Documenti

A partire dalla relazione tra storia ed antropologia, il saggio esplora le varie modalit\ue0 di analisi dei documenti d'archivio per la ricerca etnografica. Attraverso alcuni esempi etnografici, gli autori mostrano come l'uso di documenti cartacei possa risultare particolarmente utile all'indagine antropologica, ed anche come il metodo etnografico consenta di interrogare le carte d'archivio in modo differente rispetto ad altre discipline

Crossing the boundary : Peasants shepherds and servants in a western alpine community

In the historical and anthropological literature, western Alps servants were widely assumed to be few in number, and the importance of the institution of service therefore negligible. This study combines historical-demographic and ethnographic methods to investigate whether this was true of a community in the Italian western Alps with a mixed population of peasants and transhumant shepherds. Surprisingly, a valuable 1951 census reveals that seemingly small numbers hide what was actually a normal phase in the life course of peasant sons whom shepherds recruited to work as servants. Distinct patterns of life-cycle and lifetime service seem to have coexisted in the same community. The evidence also confirms that in southern Europe, as some recent studies have pointed out, the institution of service often was not just the circulation of young men and women between households but an asymmetrical exchange between different socioeconomic groups. Otherwise rigid social and cultural boundaries were thereby crossed