The article discusses misunderstandings that might arise from reading
across languages and disciplinary traditions, in order to broaden the scope of meaningful debate.


Keywords: political anthropology, culture and environment, ethnographic writing, Italy,
Sardinia.



   Wild Sardinia1 was never meant to be a tame monograph. My ethnography is a work of
engaged anthropology, a work that develops a controversial comparative framework for analysis,
and suggests implications for ethical environmental social action in Italy and beyond. It is a
profoundly transdisciplinary work, and as such, it deliberately seeks to disturb and transform
established genres of knowledge production and objectification. Its goal is precisely to unsettle,
yet remain respectful of the many diverse interlocutors who might discuss the issues raised. It is
with pleasure, then, that I find debates unfolding around it from a series of book reviews
published, for example, in Anthropological Quarterly, H-Net Reviews [Hist-Geog], American
Ethnologist, Social Anthropology, Environmental History, and Sociologica. I am indebted to
Marco Pitzalis (2012) for introducing my efforts to Italian sociologists, since it gives me a very
welcome opportunity for critical exchange with colleagues who know the “terrain” as I do.
Indeed, it is for this reason that I trust scholars interested in Italian rural studies to consider the
merits and provocations of Wild Sardinia for themselves. In this commentary, I correct some
misunderstandings that might emerge from reading across languages and disciplinary traditions,
so as to broaden the scope of meaningful debate. I hope it will be helpful to those interested in
my research results, and I welcome ongoing conversations to come.


Overview of the study
1
  Tracey Heatherington, 2010, Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of
Environmentalism. Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press.

                          Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X                156
    There are several intertwined projects undertaken in Wild Sardinia. First, it is quite simply an
ethnography, thematically focused on culture and environment but generally concerned with
many themes of identity, family, gender, economy, politics, development and social change that
have been explored by other anthropologists and rural sociologists in the context of Southern
Europe. Condensing a twenty-year span of research visits to central Sardinia, including over two
years of dissertation fieldwork in Orgosolo during the late 1990s, this book is the fruit of
participant observation and other qualitative research methods. It draws from interviews and
conversations with many Sardinian interlocutors in Orgosolo and beyond, in a variety of
contexts. Its theoretical founding takes from divergent strands in European social anthropology
and North American cultural anthropology, given my formative experiences in Canadian,
American and British university settings.
    Second, Wild Sardinia juxtaposes this extensive ethnographic study with an account of
historical and recent policy discourses on nature protection and eco-development on the island. It
builds on an anthropology of environmental conservation that blends political ecology with
ethnographic insight.2 The case study is focused on the controversial Parco Nazionale del Golfo
di Orosei e del Gennargentu (usually glossed as the “Parco del Gennargentu” or “Gennargentu
Park”). The book asserts a critique of the parks movement in Sardinia by challenging the
ontological production of “the wild” in terms of both nature and culture. My argument
recognizes the political stakes inherent in cultural representations of rural highland Sardinia as
both an area of important national heritage of biodiversity and a troublesome “delinquent zone”.
The many scientific reports and advocacy campaigns that establish rural Sardinia as a valuable
wilderness tend to erase deep cultural, gendered and affective histories of the landscape.
Ethnographic perspectives “from the bottom up” (including local politicians, municipal servants,
forest rangers, forestry workers, pastoralists, housewives, teachers, students, unemployed
workers, hospitality and eco/tourism operators, church leaders, union advocates, entrepreneurs
and others) are offered to complicate contemporary narratives of environmental conservation in
Sardinia.
    Third, the book challenges the logic of backwardness sometimes used to interpret local
mobilisation to protect forms of communal land ownership and use rights as the inevitable
consequence of an unreflexive and unchanging pastoral culture. It critically reflects on the
scholarship associated with theories of resistance, which have reified the concept as an objective
category of analysis. Reviewing a number of historical accounts of resistance in central Sardinia
going back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I took these readings of history as
entwined with the present concerns and practices of identity construction, and responses to
structural marginality. I went on to explore memories of resistance associated with the important
demonstrations at Pratobello in 1968, and the evolving political consciousness that drew upon
interpretations of Antonio Gramsci, Emilio Lussu and other important cultural models. My work
is therefore an attempt to examine the social life of “resistance” in Sardinia as an ethnographic
object that should be understood as an aspect of social poetics.
    Finally, Wild Sardinia considers how this case study of contestation over a national park in
rural Italy reflects upon contemporary environmental imaginaries at the global level. Its
ethnographic focus is therefore actually twofold: it is not only concerned to document and
interpret the social and political life of a town in rural Sardinia, but also to document and
2
 This scholarship was exemplified, for instance, by the work of Kay Milton (1996, 2002; cf. Lai 2001),
Charles Zerner (2000), Anderson and Berglund (2003).

                                 Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X         157
interpret the rich social life of visual and narrative discourses about that place that are to be
found on the internet, in policy documents, in films and television, literature, and so on. Drawing
on this material, the book enters into current debates about how cultural essentialisms related to
the dual opposition of modern versus primitive have become central to claims about who should
legitimately share authority to manage the conservation of rich but fragile biodiversity. Engaging
with the emerging critical scholarship on “indigeneity” from Australia to America to Asia, Wild
Sardinia asks provocatively whether we should think of rural Sardinian communities as
“indigenous” or not. It argues that any lack of fit should be examined as the product of
problematic assumptions embedded in the category itself; it makes no claim as to whether
concepts of “indigeneity” in fact apply. Rather, I challenge policy makers, conservation
advocates, and rural Sardinians themselves to examine their own assumptions. As the book
problematizes idyllic visions of authentic traditional communities, it also recognizes the
profound importance of debates and auto-critiques that evolve internal to communities
themselves, or in dialogue with outsiders. Finally, it celebrates the possibility for a new
generation of environmentalists and environmental professionals to resist the arrogance of
ethnocentrism and embrace respectful collaborations with resident communities.


Dangerous methods

   Readers coming to the book from different disciplines are sometimes interested by the first-
hand accounts made possible by long-term ethnographic methods, and sometimes dubious that
elements of subjectivity are deliberately embedded and acknowledged in these accounts. Pitzalis
insists that I have portrayed too rosy a picture of community: it seems that for him, evidence of
empathy or moral commitment might be tantamount to compromising naivety. Does he wish to
accuse me of “going native”, or denounce the dangers of a womanish science? Either one would
reflect rather badly on his own understanding of social theory and practice in the twenty-first
century. Does he think a foreigner, or perhaps a woman, unable to fathom the complex socio-
ecological realities of pastoralism? But I have never known Sardinian colleagues to be narrow-
minded. On the contrary, the kind opportunity to offer a reply in ANUAC is consistent with the
many gracious intellectual exchanges I enjoyed as a visiting professor at the University of
Cagliari last year. I can only conclude, then, that different disciplinary orientations are at stake,
or that some of the nuances in my prose have gone unnoticed. Pitzalis either misses or misreads
much of the analysis. A few notes on ethnographic research and writing are therefore in order.
   The project of ethnography realizes a struggle to resist the clamour of generalization that
prevails in grand theory and abstractions of scale, in the mirage of statistics and spectacles of
objectivity. Indeed, in its goal of “taking people seriously” (MacClancy 2002), the project of
ethnography constitutes a continual provocation to rethink the assumptions and languages of
social inquiry, and the commitments that might proceed from it. The result, unsurprisingly, reads
somewhat differently than much of the literature on Sardinian pastoralism. Pitzalis charges that
my “dangerous” account of fieldwork homogenizes the community and depicts only its good
side. Let us look, then, at what I have actually presented about my fieldsite in central Sardinia.
   In fact I not only overtly acknowledged that many forms of violence generated concerns,
ambiguities, and ambivalences in daily life, I also placed examples of this at the core of my
ethnographic account. In chapter 5, I discussed the case of a donkey that became a victim of
violence alongside his master, who was killed after a barroom altercation in 1997. In chapter 7, I

                         Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X               158
discussed the violent intimidations acted out in 1998 by the self-proclaimed “Fronte Armato
Anti-Parco”, including an incident involving the crucifixion of an endangered species of
indigenous sheep, that implicitly referenced an historical case of brutal rape-homicide. In chapter
8, I discuss the longstanding problem of anthropogenic forest fires, and document an abject
failure of communal grazing management. These are not pretty stories, and the social tensions
that accompanied the events were not pretty either. I remind readers that many points of view are
represented in the ethnography, and they illustrate quite serious disagreements, contradictions
and social contests in process, including debates about the future of the commons. If I have
managed to discuss this case study with some degree of tact and subtlety, I have merely fulfilled
the obligation of respect.
    I have argued that tragically violent events, including violence against wild species or
ecosystems, should not be sensationalized, but rather, understood within a larger context of
structural violence and marginality. Yet following Gino Satta’s (2001) important work in
Orgosolo, I also indicted the romance of resistance, and even examined its cultural and scholarly
construction (see also Sorge 2008). My logic neither effaced nor ignored the harshness of some
aspects of social experience. I did, however, reject common assumptions that an inclination to
violence is innate to Sardinian pastoral culture or inherent to communal tenure systems. Instead,
I argued that evidence of vivid internal social critique and reflexive examination of traditions at
the community level suggested ongoing processes of cultural learning and positive
transformation, processes that could be supported by outsiders and experts prepared to engage all
local actors as equals. I worry that Pitzalis does not seem inclined to do so.
    In his most caustic comments, my reviewer seems to betray an agenda of his own: a curiously
belligerent disdain for anthropology itself, and particularly for methods of fieldwork that draw
the researcher (perilously, he suggests) close into the social world of one’s informants. For
Pitzalis, an anthropologist’s view redoubles “the enchanted eye of the local guide”, and easily
succumbs to a “mirage” of harmonious ecology. His description draws from a thin reading of
chapter 2, in which I set out to help readers understand how local people might perceive the
landscape rather differently than tourists, biologists, or environmental activists. Pitzalis
triumphantly conflates “the anthropologist’s” (my) perception with the viewpoint I report of an
ecotourism guide, and gives me no credit for the critical sophistication progressively revealed
through later chapters. He then pronounces that I have “abandoned sane objectivity” for the sake
of social justice. His repetitive recourse to admonishment of bias is revealing. In particular, my
agenda for robust reflexivity has nettled Pitzalis to lash out at the discipline as a whole,
something hardly fair to my colleagues, and perhaps rather cunning at heart.


Dangerous epistemologies

   My research was presented as situated knowledge: deeply committed to empirical specificity
and awareness of context, without foreclosing opportunities for comparative examination that
have characterized important anthropological insights on the wider world. There are passages
written from a first person perspective that place me deliberately within the context of dialogues
and anecdotes, and open up analytical questions about their interpretation. In other words, along
with poststructural interrogation of the concepts through which social scientists have come to
describe central Sardinia, the discussion in Wild Sardinia is deliberately open-ended, and
acknowledges a partial perspective. For feminist epistemologies that resist a falsely constructed


                                Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X       159
“god’s-eye view” of the world (Haraway 1991), the only way to build grounded comprehension
is to recognize that all knowledge is contingent and incomplete. Sandra Harding calls it “strong
objectivity” (1996). A dangerous epistemology, to be sure! And perhaps, it is a topic for ongoing
discussion.
    In any case, I would not claim to know everything about my fieldsites; learning is an ongoing
process. Nevertheless, I believe that the subjective voices and experiences reported in my
ethnography should be valued as legitimate sources of understanding, and my analysis of them
should be treated seriously.3 This hardly amounts to the “militant anthropology” Pitzalis rails
against in his review, but here, too, the critique might reveal more about the reviewer’s own
pretensions than about the book. What is it that arouses such petulant contempt?
    In her consideration of “the perils and prospects for an engaged anthropology”, Louise
Lamphere opens further insight into the competing epistemological commitments at stake. She
reflected,

   In the United States we have come to realise that we need to do three things as we become
increasingly engaged with the world: first, transform our relations with the public in order to overcome
entrenched stereotypes and foster current images that accurately depict anthropology today; second,
continue to change our relations with the communities we work with, by attending to their concerns in
formulating research questions and by viewing them as equal partners in carrying out research and
educational activities; and third, work out effective ways of doing research on critical social issues that
will expand the influence of anthropology in political arenas and policy debates. (Lamphere 2003, 153)

   My own vision of anthropology has of course been inflected by the larger zeitgeist of the
field, particularly in the North American context where I now teach. While not everyone agrees
on the form that an engaged anthropology should take, there is growing acknowledgement that
ideologies of objectivity have often inhibited certain ethical engagements in social science. At
the same time, some backlash is easily discernible from those most invested in conventional
models of scientific scholarship that prescribe objective distance. These “science wars” create
rhetorics that efface the real range and richness of our collaborations, for as Setha Low and Sally
Engle Merry (2010) point out, there are many antecedents to the engaged anthropology of today
that took shape under the defining umbrella of a responsible science. This is the core of our
Boasian legacy, in fact.
   Taking a more interdisciplinary perspective, initiatives to put human engagements at the
center of responsible scientific practice have characterized some important historical moments.
The Pugwash Movement launched by Einstein and Russell, for example, enabled leading nuclear
physicists to articulate a conscientious political voice and promote disarmament during the cold
war. Prominent scientists today still participate in this vital movement to diffuse nuclear risks
and dangers, as well as more wide-ranging initiatives in “global responsibility”. It is in this spirit
that I find common ground with many colleagues across anthropology and a range of other
disciplines, not all of whom will share my particular intellectual orientations. While some critics
will inevitably insist on conflating feminist epistemologies, reflexivity and ethical concerns with
a vaguely dangerous “postmodernism”, I have no interest in fighting over petty academic


3
  In truth, the reviewer does not seem to have read the later chapters of the monograph with much care. It
requires bold effort to work in a second language, and it appears to have been a struggle to undertake the
full book with attention.

                           Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X                   160
interests. Rather, I am concerned with the bigger picture: what we as scholars are doing in the
world, and what that world will look like in the near future.


Relevance and comparative ethnography

   Ethnographies of conservation undertake projects of critique that can hit close to home. Yet as
we face growing environmental risks and increasingly vulnerable ecosystems, we cannot afford
to be uncritical of the neoliberal schemes organizing nature protection today.4 As Pitzalis noted, I
have criticized the WWF, whose narratives about wilderness in Sardinia have been manifestly
top-down, and whose rejection of meaningful dialogue with local residents I witnessed myself.5
Those who read my ethnography more carefully, however, will also discover a deep appreciation
for many of the forest rangers, agency personnel and municipal leaders who try to engage local
residents respectfully in dialogues to generate better sustainability. This is even clearer in my
recent writing (Heatherington 2012). My critical efforts are guided by an interest in achieving
viable collaborations for environmental action in rural Sardinia. It is far from radical, I think, to
argue that a new generation of ethical environmentalists must be prepared to take local people’s
experiences, interests and perspectives seriously, if they are to succeed.
   Pitzalis seems ready to dismiss my critique of the parks movement in Sardinia, because he
claims I was intellectually “hostage” to the cultural vision of my interlocutors in Orgosolo. He
deploys the charged language of kidnapping to deny the legitimacy of my ethnography as a
research tool. Note that my account included the voices of some local people who were in fact
cautiously supportive of a park, but concerned about the terms of land tenure and management
agreements that would have a long-term impact on the ability of the municipality to direct its
own development. The eagerness of Pitzalis to dismiss their concerns bears unfortunate
resemblance to the logic of Sardinian government authorities who flagrantly dismissed the voices
of local mayors during the debates about the institution of a national park in 1998. Among other
things, my research reviewed evidence that legitimately elected representatives of rural
communities were denied effective participation in negotiating the terms through which large
parts of communal territory would become subject to centralized management as a national park.
When the mayors protested, they were simply dismissed as being captive to threats of
intimidation, and politicians at the state level refused to even go and meet with them. How, then,
were people to articulate a political voice, if they were criminalized at the outset, and
4
  A considerable literature is emerging in geography and anthropology to challenge the institutional
framing of environmental conservation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. See for
example West et al. (2006); Brockington, Duffy (2010); Igoe et al. (2010); Büscher et al. (2012).
5
  It would seem a fair critique that my fieldwork failed to pursue contacts and interviews with WWF
organizers, but as it happened, I tried, and they were never available. Over the course of dissertation
fieldwork, I tried repeatedly to visit local offices in Nuoro during apparent open hours, but found the
doors always closed. I called, but got no answer. After graduation, I continued my quest by email, but
only one brief note was returned, along with a pdf document that I included in my study. Finally, as a
faculty member, I hired a Sardinian Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Sciences at my university to offer me
critical perspective, and undertake a few interviews when he visited home in Sassari. Unfortunately, he
too was ultimately unsuccessful in obtaining appointments at the WWF offices. (“What do they do?” he
asked me, “They are never there!”) Accordingly, I worked with what I had, and await future
opportunities for firsthand exchanges with WWF program planners and activists, who might offer me a
different perspective.

                                 Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X          161
representative democracy denied? Under these circumstances, the relevance of political
anthropology to unfolding debates about nature conservation and rights to resources seems clear.
   We often explain to students that anthropology is a field dedicated to making the exotic
familiar, and the familiar exotic. Good anthropology is supposed to make us reconsider the
assumptions we take most for granted. Michael Herzfeld (who has indeed been an exceptional
mentor, though not my only intellectual model) has sometimes called this “productive
discomfort”. Why discuss a theme like indigenous identity construction in the strange context of
Europe? I found the exercise compelling, both because “indigeneity” is a theme with timely
resonance in discussions of culture, environment and rights, and because rural Sardinians often
made ironic comparisons between themselves and North American Indians. Efforts at
comparative analysis stimulate our field, and while there are limits to every comparison, it is in
exploring them that we have often found surprising insight. This principle motivated my
development of a key concept that some reviewers have targeted as contentious. I drew on
anthropological literature about the Australian aboriginal dreamtimes in order to think broadly
about evolving cultural narratives of environmentalism that emerge in a scattered collage of
images, texts and databases on the World Wide Web (Heatherington 2010, 20-24). Such a bold
choice of metaphor is necessarily open to debate, but this is how I introduced it:

   Global approaches to ecology and environment constitute a strategic field of imagination within which
social and political relations of power are negotiated and naturalized. I understand them collectively as
“dreamtimes”... The virtual landscapes of Sardinia that have now become so compelling exist in these
global dreamtimes of environmentalism. They are the evocations of remembered and potential journeys
through highly crafted spaces of transcendent imagination, spaces in which the signs of locality are
remapped and transmuted into potent universals. (Heatherington 2010, 21)

   As a heuristic device, this metaphor compels us to reflect on histories of European
colonialism in the making of “wilderness”, and the ways that narratives about nature
conservation continue to embed particular modernist cultural orientations and belief systems, all
the while projecting an exotic primordialism on autochthonous cultures and landscapes. I argued
that “we can understand the dreamtimes of environmentalism as a supple dimension of cultural
imagination that overlays regional geographies with stories evoking the presence of a universal,
sacred, transcendant, timeless and global Nature” (Heatherington 2010 , 23). It is this technique of
imagination that often undermines the claims of local communities to both resource rights and
meaningful participation in environmental management of protected areas. For this reason, I
stand by the useful provocations of the dreamtime metaphor, as I stand by the provocations of
ethnography that presents perspectives “from the bottom up”.
   There are good reasons why I appreciate the willingness of Pitzalis to explore cooperation
between our fields. Borrowing from cognate disciplines can generate real inspiration, as I found
when I studied the work of sociologists such as Benedetto Meloni (1984, 1996) and Alain
Touraine (1988). It is wise, of course, to recognize one’s own limitations when indulging in
cross-disciplinary critique.6 The reviewer may have little experience with the extensive


6
  Pitzalis mistakes some of the intellectual connections between my work and its antecedents: for
example, he incorrectly identifies my discussions of alterity and indigeneity as derivative of Michael
Herzfeld, without understanding my synthetic work with sources such as Johannes Fabian (1983), Tania
Li (2000) and Moore et al. (2003). Similarly, he oversimplifies my discussion of James C. Scott (1985),

                          Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X                  162
anthropological work on aboriginal knowledge systems, any more than with the abundant
contemporary literature on political ecology. To give the benefit of the doubt, however, I keep in
mind that precisely because interlocutors from other fields tend to share only a little of our
intellectual history in common, they should be celebrated for their curiousity. Despite many
disagreements, I find genuine efforts toward productive collaboration to be sincerely generous.


References

Anderson, D. G., E. Berglund, 2003, Ethnographies of Conservation: Environmentalism and the
Distribution of Privilege, Oxford, Berghahn.
Brockington, D., Duffy, R., 2010, Capitalism and conservation: The production and
reproduction of biodiversity conservation. Antipode, 42, 3, 469-482.
Büscher, B., Sullivan, S., Neves, K., Igoe, J., Brockington, D., 2012, Toward a synthesized
critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 23, 2, 4-30.
Fabian, J., 1983, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York,
Columbia University Press.
Haraway, D., 1991, Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of
partial perspective, in Haraway D., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
New York, Routledge, 183-202.
Harding, S., 1996, Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is ‘strong objectivity’?, in Keller
E.F., H.E. Longino, Eds., Feminism & Science, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 235-248.
Heatherington, T., 2010, Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of
Environmentalism, Seattle, University of Washington Press.
__________, 2012, Remodeling the fortress of conservation? Living landscapes and the new
technologies of environmental governance, Anthropological Forum, 22, 2, 165-185.
Igoe, J., Neves, K., Brockington, D., 2010, A spectacular eco-tour around the historic bloc:
Theorizing the convergence of biodiversity conservation and capitalist expansion. Antipode. 42,
3, 586-512.
Lai, F., 2001, Antropologia del Paesaggio, Roma, Carocci.
Lamphere, L., 2003, The perils and prospects for an engaged anthropology. A view from the
United States, Social Anthropology, 11, 2, 153-168.
Li, T., 2000, Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: Resource politics and the tribal slot,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42, 1, 149-179.
Low, S., Merry, S. E., 2010, Engaged anthropology: Diversity and dilemmas. An introduction to
Supplement 2, Current Anthropology, 52, S2, S203-S226.
MacClancy, J., 2002, Introduction: Taking people seriously, in MacClancy J., Editor, Exotic No
More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1-14.
Meloni, B., 1984, Famiglie di pastori. Continuità e mutamento in una comunità della Sardegna
Centrale 1950-1970, Torino, Rosenberg & Sellier.
__________, 1996, Ricerche locali. Comunità, economia, codici e regolazione sociale, Cagliari,
CUEC.
Milton, K., 1996, Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology
in Environmental Discourse, London, Routledge.

whose classic insights are contextualized by the critical readings of Sherry Ortner (1995) and K.
Sivaramakrishnan (2005), a theoretical debate which he has not followed.

                                Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X       163
__________, 2002, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion, London, Routledge.
Moore, D.S., Kosek, J., Pandian, A., Editors, 2003, Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference,
Durham, N.C., Duke University Press.
Ortner, S., 1995, Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal, Contemporary Studies in
Society and History, 37, 1, 173-193.
Pitzalis, M., 2012, Book review, Tracey Heatherington, Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the
Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2010, 314
pp., Sociologica, 2, 2012.
Satta, G., 2001, Turisti a Orgosolo: La Sardegna centrale come attrazione turistica, Napoli,
Liguori Editori.
Scott, J. C., 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven,
CT, Yale University Press.
Sivaramakrishnan, K., 2005, Some intellectual genealogies for the concept of everyday
resistance, American Anthropologist, 107, 3, 346-355.
Sorge, A., 2008, Divergent visions: Localist and cosmopolitan identities in highland Sardinia,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14, 4, 808-824.
Touraine, A., 1988, Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.
West, P., Igoe, J., Brockington, D., 2006, Parks and peoples: The social impact of protected
areas, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 251-277.
Zerner, C., 2000, People, Plants and Justice, New York, Columbia University Press.



Tracey Heatherington è Professore Associato di Antropologia a Milwaukee, presso l’Università
del Wisconsin. Il suo volume, Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of
Environmentalism (UWP 2010), è stato premiato nel 2010 con il Victor Turner Prize for
Ethnographic Writing. È stata Fellow presso la Society for the Humanities della Cornell
University nel 2010-2011 e Visiting Professor presso l’Università di Cagliari nel 2012.




                        Anuac, Volume II, Numero 1, giugno 2013 - ISSN 2239-625X            164
