La Restituzione: problemi e pericoli

Abstract

The subject of restitution of their ethnographic investigations by researchers to examined peoples, groups and institutions has been more and more discussed in the last decades especially by scholars in Humanities and Anthropology within the international scientific circles – though to a lesser degree in Italy – due to the risks and problems relating to the rules, bans and obligations governing the fieldwork practices, as the title of this work says. More and more ethical codes defining the proper behavior during fieldwork and the rules to be followed in writing and publishing the ethnographic results, have been elaborated by Universities and other Institutions. Simultaneously the number of objections to the researchers’ work by the researcher’s objects of study has constantly increased, often leading on the one hand to more restrictive rules and obligations and on the other to official charges sometimes resulting in trials and legal punishments, as several of the publications presented and analysed in this survey reveal. The outcome in considering these difficult experiences and situations is the obviousness of a necessary change in the way of carrying out fieldwork practices today, a fact that poses unsettling questions about the future of the anthropologist profession.