The Clara Gallini fonds documents crucial years for the birth of Italian anthropology. Field reports, interviews, notes and descriptions collected between 1959 and 1973 show how field work, writing and theoretical reflection come together in the construction of knowledge.
A living material, which does not close a season of studies, but questions us about the present and offers ideas for current and future research.
Clara Gallini and the anthropological research laboratory
The Clara Gallini demoanthropological fonds represents one of the most significant testimonies for the history of Italian anthropology of the second half of the twentieth century.
The papers document the research carried out in Sardinia between 1959 and 1973 and represent, through notes, field notebooks, interviews, survey forms, photographs and preparatory materials, the daily laboratory of a discipline then in full formation.
The collection allows us to closely follow Gallini’s work on the ground: the investigations into popular festivals, the rituals of the argia, the practices of the evil eye, children’s games, the relationship between school and work and, more generally, the social transformations of Sardinia in the years of the transition to modernity.
The years in Sardinia
Clara Gallini’s arrival in Sardinia dates back to 1959, when Ernesto de Martino called her to collaborate with him at the University of Cagliari.
Trained between Milan and Rome in historical-religious studies, a student of Angelo Brelich and close to the Demartini school, Gallini found a privileged research ground on the island.
In the following years he combined his teaching with intense activity in the field, contributing to the birth of what historiography has defined as “Scuola antropologica sarda”, together with scholars such as Giulio Angioni, Pietro Clemente, Enrica Delitala, Pier Giorgio Solinas and Placido Cherchi.
The papers preserved in the State Archives directly testify to this season of studies. There you can read the questions and the process through which ethnographic observation was transformed into scientific analysis.
In this sense, the collection not only documents the research themes, but also the very construction of the anthropological gaze.
From field research to writing
From those investigations were born fundamental works that have marked studies on religious symbolism, ritual practices and popular culture.
Today, the collection allows us to reconstruct its genesis and observe the continuous relationship between field experience, theoretical reflection and writing.
With the move to Naples in 1978 and, subsequently, to the Sapienza University of Rome, Gallini oriented part of his activity towards archival research and the curation of Ernesto de Martino’s works.
However, the documentary nucleus produced in the Sardinian years remains one of the most important legacies of his scientific activity.
The Clara Gallini fonds does not only represent the memory of a scholar, but a living archive: a research space in which documents, territories and communities continue to dialogue, restoring the complexity of a Sardinia observed at a time when tradition and change were deeply intertwined.
The archive fonds
The documentary material, donated by the same scholar to the State Archives of Cagliari, covers the period 1959–1973 and includes files, interviews, notes and descriptions relating to popular festivals, argia rituals, children’s games, the evil eye and the school-work relationship.
The fonds is part of a documentary heritage that collects public and private archives of significant historical and cultural interest and makes accessible to scholars an essential source for the history of anthropology, contemporary Sardinia and field research practices.