Etnografie nella comfort zone

The article reflects on the limited public impact of Italian cultural anthropology, relating it both to the broader decline of intellectuals in mass-mediated society and to the specific weakness of the discipline within the national academic system. Its central argument is a critique of “ethnographies in the comfort zone”: research that tends to focus only on subjects and movements politically close to the researcher, while avoiding the effort to understand groups perceived as hostile or morally troubling. The author calls for a broader ethnographic vocation, able to investigate political cultures, fears, desires and social worlds that are often neglected today, in order to restore anthropology’s cognitive and public relevance.