Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses on Manfredonia, Italy, where the legacy of the petrochemical industry is divisive. The closure of the plant in the 1990s, partly as a result of protests and the outcome of the trial of the plant's managers, led to a conflict between workers and activists, mistakenly called 'environmentalists'. This rupture was reiterated through the selection of memories and actors that produced heroes and villains in the public arena, whose social and moral complexity anthropology seeks to explore.

Paper Abstract:

This paper illustrates the case of a town in southern Italy, Manfredonia, where the ENI petrochemical industrial past is far from being a source of pride. It is a cumbersome, divisive and still present legacy, considering the clean-up still underway since the factory accelerated its shutdown and dismantling in the mid-1990s, also as a result of the strong popular protest. Since then, in Manfredonia, which did not cultivate an environmentalist sensitivity, the fracture between the petrochemical plant employees and those who mobilised for its closure has widened. Indeed, the final break came with the acceptance of the compensation offered by ENI to all workers and families who had participated in the lawsuit against the managers for negligence, with the exception of a single widow. The workers and families who had defended their jobs at the end of the 1980s were later stigmatised as the 'villains' of the city, who were monetising their dignity, their own health and that of the entire population. In response, a grassroots youth movement emerged that patrimonialised the figure of the 'heroic' worker claiming justice. The recent social research carried out in Manfredonia contributed to the marginalisation of the former workers on the public stage. In this way, the news of anthropological research on industrialisation has become an opportunity for them to redeem their memory. The research is an attempt to bring out the complexity of the social and moral nuances of the events that are attempted to be stitched together in the polyphonic ethnographic process.