Interdisciplinarità e cultura materiale. Attraverso la capacità di aspirare e oltre.

This essay contributes to cultural studies by proposing a framework that navigates interdisciplinary complexity through the lens of the study of material culture and embodied consumer practices. Starting from the idea that interdisciplinarity cannot be reduced to a simple summatory of disciplines but instead requires a radical integration of languages, concepts, and methods, the essay explores how interdisciplinarity emerges from the transformative encounter between different provinces of knowledge, historically consolidated as disciplines. Still, recomposing these diverse perspectives entails a continuous movement between disciplinary maps and the terrains of lived experience. When the epistemological momentum of interdisciplinarity gives way to disciplinary or interdisciplinary instrumental function embedded in networks of power, very mundane difficulties arise in producing genuine integration. This reveals the paradoxical nature of interdisciplinarity. As such, it can be traced to four fundamental paradoxes: political-institutional, epistemological, theoretical-methodological, and practical. Reflecting on my situated research experience and trajectory – on «consumer bodies» as crossroads between material culture studies, embodiment and the interdisciplinary study of consumption – this essay highlights the need for forms of thought and practice capable of harmonizing without homogenizing and connecting without abstracting. From this perspective, rather than levelling differences we should work towards meshwork configurations which allow for the construction of liminal, transitional spaces that represent the most suitable models for addressing the in-becoming nature of interdisciplinary work.