'Sotto il cappello del Monte Baldo': senso del luogo e relazioni sociali in un'area pedemontana del Veneto

The purpose of my thesis is to investigate the relationship between locality and people in a pre- alpine area in the North-East of Italy. By means of the concept of sense of place (Feld and Basso, 1996), I analyse how space becomes meaningful in the daily life. My work is an attempt to move beyond the concept of community or locality as demarcated physical and cultural space by describing some of the ways in which inhabitants express belonging to a place. If as suggest Gupta and Ferguson, community “is never simply the recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity but a categorical identity that is premised in various forms of exclusion and construction of otherness” (1997: 13-14), my aim is to understand how people produce difference and similarity in the contemporary Italy. The study is based on ethnographic and archival research carried out in a small town in the Region of the Veneto and in its more rural hinterland and I have investigated practices and memories of local people, as part of the process of “place making” and “people making”. In the first part of my work, I explore questions raised by ethnographers who engage in “anthropology at home” and my position in the field. Indeed, I show the ways in which local history, women’s work and past emigration are selectively mobilized in the discourse and commemorations of different parts of the local population, thus producing a local contest of alterity. In the second part, my ethnographic focus is on everyday life in a hill village. An exploration of people’s sense of place illustrates how disparate topics such as the uses and memory of social space, social relationships, ties to kin and house are ways of linking people to place and the past. In particular I show how inhabitants express their belonging (or not) to place, construct and negotiate processes of social classification and practice between past and present.