RICERCA ITALIANA     

Texts of identities. Cultural migrations and public sphere: Italicity as a resource for cosmopolitism

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Abstract

Beginning with the assumption that the two starting paradigms of this research - that of the communicative view proposed by Bechelloni and that of the cosmopolitan view by Beck - are complementary, we want to make plausible the hypothesis that the original Italian hybrid identity (its lengthy history, the special character of the Italic diaspora and thus all the characteristics which contribute in identifying and defining Italicism) is today a valuable resource for human society. Using qualitative methodologies we want toprove our hypothesis by means of evidence supplied by targeted empirical social objects and processes based on the analysis of a wide but contained range of texts of Italic or Italian identity: newspaper articles and television fiction, long interviews with persons of Italian original who have settled in the Americas and in Australia, biographies and autobiographies, various scientific reports connected with the historic narratives… We will end up by giving more visibility to an existing unnoticed revolution, that of the new communication and just as much visibility to its enemies (the nihilists and the ones who over-simplify). A way in which we can build a view of our present - on the wings and the roots which characterize it - able to break away from the interpretative schools of the dominant methodological nationalis paradigm and to understand the new cosmopolitan society which is being developed.

Principal Investigator

Giovanni BECHELLONI Università degli Studi di FIRENZE

Research Objectives

The aim of the research programme is on three levels: a)theoretical, b)methodological, empirical (substantial).

A. From the theoretical point of view, the scope of this programme is to render plausible and deducible the new paradigm, which has been developing for some years now, called the "communicative view". This paradigm has been included in that current of studies which the coordinator of this programme has called the "communicative turn". A merger between "linguistic turn", "ethnographic turn" and "cultural studies" converging in the renewal of the approach of "mainstream" social sciences (sociology and cultural anthropology, history and political science) towards the study of cultural and communicative processes. This convergence has permitted us to cross those borders which have long separated issues for study (as the culture of the élite from popular culture, contemporaneity from history the national and local societies from the cosmopolitanization process, the communicative processes from those social and political, simple societies from those which are complex, and so on) which must be described and interpreted from a holistic viewpoint, attentive to the interdependence, to the pluri-casualness on a long term basis. From a view which is sensitive to continuity rather than the historical caesuras and according to a comparative approach able to spread the social phenomena over a temporary length of time and in geographical space: being the "events >>>

First Results

Partial results expected: a shared theoretical and methodological approach as well as operative procedures considered economical and relevant with respect to the aims of the research.Partial results expected: the accumulation, in the various sectors of specific relevance of the research units, of the awaited data through recordings of long interviews, summing up of focus groups, analytical records of various kinds of media narratives (newspapers and television fiction) summaries on talks, records of targeted analysis of historical-social-anthropological texts produced during recent years (some of which have been already included in the partial - for reasons of space - bibliographies attached to forms A and B of this project, summing up of talks, synthesis of thematic records taken from biographies and autobiographies and anything useful or unexpected during the course of the field work suitable for denying or confirming the reviewed hypothesis, compared to the dominant paradigms which support the theoretical and methodological apparatus of the entire project.Partial results expected: these are not only results to be published but also results able to trigger off debates among not only the experts but among the public potentially interested in the operational relapses that this project could be subjected to for the school and university educational policies, for the formation of experts in communication and more generally for public policies aimed at the formation of more >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

1. The scientific starting point of the entire project is made up of a theoretical and methodological framework common to all the research units involved in the project; as they are composed of researchers and scholars with a sociological background, who share paradigms and have had much experience of cooperation among themselves and with the international community; even though they have been oriented towards specific areas which as a whole are joined towards the understanding of a single macro made up of processes of a complex social construction seen in modern society and in particular with regard to extreme modernity or the second modernity (Giddens, Beck). The specificity of the approach which characterizes the research units involved in the project is made up of a chosen territory which is to be explored: that of the social history of communication, starting from the history of human existence (five thousand years or more) and more specifically from the Mediterranean societies and the Hellenistic world (with its roots in the ancient civilizations of Phoenicians and Etruscans, Greeks and Romans), from the social use of the public word (Socrates and Plato) to the social use of writing. It is necessary to achieve results by going through the historical journeys of the Italians and Italy (from the eighth century B.C. to today) and to discuss further the dominant paradigms on the origin of capitalism and modernity, strongly influenced by the Protestant reformation and the >>>