The course introduces to the theoretical instruments of economic anthropology and anthropology of development, as study of intensive and planned change: space of cultural encounter of multiple ideas of space, of time, of belonging and of environment between development actors and “client communities”.

The economic dimensions in other cultural contexts will be analyzed in their embeddedness with local moral economy and cultural practices of local populations in these process of globalization and incorporation in carbon economy.

Dynamics of change and of resource management (water, land, seeds, food) are at the core of contemporary reality and will be the focus of the program, with special attention through ethnographic perspective to some main issues: patterns of continuity and disjuncture with the colonial period, contradictions between cultural and environmental dimensions, the cultural reproduction, local patterns of decencies and strategies of autonomy. 

A special focus will be devoted to climate changes and the new and old roles of anthropology within accelerated environmental changes, in order to shed light on the following thematic landscapes: the challenge to the Western dichotomy between culture/nature and uncanny character of naturalism, the cultural patterns of denial, the symbolic investment of atmospheric relationships, and the the new set of meanings of human and culture within the Athropocene.

The course faces development projects as socio-cultural events and as encounter between multiple discourses and practices of heterogeneous social actors. Within the context of crisis of development models and of sustainability of mainstream resource management, the program will intersect the disciplinary tools of cultural anthropology studying change with other disciplines, other experts systems and knowledge that pervade development realities. The course will offer specific tools of anthropological analysis: the interface analysis, the actor-oriented approach, the notions of strategy, of moral community, of space of autonomy, of systems of cooperation and commons, of resource management as socio-cultural dynamic.

Through a main focus around water, one of the most relational goods, issues of sustainability, of inequality in the access of resources, of patterns of violence connected to transformations of rural contexts in southern world will be raised. What is the “community” today in development? What is the social life of a project? How to read aid relationships, the institutional and administrative encounter? How can we analyse the contradictions between resource management and environmental relationships?

Through these main questions, the course will tackle the pertinence of local knowledge, incorporated savoir-faire, systems of work and their encounter with new technological and administrative apparatus and with new expert systems.

Within society/environment relations a special focus will be dealt on the new roles of anthropology vis-a-vis climate changes, the cultural meanings of the “weather” changes, local perceptions and strategies of change and the new meaning of human culture in the Anthropocene.