Papers by Tommaso Sbriccoli
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2018
As recently as 1982, V. R. Bhattacharaya introduced his New Face of Rural India with the Gandhian... more As recently as 1982, V. R. Bhattacharaya introduced his New Face of Rural India with the Gandhian-inspired words, "To an Indian, a village means more than its synonym. On its definition stands the political shape of the country, on its interpretation depends the economic progress of the nation. The description of an Indian village means the narration of the face of the country. An Indian village is the mirror of India-past and present. On its future steps depends the future of the nation" (1982: 1). Two decades later, Dipankar Gupta, the renowned sociologist of rural India, put it thus: "…the country side has witnessed a kind of cultural implosion that has shaken many of the verities of the past. With the abolition of landlordism and the introduction of adult franchise (the two must necessarily go hand in hand), old social relations that dominated the country side are today in a highly emaciated form, when not actually dead" (2005: 752). Gupta concludes, "Agriculture is an economic residue that generously accommodates non
Terrain, Mar 4, 2021
This article, drawing on research carried out in the village of Jamgod (India, Madhya Pradesh), p... more This article, drawing on research carried out in the village of Jamgod (India, Madhya Pradesh), present the story of Babu Farari, an outlaw living and operating in this area in the 50s. First met during fieldwork as a legend about a local social bandit, the figure of Babu grew to acquire a deeper, three-dimensional complexity. His story has been reconstructed here from fragments of ethnography, interviews and conversations, and from information contained in the fieldnotes of Mayer, an anthropologist who did research in the same village when Babu Farari was active. This polyvocal narrative shows a “legend in the making” and provides insight into the way in which stories are embedded within wider social and political frameworks and how local history acquires meaning only in relation to contemporary social and political events. Indeed, details in the various narratives about Babu Farari’s life give rise to features of present-day local moral economies and folk ethics about State, power and the Self.
AM. Rivista della Società Italiana di Antropologia Medica, Oct 1, 2012
Visual Studies, Oct 1, 2016
This article will consider the roles played by the new digital technologies in the processes of v... more This article will consider the roles played by the new digital technologies in the processes of visual repatriation, refunctionalization, interpretation and production, and how these have influenced the designing and making of an anthropological photographic project in Central India that was developed in dialogue with an extant ethnographic archive. The question of the extent to which our representations of the Other are framed within, and contribute to reproducing , differences in power between the representer and those represented will be addressed, along with that of what our representations of the Other can tell us about how 'legitimate knowledges' are produced. These discussions draw me into a consideration of the ethical and pragmatic issues emerging from using and distributing vintage and contemporary images in field locations-and to present some innovative approaches to this matter through what I will call a 'talking archive'. FIGURE 1. Image appearing at page 33 of A. C. Mayer's 'Caste and Kinship in Central India' (1960). The caption there reads 'A Rajput and a Farmer smoke a pipe together'. (© Mayer Adrian C.). Tommaso Sbriccoli is a social anthropologist based at the University of Siena. Drawing on research conducted in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Italy, he has written on kinship, pastoralism, law, migration and communal violence. He is currently writing a book about Jamgod. FIGURE 2. A woman (daughter of the man depicted in the picture) holds a cropped selection of Figure 1, which is placed in the family altar. (© Neri Daniela).
In questo articolo mettiamo in luce come, negli ultimi sessant'anni, alcune importanti idee relat... more In questo articolo mettiamo in luce come, negli ultimi sessant'anni, alcune importanti idee relative al nazionalismo e alla religione siano state tradotte all'interno degli spazi quotidiani di un villaggio dell'India centrale. Il villaggio oggetto dell'analisi è stato studiato da Adrian Mayer negli anni cinquanta e, più recentemente, da Tommaso Sbriccoli. Ciò fornisce al nostro approccio etnografico una solida e originale dimensione diacronica. Nell'articolo suggeriamo che la religione ha sostituito la gerarchia castale come modalità principale di discussione della differenziazione sociale, e che il discorso anti-musulmano permette agli indù di casta Tommaso Sbriccoli Enacting nationalist history: Buildings, Edward Simpson processions and sound in the making of a village in Central India alta di depoliticizzare, e conseguentemente nascondere, le relazioni strutturate di ineguaglianza con le caste basse. Esaminiamo quindi come progetti edilizi in competizione, processioni rituali e il suono siano utilizzati per contestare differenti produzioni di significato al livello del villaggio. Invece di considerare gli spazi pubblici come arene conservatrici intese a controllare eccessi ed esuberanze, li intendiamo qui come luoghi per la sperimentazione e il cambiamento sociale, e come gli spazi in cui la storia post-coloniale dell'India viene messa in scena.
Journal of Legal Pluralism, Mar 1, 2013
This paper explores juridical and political practices and conceptions of justice and authority in... more This paper explores juridical and political practices and conceptions of justice and authority in Rajasthan, India, outlining a discursive approach to legal pluralism. The presentation and the analysis of the narrative of a Rajasthani woman will be the focus of the present work. By providing her 'internal' perspective on a case study concerning a village dispute the aim of the paper is both to clarify how legal pluralism can be seen to work in a region of rural Rajasthan, and to prove the usefulness of the method here adopted for the identification and comprehension of the modalities through which different levels of organization are produced and structured within discourse. Indeed, the attempt is to show how legal pluralism can be analyzed not only according to the postulated presence of different normative systems or access to diverse legal forums, but also in relation to the capacity of social actors to build, in a (semi)autonomous way, their position within a discursive order characterized by the potential production and multiplication of legal and political planes.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mar 25, 2016
This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on... more This study of goondas (gangsters or toughs) in North Indian politics comes by way of a comment on intellectual method in the anthropology of moralities. More especially, it offers critical remarks on the recent adoption of ‘virtue’ as the cardinal moral co-ordinate of human life. Drawing on field research conducted across northern India, we show that when people celebrate goondas as leaders, they do so not because they see in them virtuous men, but because they think them capable of ‘getting things done’. This ethics of efficacy is neither merely instrumental nor is it but another variant of virtue ethics. It presents, instead, an altogether different moral teleology orientated towards effective action rather than excellent character. While challenging the self-centred bent of the late anthropology of ethics, we also make preliminary remarks on the contrast between ‘moral’ and ‘practical’ judgement, and the limits of ‘the moral’ as such.
In recent years, we have been witnessing an increasing involvement of anthropologists as workers ... more In recent years, we have been witnessing an increasing involvement of anthropologists as workers within the Italian system of shelter for asylum seekers and refugees. Such involvement deserves to be investigated for many reasons. On one side, it illustrates what role and function society at large believes anthropology should take on. On the other side, it also makes explicit what role and competences anthropologists themselves deem to be able to perform and deploy. At the same time, it also shows the complex relations that are produced-in the neo-liberal context of dismantling of public university and externalization of welfare services-between academia, market, civil society and institutions. Finally, such collaboration of our discipline with institutions governing Other's life inevitably evokes past connections between anthropology and colonialism and consequently asks for a particularly sound analytical effort. In this article, I will thus delineate some areas of problematiza...
Proceedings of the world congress of the IASS/AIS, 2015
This contribution draws on the interdisciplinary work carried out by an anthropologist (Tom-maso ... more This contribution draws on the interdisciplinary work carried out by an anthropologist (Tom-maso Sbriccoli) and a semiotician (Stefano Jacoviello) on a contemporary category of subalterns in our societies: the migrants. Our presentation will follow a group of them, asylum seekers, through the procedure of claiming their status as refugees in Italy. In what follows, we will focus on voice both as a discursive category and as a textual clue and we will try to show how voice can be used as an analytical indicator of the efficacy of someone's action. Searching for voice within the texture of discourse, we will thus construct a model to describe the actions, both enacted and suffered, by asylum seekers. As a result, we will be able to reflect on the relation between agency and subalternity and to the one, which runs in parallel, between subject, subjectivity and identity. In this way, we hope that our work at the crossing of anthropology and semiotics will provide a set of analytical tools and a particular perspective to contribute to the debate on the relationship and possible collaborations between the two disciplines and on the meaning of action.
Recensione di Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precariou... more Recensione di Luisa Steur, Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala , New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2017, pp. 302.
In recent years, we have been witnessing an increasing involvement of anthropologists as workers ... more In recent years, we have been witnessing an increasing involvement of anthropologists as workers within the Italian system of shelter for asylum seekers and refugees. Such involvement deserves to be investigated for many reasons. On one side, it illustrates what role and function society at large believes anthropology should take on. On the other side, it also makes explicit what role and competences anthropologists themselves deem to be able to perform and deploy. At the same time, it also shows the complex relations that are produced – in the neo-liberal context of dismantling of public university and externalization of welfare services – between academia, market, civil society and institutions. Finally, such collaboration of our discipline with institutions governing Other’s life inevitably evokes past connections between anthropology and colonialism and consequently asks for a particularly sound analytical effort. In this article, I will thus delineate some areas of problematiza...
In this paper we look at how some big ideas to do with nationalism and religion have been transla... more In this paper we look at how some big ideas to do with nationalism and religion have been translated into the everyday spaces of a village in Central India over the last sixty years. This particular village was studied by Adrian Mayer in the 1950s and, more recently, by Tommaso Sbriccoli, which gives our ethnographic approach a strong and original diachronic dimension. We suggest that religion has replaced caste hierarchy as the principle mode in which social differentiation is discussed, and that anti-Muslim discourse permits high caste Hindus to de-politicise and thus conceal structured relations of inequality with low caste Hindus. We examine the ways in which competitive building projects, ritualised processions and sounds are used to contest meaning at the village level. Instead of seeing public spaces as conservative arenas intended to check exuberance and excess, we see them as places for experimentation and social change, and as the spaces in which Indian post-colonial histo...
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2018
Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archi... more Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the rem...
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016
This article, drawing on research carried out in the village of Jamgod (India, Madhya Pradesh), p... more This article, drawing on research carried out in the village of Jamgod (India, Madhya Pradesh), present the story of Babu Farari, an outlaw living and operating in this area in the 50s. First met during fieldwork as a legend about a local social bandit, the figure of Babu grew to acquire a deeper, three-dimensional complexity. His story has been reconstructed here from fragments of ethnography, interviews and conversations, and from information contained in the fieldnotes of Mayer, an anthropologist who did research in the same village when Babu Farari was active. This polyvocal narrative shows a “legend in the making” and provides insight into the way in which stories are embedded within wider social and political frameworks and how local history acquires meaning only in relation to contemporary social and political events. Indeed, details in the various narratives about Babu Farari’s life give rise to features of present-day local moral economies and folk ethics about State, power...
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Papers by Tommaso Sbriccoli
Narratives of Plural Italy, between Imaginary and Diversity Politics"
XXVI International Conference of Film Studies, Rome, May 6-8, 2021
Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts - University of Roma Tre