World Futures, 67: 4757, 2011 Copyright C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844

online DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2010.533583

ANTHROPOLOGY OF URBAN SPACE: IDENTITIES AND PLACES IN THE POSTMODERN CITY

GIUSEPPE LICARI
Department of Communication Sciences, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy This reection is focused on the anthropologic study of cities and their origins. A thought is on the birth of urban reality, its spaces and symbolisms that are responsible for their modern and postmodern transformation. Exchange and contemporary common life follow old traditional schemes, reminding us of lifestyles in villages rather than those of modern cities. These forms of living are reproposed by the groups of migrants who inhabit squares and streets and connote them with their own symbolisms in a multi-ethnic space, where more frequent are the moments of social and cultural fragmentation as opposed to the hosting communitys life. KEYWORDS: Identity, intercultural cohabitation, places, postmodern city, urban space.

GENESIS OF THE SPACE Scholars state space arises when human beings turn an anonymous place into a portion of dened and relational space (Aug` 1992; Callari Galli 1996). The e passage from anonymous (profane) to nominated (sacred) space primarily occurs through its occupation (Eliade 1984) as rst act of drawing a border1 that will allow its recognition in time. To claim this right, the space has to be therefore localized, exist as spatial moment, as named locality. For the Latin world, the space conned by the trace of the plough founds the city space that sketches its horizon: the line that separates the city from the countryside, the internal from the externalin fact, Rome rises through the symbolic act of tracking a furrow in the ground, the primordial furrow that determines the border. In this action not only geometry has been established, which measures the land, but mainly a right and a direction that must necessarily be followed by acknowledgment. The symbolic act of furrowing the land represents the aim at circumscribing and therefore dening and turning toward the center, naming a physical space until that moment anonymous. The furrow, whose other side the stranger, the foreigner, the unknown, the barbarian lives, whereas on this side the well-known,

Address correspondence to Giuseppe Licari, Development Anthropology, Department of Communication Sciences, La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. E-mail: giuseppe.licari@ uniroma1.it 47

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the familiar, the friend. Under the aspect of familiarity and foreignness that places can generate in a symbolic way, Romulus and Remuss legend is very emblematic. In the relationship between the two brothers the legend narrates, a tragedy occurs because Remus wants to cross the furrow his brother traces to indicate the borders of the rising Rome. The story also points out how the relationship between the man and the space denes the identity of the place as well as that of those who live there. The identity of a space actually converts the territory in a place. Here is how a portion of a territory, which is named and projected into the future, becomes Rome. These early observations announce how human beings got to possess the space; how its rst appropriation has happened, the rst seed of what will be urbanity, the Urbis, the city we have today. SPACE AND PLACES OF LIVING I shall now consider some aspects related to the space to be lived with a closer look at its inuence on the inhabitant of these places. In the cities, the town walls originally established the distinction between what belonged to the city and what was excluded. Within the walls, however, if we consider for example the Greek and Roman world, we can notice a crucial difference: for the Greeks it is the city (polis) that determines the characteristics of the citizen (polites), while for the Romans the citizens (cives) are those who determine the features of the city (civitas). In the Greek city-states,2 the citizenship was originally not an individual right, but actually only meant the afliation to one political and social community. The given rights were equal for all citizens, such as the general obligations like respecting the laws, defending State and constitution, the worship of gods and the State, that were often conrmed with an oath. The citizenship could even be granted to a foreigner and implied all the rights of a citizen by birth. In the Hellenistic confederations every citizen of a member State acquired a second citizenship, the one of the confederation. The citizenship could have been lost in case of deprivation of the rights (atimia) or as a consequence of an exile. In ancient Rome, the citizenship at rst depended only on being born by both Roman parents, although one of the parents could have been peregrinus in possession of the conubium. It implied rights, privileges, and obligations. The Roman citizenship was incompatible with that of another State. Even those who did not live in Rome, remained citizens if they had the citizenship, and maintained the right to vote at the assemblies in Rome. In a second stage, with the Constitution of Antoninus in 212 BC,3 all those who lived within the borders of the empire became Roman citizens. Taking a leap in contemporary days, by establishing afliation, the city still regulates both the relationships between the different identities by relating movements of inclusion/exclusion, and the relationship with the civic Entity. This demonstrates how, even now, besides a social fact, the building of the identity is also a relevant cultural determination: being born and living in a determined place can be relevant and can characterize ones own feeling and sense of belonging (Licari 2006).

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The course of a space settlement and its conrmation plays an important role even within a community where the borders can be dened by values and norms. The awareness of such physical and ethical borders becomes one of the factors that can determine whether a person belongs to it, and in some cases even how. It is easy to perceive that if in a community you know how to nd out its not only physical borders, it means that you nd out a familiar and encouraging space as well as the area that those borders enclose. However, the space/territorial identity assumes a crucial value for the individual and the community only to the extent they can confront themselves with the other in a constructive dialogue. In this direction the ambiguous value appears; the ambivalence of the border as an element that though dividing, at the same time constitutes a determining point of contact for oneself and the other.

PLACES OF LISTENING AND NARRATION In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty had distinguished a geometric and an anthropological space, considering the relational space a place of experience with the world on the part of a being who was essentially placed in relation with the environment. The space would be for the place what the word is when being spoken. At the same time we can state that the narration people constantly create around themselves transforms places into spaces, or spaces into places. It thus appears how relevant is the narration as well as the various poetic, anthropological, philosophical, but also architectural and urban languages associated to it. The languages of the various disciplines very specically help to make the story or stories of places and the living space. We can therefore consider how a place4 can be narrated. Words are not mere tools to designate events or things: they are the most powerful tools to build the world they intend to designate and draw. Full of history and connotations, words also designate and narrate which point of view the world is described from.5 The peculiarity of narration as a tool, thus, stands out: it is a constructive performance, since it re-describes the experienced life to a point where we become the story that we tell, taking back past experiences in a new way and framing current and future ones under the light of a certain further perspective. Conrmations of this awareness appear in literature as well. In this connection the stories Marco Polo tells to the Great Khan appear interestingly relevant when he describes him his reign, which were later resumed by Italo Calvino in his work Invisible Cities (1980, 137). Here is how Calvino describes the city called Euphemy where the merchants of seven lands gather themselves at each solstice and equinox to exchange goods:
[ . . . ] But what motivates to go up the river and cross deserts to arrive hitherto is not only the exchange of goods that can be found in all bazaars inside and outside the reign of the Great Khan, scattered at your feet on the same yellow mats, in the shade of the same whisk curtains, offered with the same false discount price.

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Going to Euphemia is not only for selling or buying, but also because in the night everywhere near the res around the bazaar, sitting on sacks or barrels or lying down on piles of rugs, every word that someone sayslike wolf, sister, hidden treasure, battle, scab, loversinspire the others to tell each their own story of wolfs, sisters, treasures, scab, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey that is waiting for you, in order to stay awake to the rocking of the camel or the junk you begin to rethink of all your memories one by one, your wolf will become another wolf, your sister another sister, your battle other battles, on the way back from Euphemia, the city where memories are exchanged at every solstice and every equinox. Through the creation of stories, people are therefore attributing meaning to events and their own (internal and external) world both at an individual and a collective level, and by doing so, they attribute it mainly to their living space. Reality is represented through narrative acts by which one tries not only to interpret the world but to predict future events (Gergen 2004) as well as the places where one intends to locate that future. One of the main characteristics of narration is in fact precisely sequentiality (Bruner 1993). Events, feelings, mental states are told on the basis of a precise order. Their meaning actually depends on the point of the whole sequence where they are located.6 The structure of the experience is thus narrative. Yet equally narrative seems the work that architecture and urban planning develop; we can see Wittgensteins philosophic researches (1953) where language is mixed with the history of a city, where the comparison on the city that grows through the stories and the history projected on its facades resembles the growth of our language (Vezzani 2004). This dialogue looks like the effort that our children make to learn the language and the places of living in order to unveil their secrets and live a profound experience of familiarity with places. Perhaps, more than other authors, Wittgenstein explains how the architect gets ready to tell a story, his story and the story of his space-place that is granted to him by the community that he feels he belongs to, while he is about to design a place of living. You just need to think about the function owned by the historic memory present in one place: the stories of important events for one community, the written history emanated from the facades of the houses and buildings of one city, stories that in many societies are narrated by the elderly, who have the task to pass on a series of socially shared norms and values; narration that has the function to underline and maintain sharing and afliation for the good of the community. It seems that we can state that listening and narration are a real need for human beings. It also seems that in human beings the practical and reective nature of their condition activates many meta-textual elements (methods of thinking, perception, gestures, types of relationships, situation where the communication exchange takes place) in order to give life to different ways to listen and communicate; communication, in fact, is not only limited to its oral expression; we have the artistic, cultural, technical, architectural, and urban one. A basic feature of communication is its dialogic character. The discourse is always dialogic: it literally means running here and there, owing through, and more than owing through who speaks and who listens, it represents a moment of the dialogic chain

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that ties together both the researcher and his object of study, both the technician and his work. As we have already shown, we must say that every discourse is located or occurs in a determined place (Bateson 1976), at a certain moment, among people that belong to specic culture. Every discourse is inuenced by the situation where it is spoken and by the relation it is placed in. What we have said speaking of the discourse is valid for the text as well. In the case of the living space, texts and works are discourses that keep on tending toward the other. As we know, every work embraces more and more generations. In the end, it is a good practice that every discourse and text need a good amount of preliminary listening. Before writing a poem, the poet listens to himself and the places, in the same way as before a design, the architect gathers exponential and historical elements of a place and listens to them with his whole body, eyes and mind, to start the collocation of its text and work in the selected context. This process may start in the mind of the subject as much as beginning from a real listening to the other, his culture or his environment. Listening to places is an expression referring to a process of listening of the physical places, but at the same time, of how these places echo in ourselves. PLACES AND NON-PLACES OF THE POSTMODERN CITY As we have seen, the spatial context is at the same time what the identity of a group expresses and what a group has to defend against external and internal threats. When for example bulldozers erase portions of a territory, when allochtones settle in the territory, and, even more noticeably when, in a war, bombardments destroy entire cities, and the references of a territory get canceled together with those of its identity. At present, moreover, because of the relevance taken by the debate on urban safety, the deletion of a whole set of places from the city map, real shared spatial reference points, has turned the urban space into a control tool; all this however did not coincide with a real reduction of the social conict within it. On the contrary it has encouraged the radicalization in well dened areas in order to hide from the sight of the many, creating the so-called ghettos. The catalog we select the new forms for the territorial and architectural plan from seems to be made around a new discriminating factor: fear, the obsession about personal safety, and self-isolation inside a personal spatial context. In the postmodern time, squares and meeting places fail, along with their symbolic importance of occasions, to meet and compare with the other: it is the relationship which frightens, and we resign in its regard. Reading then fears, insecurities and self-isolations according to anthropological and psychological codes, a fear can be made out of what is above all intrapersonal, before becoming interpersonal. Without a dialogue with the other, the different and the outsider that live in us and everyone feels inside him, a real comparison with the other we meet, with the immigrants who already permanently live in our cities7 is unthinkable. Intending to move in a decidedly anthropological area, it is the moment to call upon the thought of Marc Aug` , an author who denes the place as a notion e

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of meaning for its inhabitants. In his work Non-places (1992) Aug` describes e the three common characteristics for places such as: identitarian, relational, and historic. Being born means to be born in a place, being assigned a home. In this sense the place of birth founds the individual identity. The place is the order on the basis of which elements are distributed in terms of coexistence, therefore relations. The map of the house, the rules of residence, the neighborhoods of the village, altars, public places, the division of the territory, correspond for everyone to a set of possibilities, rules and prohibitions with a spatial, social, identitarian, and historic content at the same time (La Cecla 2000, 31). If one place can be dened as identitarian, relational, historic, a space that cannot be dened neither identitarian, nor relational or historic will then dene a non-place. Aug` argues that sur-modernity (excess of time and space in modernity) e produces non-places, which do not integrate the places of memory in themselves. In this way, Aug` considers space as a frequented place, a crossroad of mobile ity: those who move transform in fact in a place the road which urbanization geometrically denes as space. INTERCULTURAL COHABITATION IN THE POST MODERN CITY The city occupies a territory and this is commonly understood as a geographic and economic place just like geographers and demographers (Dematteis 1995), sociologists and economists said in the past. We have to remember, however, that we lately deal with the territory not only as physical structures: hills, seas, roads and railway networks, houses, but mainly as human and cultural resources. The urban milieu is then enriched with mobile structures, as the relational space that includes market exchanges as well as individual and collective experiences of one place, such as those cultures and relative skills and notions belonging to the people who are permanently present or passing by, and become an added value of remarkable interest (Latouche 2000).8 Regarding the intercultural cohabitation in contemporary cities, I believe that comparing ourselves with other cultures different than ours has almost become a necessity for whoever faces the social life of any city. It is necessary to underline that when cultures meet the relationship with the other enriches us and our culture, especially if we have all the tools to decode the messages that other people, nonEU citizens and autochthones, generally send to community and institutions, and particularly to the population, such as for example the one that embodies the neighborhood relations. Nevertheless, there are many people that in the relationship with the other, the different, the non-EU citizen, the foreigner, are petried and raise physical or metaphoric walls, with the aim to restrain the contact between cultures. This ethnocentric attitude does not obviously resolve the problem; on the contrary it worsens the already difcult relations of intercultural cohabitation and social interaction. We can briey state that a serious reection on the intercultural cohabitation should consider at least two aspects of fundamental importance: the rst is that

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the phenomena linked to globalization will more and more encourage different cultures in close and continuous relationship between them; the second afrms that when different cultures get in contact, a process of interaction starts with both positive and negative implications that impact on the social and cultural context of our cities (Palmeri 2005). Interculture has actually become an ordinary characteristic of our social life and in our economic-productive activities: we have to acknowledge that non-EU citizens are rightfully part of the productivity chain. The result is that we are more and more in contact with other cultures which are different than ours and in contexts that until now were considered symbols and signs of local identity. Let us think, for example, of the immigrants vote as an element that can generate a strong and irreversible change in the national identity: if not well managed, this relationship can give rise to misunderstandings and even severe conicts that can be both internal and with groups of foreigners. We can thus have autochthonous or immigrant communities who, since they have to continuously mediate and consider their own identity and/or ethnicity in relation to the hosting one and that of other groups of foreigners they coexist with, nd themselves to live together with the other and this generates disturbing feelings, clashes and abuses of power that damage rights and cause bitter sufferings. As we know, when we are called to clarify aspects pertaining to our own identity, the other becomes obscure, uneasy, and hardly manageable. One example is represented by the ethnic wars that happened in Europe, as the ones that took place in Rwanda in Africa, and the recent events in Rosarno in Italy, just to give some examples. In the same way, we have to remember that cohabitation allows us to also experiment syncretisms both in consumption, and in food and culture: clothing, the way of moving, music tastes, and so on are already spread in Italian cities as well, after the migratory wave in our country during the last years. We can nd this mixit in spaces as non-places (Aug` 1992) but also in the transparent e e interstices9 : spatial realities that open the door to a dialogue among the cultures present in the same context, overcoming exclusions and indifference (Marengo 1999); or in the schools where the next generation will be composed of subjects who will test hard their sight and hearing: young man with black skin, but if you close your eyes he seems one of us, an Italian teacher of north-east Italy used to say. It is therefore necessary to get to know and understand the cultural practices of the others, and obtaining tools to be able to understand the abundance and variety of the cultures that relate to us becomes equally urgent. At the same time institutions themselves are being called to suggest models of exchange or cultural mediation among different experiences that can possibly give rise to that cultural mixture, even though this tendency does not currently seem to be still dominant because of the ongoing process of globalization that brought worlds closer that were very distant in space and time. It is plausible to think that the contemporary era also produces subjectivities that are not completely acknowledged in their native culture. In this case the interaction with the other can ease a harmonious development of social cohabitation. Another example of peaceful cohabitation is represented by the cases of those

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people who live along the borders or frontiers and establish signicant economic and social daily connections, and the result is that not only linguistic barriers are overcome, but also socioeconomic ones, giving actually rise to a neutral area where the two cultures in contact are both acknowledged with similar importance without one predominating the other.10 FINAL OBSERVATIONS The scope of this work is to propose a synthetic reading of the symbolism of establishment of urban contexts passing through places and moments that generate the building of identity processes. As we have already seen, the combination of some symbolic elements, among very distant historic moments, helps us understand how identity processes more or less respond to the same dynamics still today. Physical space is important, as well as relations and rights. At the same time, what we currently call individual and collective identity originates from narrations, as Calvino has well described in Euphemia. The arrival of modernity, however, is like a step toward the non-places that Aug` writes about. A surplus of time and space that determines, in that place, the e vanishing of identity, relational, as well as historic processes. The present age that symbolizes the epilogue of modern age, tends to place itself as a balance of the surplus of time and space of some places, slows them down, blends them, puts them in conict and transforms them, recreating a new history: the postmodern city. The latter one, by resembling with communities and villages, with nomadic places and traditional customs, seems to be an answer to the surplus of rationality of the modern city, which is orderly, functional and aiming only at speeding up its inhabitants lives and relations. In the modern city, the time of the story seems to disappear, and consequently the possibility to meet the other, until we nd ourselves speechless and alone, isolated among many people. An anthropological and intercultural glance is therefore not only desirable, but denitely necessary if it has to drive us towards an intercultural dynamic where the cultures in contact will not only consider themselves right but turn to a third reality that will be able to take shape out of these two, or more cultures. As anthropology states (Harrison 2001), cultures, and those who are now interacting in urban contexts, have to let themselves contaminate and domesticate one another. They will have to activate relations of reciprocity and recognition of the otherness and recognize equal rights to men and women. Having said this, I would like to conclude recalling two concepts that well illustrate cultures in their contact, clash, moving away and coming nearer, the concept of concentration and that of expansion. On the one hand, the term concentration alludes to a centripetal movement, directed toward the center, therefore of aggregation. In the anthropological eld this image can be represented by the axis mundi, which for the Aborigines denes the center of the world. Considering your own place as center of the world, at rst implies a sacral and respectful attitude. For the aboriginal nomads in Australia the center of the world in their own country is the point where the

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pole that supports the tent is stuck into the ground, day after day but always in different places (Chatwin 1987). On the other hand, the dynamic embedded in the continuous displacement is not a contradiction in terms, it would if we thought of the geometric, homogenous, calculable, and localized space from a migratory point of view. For the aborigines the place, which above all is the space that opens the communication with the Other, the foundation place that contains the symbolic requirements able to orientate the group in the territory, is recognizable at each point. The expansiondiffusion the aborigines make us imagine though recalling the geometric shape of the circumference, the circle around the pole, related to the everyday motion in the space, does not correspond to a line that circumscribes a point in a regular way, but it is something porous, diffuse, nonlinear, something jagged, something to be built, in the daily interaction with the other (La Cecla 2000). Within these two conceptualizations I would like to recall my reections on the Anthropology of urban space. I would like to try and say that when anthropology describes life, experiences, history and the origin of the man, it imagines him on one hand within the concept of expansion connected with hunting and collecting, thus with nomad, populations (Meillassoux 1967); on the other hand, as sedentary therefore with growers, and more recently in the urban space, as a citizen. Nevertheless, nomadism is perhaps what we still meet in our squares, where it seems that these people have lost the way, or have lost the pole to be stuck into the ground, an almost completely western responsibility, for having exchanged mirrors with gold, or mechanized labor too much through frenetic development projects that neither in the West would have been successful. It is sufcient to think of the sixties and the discrepancy between North and South in Europe in order to understand how the advanced technologies of the North were often misinterpreted even in Europe. And here we were all children of the same symbolism and had lived with the same Western myth. While, for example, when we speak of the rice cultivators as the Diola of the southern region of Casamance11 in Senegal (Palmeri 1990, 2010), the symbolism of living is only other, the myth is not the western one. Here, in order to modify the truly sustainable rural realities in market societies, advanced technologies have had the result to destroy the thousand-year knowledge of how to farm the land and the social structure as well, and created hunger and illusion that led millions of people towards the southern coasts of Europe, believing that they could go up its entire territory, perhaps because the nomadic spirit is still alive within them. That is why in our cities we nd many immigrants who are ready to everything. Perhaps we do not understand enough that these people migrated for two reasons; a romantic one, because the memory of their nomadism is still vivid, their stories and identity narrations speak about journeys of initiation, encounters, and enrichments. Secondly, because the majority of them have nothing more to eat in their countries. Where for generations and generations their ancestors and even grandparents and parents lived with dignity, they have no more chances, mainly because the technological progress of the West has created not only a physical desert, but a cultural one as well.

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Many of them have studied in the near cities and after their return in their village they have only found misery and desertion. A very different reality from the dignied poverty where they grew up. So, perhaps, in these conditions, the attempt to migrate to rich countries remains the only narration that motivates them to persist. As anthropology suggests, we have to suppose that men were originally beings who wandered in space displacing themselves where there were more resources and that this nomadic spirit accompany them even now. After these arguments I can only underline that the centripetal movement that allows us to gather ourselves in a private space and the centrifugal movement that opens us toward a public space, represent only two of the possible coordinates to use one map with (Korzbinski 1933), where it is necessary to look and listen to the space and places of the human relations starting from this rst and simple intuition: the dialogue between the beginning and the end that metaphorically resembles the enormous vital pulsation wrapped in the diastole and systole of our planetary heart. NOTES
1. The Devoto-Oli (2008) dictionary denes the border as a line naturally or articially formed to demarcate the extension of a territory [ . . . ]. Therefore the border demarcates a space, rescues it from the nothing, gives it a dimension, and an identity. 2. For the Greeks, the barbarians, the non-Greeks, the xenos, the foreigners, were those who could not speak the Greek language; a denition of the other not free from implications; nevertheless all this referred to a non-pejorative reading of the other (it was simply unknown); our non-EU citizen instead appears under a completely different light. 3. Otherwise known as edict of Caracolla. In 212 BC by means of this constitution the Roman citizenship was given to all the free inhabitants of the Empire. 4. The reection on the potential of narration and story originates with Bruner (1988) that brings respectively back logical-scientic and literary language to two types of thought, two different ways to create reality, one complementary and irreducible to the other. Paradigmatic and narrative thought. The rst, looking at categorization and conceptualization, aims at providing formal explanatory and mathematical systems, identifying the causes of general order and the procedures to verify/falsify them. The narrative thought, instead, through stories, analogies, and metaphors, gives an interpretation of the world in terms of intentionality. Bruner also species how a narrative speech must mainly have three characteristics: ideas for presupposition (i.e., the creation of implicit meanings); subjectivation (representation of reality through the lter of the characters consciousness); plurality of perspectives (the world is seen through a multiplicity of prisms, and each of them grasps a part of it). 5. In this direction, important is Spences thought (1982, 121): Narrations are not only exterior linguistic coverings limited to retrospectively tell a lived life, but supports that allow to signicantly and intelligibly create and order the changes a person is facing and consequently his/her context in time. 6. Understanding a narration means getting the plot of the story and understanding its sense in order to correlate it with the plot, as at the same time the plot appears out of a series of events (Bernardelli 1999). 7. Just to observe Vittorio Square in Rome, not to mention the whole Esquilino district next to Termini Station. 8. All disciplines have thus to deal with the territory: from geology to engineering, from sociology (Morin 1991; Cassano 1996) to anthropology (Callari Galli 2003; Harrison 2001; Palmeri 2005;

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Licari 2006), from philosophy (Esposito 2004) to psychology, from architecture to urbanism, to history, and so on. 9. Transparent interstices can be considered, for example, the occasional places of meeting in the streets, hidden from the sight: the underpasses where the non-EU citizens tend to stretch out mats and sell their merchandise. 10. Except in war conicts between two or more nations or people. 11. Casamance is divided in Lower Casamance (Ziguinchor region) and Upper Casamance (Kolda region).

REFERENCES
Aug` , M. 1992. Non-places. Milano: Eleuthera, 2002. e Bateson, G. 1976. An ecology of mind. Milano: Adelphi. Bernardelli, A. 1999. The narration. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Bruner, J. 1988. Mind to higher dimensions. Roma-Bari: Laterza. . 1993. Search for meaning. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Callari Galli, M. 1996. The space of the encounter. Paths in complexity, edited by CLEUP, Bologna: Clueb. Calvino, I. 1980. Invisible cities. Torino: Einaudi. Cassano, F. 1996. Meridian thinking. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Chatwin, B. 1987. Songlines. Milano: Adelphi. Dematteis, G. 1995. Implicit project. The contribution of human geography in the science of the territory. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Devoto-Oli. 2008. Dictionary of Italian Language. Milano: Mondadori. Eliade, M. 1984. The sacred and the profane. Torino: Boringhieri. Esposito, R. 2004. Biopolitics and identity. Immunity between cure and poison. Narrating the Group 2:522. Gergen, K. J. 2004. The role of narration in the construction of knowledge. Narrating the Group 1: 920. Heidegger, M. 1950. Broken paths. Firenze: La nuova Italia. La Cecla, F. 2000. Lost. man without environment. Bari: Laterza. Licari, G. 2006. Urban anthropology. The case of neighbourhood contracts, Padova: Cleup. Meillassoux, C. 1967. The economy of the savannah. Anthropological economy of western Africa, edited by Paolo Palmeri. Milano: Feltrinelli. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phenomenology of perception. Milano: Il Saggiatore. 1965. Morin, E. l991. Ideas: Habitat, life, organizations, customs and tradition. Milano: Feltrinelli. Palmeri, P. 2010. Traditional societies: A kind in extinction. In Participating processes and sustainable development, ed. M. Dalema, G. Licari, and P. Cori, 133152. Padova: Cleup. . 2005. Intercultural relations in Italy today. Padova: Cleup. . 1990. Back to the village. Padova: Cleup. Vezzani, B. 2004. Narrative wandering: The adventures of an imprudent but determined reader. Narrating the Group 1:7281. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical researches. Torino: Einaudi, Torino.

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