Leggere la protesta. Per un'antropologia dei movimenti sociali

Starting from an analysis that Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote almost 40 years ago, in this paper I present a cultural frame for an interpretation of social movements with regard to the two main processes of progress and of national unification. In contemporary global world several grassroots reactions unfold against these processes. So, I read the phenomenon of social movements as an index of the mor- al condition of society. A crucial question emerges at this point: are the cultural meanings of the protest produced by social movements expression of a particular vision of world and life, that wants to be perceived as an alternative to the dominant hegemonic one? Or, by now the conception of the world is – as Pasolini claimed – everywhere the same; a hegemonic and uniform conception dominating all over the world so that any kind of protest is, in the end, nothing else that one more way to gesticulate? In my essay I present an answer to this question and at the same time I claim for the necessity that anthropology gains for itself more room into the public sphere.