Come e perché decidere di “fare l’antropologo”: una personale case history nella brasiliana São Paulo degli anni Quaranta

Abstract

Through the memories of his childhood and early youth, the Author (who’s by now 86 years old) try to enlighten the main factors, different in kind and intensity, that a long time ago contributed to his choice “to be an anthropologist”, and to another choice, assumed as strongly related, which is the political one, “on the left”. He therefore reviews a series of small and major events, and subjective experiences, first in Italy, between Padova and Trieste, and then as emigrant with his family in a totally different context, São Paulo in Brazil, owing to the Fascist “racial laws”. It is thus in São Paulo, and in its manifold dimensions and contradictions, where his main training curriculum takes place, from primary school to University. A curriculum in some way fractured – but leaving its undeletable sign – with the return of the family in Italy, after the end of the Second World War