Paolo Heywood
Biographic Data
| ID | 75777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paolo Heywood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paolo |
| FAMILY NAME | Heywood |
| SIGNATURE | HEYWOOD P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2983-9240 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 150 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Life of Form: Anthropology, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Context
What if anthropology's fundamental assumptions about cultural and social context were shaped by a philosopher many anthropologists have never engaged with? This book explores how, from the early twentieth century to the present day, anthropological ideas about context have been shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein's evolving philosophy, often without anthropologists fully realizing it. It shows how Wittgenstein's philosophical journey mirrors anthropolo…
What Was Antiformalism, and What Comes Next? On Coherence, Corrigibility and Collaboration
For several decades, social and cultural anthropology has been enmeshed in an antiformalist mood—a shared sensibility that valorizes disruption, emergence, and complexity over stability and pattern; celebrates flexible concepts resistant to systematization; and treats theoretical frameworks with suspicion. Initially revolutionary, this antiformalism has long since become mainstream, settling into recognizable conventions. This article traces anti…
A Gesture to Anthropology
This chapter analyses Wittgenstein’s transitional period and his shift from logical to linguistic models of context. Centred on his work in early 1930s and on his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, it shows how Wittgenstein moved from seeing context as singular logic to viewing it as multiple ‘logical spaces’ or ‘grammars’. This shift prefigures later anthropological moves away from formal systems while retaining some commitment to structure thr…
On the problem of continuity: A theory of culture beyond invention
Anthropologists, in common with social theorists more generally, have often understood social life as an emergent phenomenon grounded in practices of creativity and improvisation. Where stasis and continuity feature, these are often presented as illusory manifestations of underlying processes of ‘invention’, or as external impositions upon otherwise creative and innovative actors. These approaches have helped to challenge the essentialisms that u…
Ethnographies of Interest: Theorizing Knowledge between Enthusiasm and Instrumentalism
Anthropologists and social theorists have written extensively about the ways in which economic and political interests lead people to act in social life. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to what people find “interesting,” in the sense of being engaged or enthused rather than of having a stake in something. Even more rarely have we attended to the ethnographic deployment of both of these ambiguous senses of interest in specific soc…
Blessed Acts of Oblivion: On the Ethics of Forgetting
This essay explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self. Forgetfulness is a feature of a range of contexts of political conflict and 'difficult' heritage. Such forgetfulness is often imagined as an imposition (as when states deny the freedom to remember) or a weakness (as when people are thought to repress uncomfortable or difficult memories). Here, by contrast, I examine a context of difficult heritage and political conflict in …
Modalities of Free Speech
While debates over freedom of speech have been a focus of renewed public and media attention over the past decade, anthropological literature focusing self-consciously and explicitly on the topic remained, until very recently, relatively thin on the ground. And yet questions of freedom of expression are treated tangentially in a range of anthropological literatures, including studies of publics, media and mediation, expertise, political subjectiv…
Of souls and spider monkeys
Are There Anthropological Problems
Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation
Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy acc…
A Thought Experiment in the Wild
This article aims to complicate the opposition between "thick description" and "thin" thought experiments by constructing a thought experiment of its own. It compares the use of examples-thick and thin-in the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, who came to extremely similar conclusions about the importance of context to meaning, the former around a decade before the latter. By imagining the-by no means implausible-possibility that Wittgenstein r…
Off the Rails: Thin Moral Thinking and Stylized Ethical Dilemmas
This introduction situates the trolley problem and other such dilemmas in anthropological debates about contextualization and abstraction both within and beyond the realm of the moral. We highlight some of the criticisms anthropologists have made of the "thinness" of ethical thought experiments while also suggesting some ways in which philosophers might wish to defend them. We also point to a growing interest on the part of a range of anthropolog…
Out of the ordinary: "Everyday life and the "carnival of Mussolini
Ordinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and premier site of neofascist tourism, reveals ju…
Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating 'the Everyday' in the Birthplace of Fascism
This paper examines the ways in which 'ordinariness' can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist ur…
Freedom of Speech
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has …
All the Difference in the World: The Nature of Difference and Different Natures
This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radicall…
Fascism, uncensored: Legalism and neo-fascist pilgrimage in Predappio, Italy
This article describes the afterlife of the 1952 Scelba Law in Italy, which forbids "apologias" for the fascist regime, and its chequered history of application. Intended to censor, amongst other things, speech directed towards the reconstitution of an Italian fascist party, fascist propaganda, and fascist demonstrations, the Scelba Law has been sparingly and inconsistently applied. This is particularly evident in the village of Predappio, Mussol…
Le fascisme non censuré: Légalisme et pèlerinage néofasciste à Predappio en Italie
La loi Scelba, promulguée en Italie en 1952 dans le but de prohiber toute « apologie » du régime fasciste, a connu une histoire mouvementée. Notamment destinée à censurer les discours visant à reconstituer un parti fasciste italien, la propagande fasciste et les manifestations fascistes, elle ne fut que peu utilisée ou de manière incohérente. Dans le cas du village italien de Predappio, lieu de naissance de Mussolini devenu un des premiers sites …
After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory
Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnogr…
The ontological turn
This chapter argues that there is an important and interesting difference of form between the 'ontological turn' and a number of the 'schools'. It provides an analysis in anthropology more broadly: in other words, of anthropological theory. The chapter discusses the critical perspectives on the turn, but for the sake of avoiding confusion from the outset, it is worth making clear that, like its progenitors, the ontological turn is aiming to colla…
After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory
Making Difference: Queer Activism and Anthropological Theory
This article examines two paradoxes. The first is ethnographic: queer activists in Bologna, Italy, are concerned with defining themselves in opposition to fixed categories of identity and the forms of politics based on them. In so doing, however, they must engage with the risk that this endeavor of difference-making itself becomes as fixed and uniform as the identities to which it is opposed. The second paradox is theoretical: a range of anthropo…
Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology: Debate
Ontological Turn, The
Culture' is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline's history, the most recent of which is the 'ontological turn'. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that 'culture' carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or v…
Agreeing to disagree: LGBTQ activism and the church in Italy
In 2012 the Bologna chapter of We Are Church, a group of lay liberal Catholics who lobby the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality, sought to pursue a dialogue with the city's LGBTQ community. The relative success of those conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors, whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity …
Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on 'Ontology
This article contributes to anthropological discussions of ontology by exploring the implications of a seemingly simple question: what is there? Rather than offering a definitive answer, the author explores how different approaches to ontology shape anthropological inquiry. The article examines the ontological turn in anthropology, considering its potential to enrich ethnographic research and analysis. It also addresses the challenges and complex…
Ontological Turn, The
Culture' is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline's history, the most recent of which is the 'ontological turn'. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that 'culture' carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or v…
Freedom in the code: The anthropology of (double) morality
This essay engages with current debates in the anthropology of ethics regarding the relationship between freedom and moral codes. By describing a particular understanding of the Italian concept of doppia morale (double morality) amongst LGBTQ activists in Bologna, and applying it to a number of examples, I show how it is possible to relate to moral codes or injunctions in such a way as to allow for their betrayal in certain circumstances. This cl…
Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating 'the Everyday' in the Birthplace of Fascism
This paper examines the ways in which 'ordinariness' can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist ur…
Making Difference: Queer Activism and Anthropological Theory
This article examines two paradoxes. The first is ethnographic: queer activists in Bologna, Italy, are concerned with defining themselves in opposition to fixed categories of identity and the forms of politics based on them. In so doing, however, they must engage with the risk that this endeavor of difference-making itself becomes as fixed and uniform as the identities to which it is opposed. The second paradox is theoretical: a range of anthropo…
Equivocal locations: Being 'red' in 'Red Bologna
This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's 'showcase city' of the left, 'Red Bologna', in which to be 'red' is ubiquitous but each person's 'red' is a different thing: being 'red' (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions …
All the Difference in the World: The Nature of Difference and Different Natures
This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radicall…
Agreeing to disagree: LGBTQ activism and the church in Italy
In 2012 the Bologna chapter of We Are Church, a group of lay liberal Catholics who lobby the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality, sought to pursue a dialogue with the city's LGBTQ community. The relative success of those conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors, whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity …
Out of the ordinary: "Everyday life and the "carnival of Mussolini
Ordinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and premier site of neofascist tourism, reveals ju…
Freedom of Speech
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has …
Ethnographies of Interest: Theorizing Knowledge between Enthusiasm and Instrumentalism
Anthropologists and social theorists have written extensively about the ways in which economic and political interests lead people to act in social life. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to what people find “interesting,” in the sense of being engaged or enthused rather than of having a stake in something. Even more rarely have we attended to the ethnographic deployment of both of these ambiguous senses of interest in specific soc…
Le fascisme non censuré: Légalisme et pèlerinage néofasciste à Predappio en Italie
La loi Scelba, promulguée en Italie en 1952 dans le but de prohiber toute « apologie » du régime fasciste, a connu une histoire mouvementée. Notamment destinée à censurer les discours visant à reconstituer un parti fasciste italien, la propagande fasciste et les manifestations fascistes, elle ne fut que peu utilisée ou de manière incohérente. Dans le cas du village italien de Predappio, lieu de naissance de Mussolini devenu un des premiers sites …
Neoliberal nation? Mobbing and morality in Italy
Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on 'Ontology
This article contributes to anthropological discussions of ontology by exploring the implications of a seemingly simple question: what is there? Rather than offering a definitive answer, the author explores how different approaches to ontology shape anthropological inquiry. The article examines the ontological turn in anthropology, considering its potential to enrich ethnographic research and analysis. It also addresses the challenges and complex…
Neoliberal nation? Mobbing and morality in Italy
Agreeing to disagree: LGBTQ activism and the church in Italy
In 2012 the Bologna chapter of We Are Church, a group of lay liberal Catholics who lobby the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality, sought to pursue a dialogue with the city's LGBTQ community. The relative success of those conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors, whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity …
Freedom in the code: The anthropology of (double) morality
This essay engages with current debates in the anthropology of ethics regarding the relationship between freedom and moral codes. By describing a particular understanding of the Italian concept of doppia morale (double morality) amongst LGBTQ activists in Bologna, and applying it to a number of examples, I show how it is possible to relate to moral codes or injunctions in such a way as to allow for their betrayal in certain circumstances. This cl…
Equivocal locations: Being 'red' in 'Red Bologna
This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's 'showcase city' of the left, 'Red Bologna', in which to be 'red' is ubiquitous but each person's 'red' is a different thing: being 'red' (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions …
Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology: Debate
Ontological Turn, The
Culture' is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline's history, the most recent of which is the 'ontological turn'. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that 'culture' carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or v…
After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory
Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnogr…
The ontological turn
This chapter argues that there is an important and interesting difference of form between the 'ontological turn' and a number of the 'schools'. It provides an analysis in anthropology more broadly: in other words, of anthropological theory. The chapter discusses the critical perspectives on the turn, but for the sake of avoiding confusion from the outset, it is worth making clear that, like its progenitors, the ontological turn is aiming to colla…
After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory
Making Difference: Queer Activism and Anthropological Theory
This article examines two paradoxes. The first is ethnographic: queer activists in Bologna, Italy, are concerned with defining themselves in opposition to fixed categories of identity and the forms of politics based on them. In so doing, however, they must engage with the risk that this endeavor of difference-making itself becomes as fixed and uniform as the identities to which it is opposed. The second paradox is theoretical: a range of anthropo…
Fascism, uncensored: Legalism and neo-fascist pilgrimage in Predappio, Italy
This article describes the afterlife of the 1952 Scelba Law in Italy, which forbids "apologias" for the fascist regime, and its chequered history of application. Intended to censor, amongst other things, speech directed towards the reconstitution of an Italian fascist party, fascist propaganda, and fascist demonstrations, the Scelba Law has been sparingly and inconsistently applied. This is particularly evident in the village of Predappio, Mussol…
Le fascisme non censuré: Légalisme et pèlerinage néofasciste à Predappio en Italie
La loi Scelba, promulguée en Italie en 1952 dans le but de prohiber toute « apologie » du régime fasciste, a connu une histoire mouvementée. Notamment destinée à censurer les discours visant à reconstituer un parti fasciste italien, la propagande fasciste et les manifestations fascistes, elle ne fut que peu utilisée ou de manière incohérente. Dans le cas du village italien de Predappio, lieu de naissance de Mussolini devenu un des premiers sites …
All the Difference in the World: The Nature of Difference and Different Natures
This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radicall…
Freedom of Speech
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has …
Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating 'the Everyday' in the Birthplace of Fascism
This paper examines the ways in which 'ordinariness' can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist ur…
Are There Anthropological Problems
Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation
Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy acc…
A Thought Experiment in the Wild
This article aims to complicate the opposition between "thick description" and "thin" thought experiments by constructing a thought experiment of its own. It compares the use of examples-thick and thin-in the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, who came to extremely similar conclusions about the importance of context to meaning, the former around a decade before the latter. By imagining the-by no means implausible-possibility that Wittgenstein r…
Off the Rails: Thin Moral Thinking and Stylized Ethical Dilemmas
This introduction situates the trolley problem and other such dilemmas in anthropological debates about contextualization and abstraction both within and beyond the realm of the moral. We highlight some of the criticisms anthropologists have made of the "thinness" of ethical thought experiments while also suggesting some ways in which philosophers might wish to defend them. We also point to a growing interest on the part of a range of anthropolog…
Out of the ordinary: "Everyday life and the "carnival of Mussolini
Ordinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and premier site of neofascist tourism, reveals ju…
On the problem of continuity: A theory of culture beyond invention
Anthropologists, in common with social theorists more generally, have often understood social life as an emergent phenomenon grounded in practices of creativity and improvisation. Where stasis and continuity feature, these are often presented as illusory manifestations of underlying processes of ‘invention’, or as external impositions upon otherwise creative and innovative actors. These approaches have helped to challenge the essentialisms that u…
Ethnographies of Interest: Theorizing Knowledge between Enthusiasm and Instrumentalism
Anthropologists and social theorists have written extensively about the ways in which economic and political interests lead people to act in social life. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to what people find “interesting,” in the sense of being engaged or enthused rather than of having a stake in something. Even more rarely have we attended to the ethnographic deployment of both of these ambiguous senses of interest in specific soc…
Blessed Acts of Oblivion: On the Ethics of Forgetting
This essay explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self. Forgetfulness is a feature of a range of contexts of political conflict and 'difficult' heritage. Such forgetfulness is often imagined as an imposition (as when states deny the freedom to remember) or a weakness (as when people are thought to repress uncomfortable or difficult memories). Here, by contrast, I examine a context of difficult heritage and political conflict in …
Modalities of Free Speech
While debates over freedom of speech have been a focus of renewed public and media attention over the past decade, anthropological literature focusing self-consciously and explicitly on the topic remained, until very recently, relatively thin on the ground. And yet questions of freedom of expression are treated tangentially in a range of anthropological literatures, including studies of publics, media and mediation, expertise, political subjectiv…
Anthropological Studies and Insights (17 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (7 works) · Law (7 works)