C Grasseni
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 19155 |
|---|---|
| NOME | C Grasseni |
| PRENOMES | C |
| SOBRENOME | Grasseni |
| ASSINATURA | GRASSENI C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4545-1978 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 194 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Introduction
More than visual
Skilled vision is more-than-visual because the enskilment of vision happens in intersensorial contexts and because it pertains to the broader formation of aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Sensory and social apprenticeship coexist in practice. I dwell on the intersensoriality of learning to see in an analytical way and on the sociality and morality of skilled visions, using ethnographic examples from my fieldwork with food gardeners in the Net…
Re-territorialising skills? Insights from ethnography on solidarity-economy food activism
The article addresses the role of citizens in setting up short food chains in the framework of the solidarity economy movement in Lombardy, Italy. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork with solidarity economy activists and longitudinal ethnography (2009–2023), the article critically analyses solidarity-driven experimentations with local food systems, including direct bulk-buying from farmers and setting up a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) …
Crafting Futures through Cheese-Making in Val Taleggio (Northern Italy)
The politics of scale is the main issue within and around debates on whether geographical indications are the best strategy to support local economies. Two PDO cheeses are made in Val Taleggio. While Taleggio PDO has outscaled the valley and its interests, Strachìtunt PDO was reinvented to be at scale for the valley’s producers. I explain the two-step transition in the producers’ communicative strategy, from a language of heritage cheese and its …
Ethnographic responsibility
Michael Herzfeld’s exposé on how bureaucratic interpretations of ethics risk stifling ethnographic engagement and methodological creativity is timely and poignant. Regulatory approaches to research ethics vary significantly according to national and disciplinary contexts. In the Netherlands, the focus is on research data management and scientific integrity. I see this from the privileged point of view of an appointed national committee member for…
Re-tooling craft
Alben cheese Source: Courtesy of CasArrigoni.it Building on ongoing research on collective food procurement and food heritage, I propose to rethink and reimagine the meaning, status and future of craft for diverse social actors (alternative consumption networks, makers and smallholders, policy visionaries, etc.) who are operating in increasingly challenging contexts. These include new fragilities due to climate change combined with the social kno…
Introduction
Why an ethnographic contribution connecting skill, food, and sustainability
Reskilling for sustainability
We complete this thematic issue's contribution on skill, food, and sustainability with a team report based on ethnographic research which focuses on reskilling for sustainability in multiple European locations and involving diverse social actors and stakeholders.The Food Citizens?project (2017-2024) is a comparative ethnographic analysis of collective food procurement networks and phenomena in European cities.Three Ph.D. candidates, two post docs…
Visions of the Urban Green
The article investigates urban gardening in Turin with ethnography, historical analysis and photography, using both the authors’ photography and sources from social media and private archives. The authors collaborate to analyse ‘community’ gardening through a critical anthropological perspective which centres on the hegemonic power of aesthetic assumptions about the urban green. As a post-industrial, multicultural city, Turin illuminates the dial…
Collaboration, Mediation, and Comparison
Four of the five articles in this special issue are authored by members of the Food Citizens? team. Together with our colleagues from the Security Vision project (fifth article), we reflect on the epistemological and methodological practices followed in our ERC-funded research projects, which involve different forms of collaboration, mediation and comparison. The introductory and final remarks explain the rationale of the conversation and compari…
Ambivalent solidarities
The authors compare the solidarity practices of farmers and food activists in Croatia and Italy in order to highlight the unintended consequences of mutual support initiatives and how these may reinforce disengagement from governance. Two ethnographic case studies from Istria (Croatia) and Lombardy (northern Italy) show self-reliant ways of organizing mutual support networks among, respectively, Istrian winemakers and Lombard Solidarity Purchase …
Anthropological perspectives of solidarity and reciprocity
The concept of solidarity is ambiguous: it includes mechanisms of taxes and redistribution, charity, altruistic contributions and political support, social policy, concessions, grants, funds, food, clothes, social entrepreneurship, sponsorship, NGOS, etc. Communitarianism, equality and progress are their ideological pillars. Solidarity in mass culture is a form of ideational and tangible redistribution. Sociology based on the Marxist tradition ha…
Introduction
In this special section, we conceptualise 'Skilled mediations' to examine the following questions from several ethnographic perspectives: How do skills and media interact, enable and limit our engagement in our material and social environments? How can this be studied ethnographically? We take our previous works on 'skilled visions' and 'enskilment' as starting points to define skilled mediation as a mode of engagement with the senses, practice, …
Response to Rupert Cox
Skilled Vision
The skilled vision approach is inspired by the edited volume Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards , edited by Cristina Grasseni and published in 2007, which gathered research in anthropology, history of science, and the visual arts on visual apprenticeship. A skilled vision approach considers vision as a realm of social expertise that depends on trained perception within a structured environment. Looking is a culturally inculcate…
Understanding skill, food and field
Building on an epistemological reading of anthropology as a field-based social science, I argue in favour of ethnography, namely a reflexive field-based practice and a defining methodology for anthropology. I introduce the methodology of ‘comparing by context’ as a way of rigorously translating the experience of apprenticeship in the field into forms of social learning and of understanding. I argue that practising anthropology as an ethnographer …
Ecologies of Belonging and the Mugshot Aesthetics
Based on an ethnographic approach as well as on cultural critique of relevant digital projects, this article confronts visual ‘ecologies of belonging’. Building on my ‘skilled visions’ approach, I propose a critical study of everyday visual apprenticeship of social and cultural stereotypes about looking. The main finding is that the act of looking and categorizing self and others should be understood as a form of relational and situated learning,…
Of Cheese and Ecomuseums
This chapter offers two examples how the protection of food as cultural heritage may not be disjoint from a degree of &s;invention&s; or even &s;reinvention&s;. The two examples are the ecomuseums of the Valli del Bitto and the Case of Taleggio and Strachitunt. In particular, the chapter highlights the link between typical products and the food industry as well as the role played by regional and national institutions in supporting the concept of …
Picturing Intimacy
Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we addressing the limits and potential of montage. We argue that the multi-vocality and multi-temporality of social networks can be incorporated into the linearity of a narrated film. We discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August (2013, http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org…
Seeds of Trust. Italy's Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (Solidarity Purchase Groups)
This article presents a case study of the solidarity economy in Italy: the Italian G.A.S. – Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, which I translate as Solidarity Purchase Groups. GAS are often conceptualized as "alternative food networks". Beyond this categorization, I highlight their novelty in relational, political, and ecological terms, with respect to their capacity to forge new partnerships between consumers and producers. Introducing an ethnographic…
Food Activism in Italy as an Anthropology of Direct Democracy
This article presents qualitative and quantitative findings on provisioning activism in Italy, focusing on Solidarity Purchase Groups (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, GAS). By using quantitative data about GAS growth, numerical consistence and economic impact and through ethnographic insights based on prolonged fieldwork, it identifies the GAS movement as an ecological, economic and political counterculture. I discuss the implications for policy eff…
Introduction. Digital Visual Engagements
Do digital media formats enable new conceptual and collaborative practices? How do they allow us to challenge cinematic conventions or habitual understandings of the spatio-temporal arrangements of both ethnographic narrative and analytic insight? To what avail? This special issue is the result of conversations initiated around these questions on occasion of a co-convened panel at the Manchester IUAES conference in August 2013 (Evolving humanity,…
Collective food purchasing networks in Italy as a case study of responsible innovation
Based upon fieldwork in Italy and the USA, the authors present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies, and in particular alternative food networks, as a form of active citizenship that could re-orient the current debate on responsible innovation
The Atlas and the Film
In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources…
Beyond Alternative Food Networks
Food activism is core to the contemporary study of food - there are numerous foodscapes which exist within the umbrella definition of food activism from farmer's markets, organic food movements to Fair Trade. This highly original book focuses on one key emerging foodscape dominating the Italian alternative food network (AFN) scene: GAS (gruppi di acquisto solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups) and explores the innovative social dynamics un…
Skilled vision. An apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics
Des ethnographies des pratiques scientifiques, professionelles et educatives ont explore les facons dont l'activite humaine est socialisee et mediatisee par des inscriptions particulieres. Mais on a souligne aussi qu'une education de l'attention est fondamentale pour acquerir des competences par une experience phenomenologique et multi sensorielle. Cet article explore plutot le regard en termes de l'acquisition des competences, en montrant commen…
Re-inventing food
Le concept d'héritage culturel, ou patrimoine immatériel, est appliqué avec succès à l'alimentation, surtout dans les domaines de la consommation soutenable et critique, de la production traditionnelle et organique et du développement local. Néanmoins, ce processus exige un certain niveau de standardisation de la nourriture et des images associées adressées au grand public. La réinvention de la nourriture peut engendrer des stratégies d'auto-redé…
Beyond Alternative Food Networks
Food activism is core to the contemporary study of food - there are numerous foodscapes which exist within the umbrella definition of food activism from farmer's markets, organic food movements to Fair Trade. This highly original book focuses on one key emerging foodscape dominating the Italian alternative food network (AFN) scene: GAS (gruppi di acquisto solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups) and explores the innovative social dynamics un…
Skilled Landscapes
In this paper I focus on a local initiative to produce a hiking map of Valtaleggio (in northern Italy). In the effort of redrawing the valley to attract tourism a group of locals engaged in planning and negotiating visibility, but also got involved in an exercise of memory, remembering the history of their valley through recent changes in the landscape. The ethnographic observation of the 'map enterprise' spurs reflections on differing local perc…
Designer Cows
Cattle fair arenas are panopticon-like spaces that are instrumental in dissecting the cow's body into functional parts or traits. The arena aestheticizes a partitioning gaze that is codified in a marking system: the "linear evaluation protocol" for milk cows. The positioning of the nonhuman animal body into a highly artificial context allows one to view the cow as a self-standing object, ready to be partitioned. The exhibition space of the cattle…
More than visual
Skilled vision is more-than-visual because the enskilment of vision happens in intersensorial contexts and because it pertains to the broader formation of aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Sensory and social apprenticeship coexist in practice. I dwell on the intersensoriality of learning to see in an analytical way and on the sociality and morality of skilled visions, using ethnographic examples from my fieldwork with food gardeners in the Net…
Managing cows
Naming Cheese
The following essays were written by members of the Cheese Scholars Collective. Formed during a workshop held 24–26 June 2009 in Totnes, Devon, England, the Collective is dedicated to faci1itating the constructive exchange of scholarly perspectives on cheese and its makers. The short essay form of these papers is intended to allow for a more productive juxtaposition of the authors' ideas, and to better convey the array of forms their shared objec…
Reskilling for sustainability
We complete this thematic issue's contribution on skill, food, and sustainability with a team report based on ethnographic research which focuses on reskilling for sustainability in multiple European locations and involving diverse social actors and stakeholders.The Food Citizens?project (2017-2024) is a comparative ethnographic analysis of collective food procurement networks and phenomena in European cities.Three Ph.D. candidates, two post docs…
Taxidermy as rhetoric of self-making
Re-territorialising skills? Insights from ethnography on solidarity-economy food activism
The article addresses the role of citizens in setting up short food chains in the framework of the solidarity economy movement in Lombardy, Italy. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork with solidarity economy activists and longitudinal ethnography (2009–2023), the article critically analyses solidarity-driven experimentations with local food systems, including direct bulk-buying from farmers and setting up a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) …
Introduction
Why an ethnographic contribution connecting skill, food, and sustainability
Ambivalent solidarities
The authors compare the solidarity practices of farmers and food activists in Croatia and Italy in order to highlight the unintended consequences of mutual support initiatives and how these may reinforce disengagement from governance. Two ethnographic case studies from Istria (Croatia) and Lombardy (northern Italy) show self-reliant ways of organizing mutual support networks among, respectively, Istrian winemakers and Lombard Solidarity Purchase …
Understanding skill, food and field
Building on an epistemological reading of anthropology as a field-based social science, I argue in favour of ethnography, namely a reflexive field-based practice and a defining methodology for anthropology. I introduce the methodology of ‘comparing by context’ as a way of rigorously translating the experience of apprenticeship in the field into forms of social learning and of understanding. I argue that practising anthropology as an ethnographer …
Collective food purchasing networks in Italy as a case study of responsible innovation
Based upon fieldwork in Italy and the USA, the authors present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies, and in particular alternative food networks, as a form of active citizenship that could re-orient the current debate on responsible innovation
The Atlas and the Film
In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources…
Conservation, development and self-commodification
This paper is based on about a decade of fieldwork in an alpine valley of northern Italy. It examines both European-directed and local initiatives that may help rethink 'development', especially in relation to the transformation of the traditional practice of dairy breeding and cheese-making. Several areas of mountainous Lombardy, in northern Italy, are currently classified as 'marginal rural areas' and are therefore recipients of European aid fo…
Disciplining Vision in Animal Biotechnology
In this article, skilled vision is presented as a capacity acquired in a community of practice that enables specific ways of knowing and acting in the world. The analysis of skilled vision is obtained through the ethnographic study of the artefacts and the routines that structure certain ecologies of practice. The example chosen is that of the skilled gaze of animal breeders, in particular of the children of dairy cow breeders who, by playing wit…
Taxidermy as rhetoric of self-making
Skilled Landscapes
In this paper I focus on a local initiative to produce a hiking map of Valtaleggio (in northern Italy). In the effort of redrawing the valley to attract tourism a group of locals engaged in planning and negotiating visibility, but also got involved in an exercise of memory, remembering the history of their valley through recent changes in the landscape. The ethnographic observation of the 'map enterprise' spurs reflections on differing local perc…
Skilled vision. An apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics
Des ethnographies des pratiques scientifiques, professionelles et educatives ont explore les facons dont l'activite humaine est socialisee et mediatisee par des inscriptions particulieres. Mais on a souligne aussi qu'une education de l'attention est fondamentale pour acquerir des competences par une experience phenomenologique et multi sensorielle. Cet article explore plutot le regard en termes de l'acquisition des competences, en montrant commen…
Designer Cows
Cattle fair arenas are panopticon-like spaces that are instrumental in dissecting the cow's body into functional parts or traits. The arena aestheticizes a partitioning gaze that is codified in a marking system: the "linear evaluation protocol" for milk cows. The positioning of the nonhuman animal body into a highly artificial context allows one to view the cow as a self-standing object, ready to be partitioned. The exhibition space of the cattle…
Disciplining Vision in Animal Biotechnology
In this article, skilled vision is presented as a capacity acquired in a community of practice that enables specific ways of knowing and acting in the world. The analysis of skilled vision is obtained through the ethnographic study of the artefacts and the routines that structure certain ecologies of practice. The example chosen is that of the skilled gaze of animal breeders, in particular of the children of dairy cow breeders who, by playing wit…
Communities of Practice and Forms of Life
Skilled vision. An apprenticeship in breeding aesthetics1
Conservation, development and self-commodification
This paper is based on about a decade of fieldwork in an alpine valley of northern Italy. It examines both European-directed and local initiatives that may help rethink 'development', especially in relation to the transformation of the traditional practice of dairy breeding and cheese-making. Several areas of mountainous Lombardy, in northern Italy, are currently classified as 'marginal rural areas' and are therefore recipients of European aid fo…
Managing cows
Slow living - By Wendy Parkins & Geoffrey Craig
Re-inventing food
Le concept d'héritage culturel, ou patrimoine immatériel, est appliqué avec succès à l'alimentation, surtout dans les domaines de la consommation soutenable et critique, de la production traditionnelle et organique et du développement local. Néanmoins, ce processus exige un certain niveau de standardisation de la nourriture et des images associées adressées au grand public. La réinvention de la nourriture peut engendrer des stratégies d'auto-redé…
Patrimoines alimentaires
Naming Cheese
The following essays were written by members of the Cheese Scholars Collective. Formed during a workshop held 24–26 June 2009 in Totnes, Devon, England, the Collective is dedicated to faci1itating the constructive exchange of scholarly perspectives on cheese and its makers. The short essay form of these papers is intended to allow for a more productive juxtaposition of the authors' ideas, and to better convey the array of forms their shared objec…
Beyond Alternative Food Networks
Food activism is core to the contemporary study of food - there are numerous foodscapes which exist within the umbrella definition of food activism from farmer's markets, organic food movements to Fair Trade. This highly original book focuses on one key emerging foodscape dominating the Italian alternative food network (AFN) scene: GAS (gruppi di acquisto solidale or solidarity-based purchase groups) and explores the innovative social dynamics un…
Seeds of Trust. Italy's Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (Solidarity Purchase Groups)
This article presents a case study of the solidarity economy in Italy: the Italian G.A.S. – Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, which I translate as Solidarity Purchase Groups. GAS are often conceptualized as "alternative food networks". Beyond this categorization, I highlight their novelty in relational, political, and ecological terms, with respect to their capacity to forge new partnerships between consumers and producers. Introducing an ethnographic…
Food Activism in Italy as an Anthropology of Direct Democracy
This article presents qualitative and quantitative findings on provisioning activism in Italy, focusing on Solidarity Purchase Groups (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, GAS). By using quantitative data about GAS growth, numerical consistence and economic impact and through ethnographic insights based on prolonged fieldwork, it identifies the GAS movement as an ecological, economic and political counterculture. I discuss the implications for policy eff…
Introduction. Digital Visual Engagements
Do digital media formats enable new conceptual and collaborative practices? How do they allow us to challenge cinematic conventions or habitual understandings of the spatio-temporal arrangements of both ethnographic narrative and analytic insight? To what avail? This special issue is the result of conversations initiated around these questions on occasion of a co-convened panel at the Manchester IUAES conference in August 2013 (Evolving humanity,…
Collective food purchasing networks in Italy as a case study of responsible innovation
Based upon fieldwork in Italy and the USA, the authors present work-in-progress insights into solidarity economies, and in particular alternative food networks, as a form of active citizenship that could re-orient the current debate on responsible innovation
The Atlas and the Film
In this article I refer to my fieldwork in Boston's North End to explore the implications of using film and media annotating software as two complementary conceptual tools and representational strategies. I elaborate on Warburg's notion of the "atlas" as an analytic device. I propose the Atlas on the one hand and Montage on the other as two complementary formal principles that allow us to take full advantage of the dialectic nature of the sources…
Of Cheese and Ecomuseums
This chapter offers two examples how the protection of food as cultural heritage may not be disjoint from a degree of &s;invention&s; or even &s;reinvention&s;. The two examples are the ecomuseums of the Valli del Bitto and the Case of Taleggio and Strachitunt. In particular, the chapter highlights the link between typical products and the food industry as well as the role played by regional and national institutions in supporting the concept of …
Picturing Intimacy
Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we addressing the limits and potential of montage. We argue that the multi-vocality and multi-temporality of social networks can be incorporated into the linearity of a narrated film. We discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August (2013, http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org…
Ecologies of Belonging and the Mugshot Aesthetics
Based on an ethnographic approach as well as on cultural critique of relevant digital projects, this article confronts visual ‘ecologies of belonging’. Building on my ‘skilled visions’ approach, I propose a critical study of everyday visual apprenticeship of social and cultural stereotypes about looking. The main finding is that the act of looking and categorizing self and others should be understood as a form of relational and situated learning,…
Skilled Vision
The skilled vision approach is inspired by the edited volume Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards , edited by Cristina Grasseni and published in 2007, which gathered research in anthropology, history of science, and the visual arts on visual apprenticeship. A skilled vision approach considers vision as a realm of social expertise that depends on trained perception within a structured environment. Looking is a culturally inculcate…
Understanding skill, food and field
Building on an epistemological reading of anthropology as a field-based social science, I argue in favour of ethnography, namely a reflexive field-based practice and a defining methodology for anthropology. I introduce the methodology of ‘comparing by context’ as a way of rigorously translating the experience of apprenticeship in the field into forms of social learning and of understanding. I argue that practising anthropology as an ethnographer …
Anthropological perspectives of solidarity and reciprocity
The concept of solidarity is ambiguous: it includes mechanisms of taxes and redistribution, charity, altruistic contributions and political support, social policy, concessions, grants, funds, food, clothes, social entrepreneurship, sponsorship, NGOS, etc. Communitarianism, equality and progress are their ideological pillars. Solidarity in mass culture is a form of ideational and tangible redistribution. Sociology based on the Marxist tradition ha…
Sociology (27 obras) · Anthropology (14 obras) · Ethnography (14 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Art (12 obras) · Geography (10 obras) · History (10 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (9 obras) · Law (9 obras)