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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 ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself-connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction PART I Chapter 1. Equivocal Locations
Chapter 2. The Anthropology of (Double) Morality
PART II Chapter 3. Agreeing to Disagree
Chapter 4. Different Differences
PART III Chapter 5. Why Will Recursivity Run Out of Steam?
Chapter 6. Making Difference
Conclusion References
Index
About the author
Paolo Heywood is an assistant professor at Durham University.
Summary
This book is a contribution to the anthropology of Italy and of Europe as an ethnography of queer activism in Bologna; and, at the same time, it is an intervention in a set of ongoing theoretical debates in anthropology surrounding the perennial problem of the relationship between ethnographic data and anthropological analysis.
Additional text
“Genuinely remarkable… There’s almost nothing quite this lucidly philosophical, conceptually and politically provocative, and deeply ethnographic in recent work… An intellectual treat with few competitors.” · Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
