Paper short abstract:

Starting from 1878 Bartolomeo Malfatti’s handbook 'Etnografia' (Ethnography), the paper discusses the trajectory of ethnography in Italy, its trans/national formation, and different declinations, to critically reflect upon the meanings of “doing ethnography” in the long nineteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

In 1878 appeared the first Italian handbook dedicated to the field of Etnografia (ethnography) by Bartolomeo Malfatti (1828-1892). The book expressed the need to configure ethnography as an autonomous discipline freed from biological determinism and aimed at the search for an appropriate research method and specialized knowledge. Although set in an evolutionist framework, Malfatti presented ethnography in contraposition to anthropology – as a “scienza storica delle genti” (“historical science of peoples”) diverging from the medical and biological-naturalist conceptions prevailing in late nineteenth-century Italy thanks to Paolo Mantegazza’s Florentine school of anthropology (Puccini 2011).

Following the lessons of Adriano Balbi and Giovenale Vegezzi Ruscalla, as well as Carlo Cattaneo and Gabriele Rosa, Malfatti offered an organic and complete systematization of ethnography as a research program linked to early nineteenth-century geographical, historical, and philological studies influenced by the German scholarship of Theodor Waitz, Friedrich Müller, Oscar Peschel, Lorenz Dieffenbach, Maximilian Perty, M.L. Frankenheim, and Georg Gerland. In Malfatti’s approach, ethnography deals primarily with peoples and their language, psychic life, social order, customs, trade, religions, myths, and migrations. The need to clarify the statute of ethnography as separate from anthropology would arise again in the 1910s, following Lamberto Loria’s foundation of Italian ethnography on the basis of his fieldwork experience.

Starting from Malfatti and driving from the Italian ethnographic archive, the paper discusses the trajectory of ethnography in Italy, its trans/national formation, and different declinations, to critically reflect upon the meanings of “doing ethnography” in the long nineteenth century.