Andrea Cossu

Memory, symbolic conflict and changes in the national calendar in the Italian Second Republic

Italys national calendar has undergone a marked transformation in the last 10 years, with the inclusion of new holidays and the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones. This article analyses these changes by focusing on the recent debates about a shared past, involving state leaders as well as intellectuals. After an analysis of the forms of symbolic conflict concerning memory and the relevance of cultural constraints in shaping this conflict, and a brief assessment of the new form of the Republics calendar, the article examines three major days that deal with the States treatment of the past: 25 April (Liberation Day); 2 June, seen as the birthday of the Republic; and the recently introduced national Remembrance Day (10 February), which remembers the foibe or killings and emigration of Italian people on Italys eastern frontier with former Yugoslavia. The article concludes by identifying the major trends in the public management of memory in the context of Italys Second R...

Commemoration and processes of appropriation: The Italian Communist Party and the Italian Resistance (1943–48)

Scholarship on collective memory often conceives struggles over the past as directly dependent on the structure of interests in the present. However, temporal constraints affect the way the past is selected and represented. In this article I focus on the appropriation of the memory of the Resistance by the Italian Communist Party in the years between 1943 and 1948. I highlight, following a growing literature on the path dependence of memory, that the consolidation of the memory of this period was conditioned not only by the political culture of the organization, but also by the internal dynamics and the specific genre of communist commemoration.

From lines to networks: Calendars, narrative, and temporality

The focus of the article is the analysis of a particular site of collective memory (one state’s system of national holidays condensed in a calendar) from a perspective that highlights its relational and narrative characteristics. By adopting the idea of “commemorative networks,” the article will regard commemorated events as nodes in a network, connected by ties that highlight the causal relationship between any two events as perceived by the commemorating agencies in the making of narratives of the state. This approach offers a methodologically sound complement to other perspectives that investigate the formal narrative and semiotic features of “collective memory.”

Myths and Histories of Italian Sociology

This first chapter introduces an analytical narrative of the process of institutionalization of Italian sociology, as an inquiry into the creation of infrastructures for practicing sociology as an academic discipline. The chapter questions existing disciplinary memory about the ‘rebirth’ of Italian sociology after the Second World War and describes the typical features of early positivistic debates and the role of statistician Corrado Gini and his school during the Fascist regime. The two main theses framing this historical–sociological reconstruction are then advanced: post-war Italian sociology as a complex polycentric endeavor and the ‘colonization’ of sociology by academic mores and processes after its full institutionalization in the mid-1960s.

Entrenchment and the Emergence of New Structures

This chapter surveys the emergence of the major structural cleavage around which Italian sociology developed in the 1970s: the grouping of sociologists as two loosely defined ‘Catholic’ and ‘lay’ camps. The first group coalesced around Achille Ardigo , while the lay camp assumed a more polycentric , fragmented pattern. Membership would influence almost every aspect of a sociologist’s scholarly and academic career. In time, the camps grew increasingly self-referential and hindered the emergence of a true scientific community among Italian sociologists. The chapter also follows the estrangement of Franco Ferrarotti from his colleagues and the emergence of a third camp composed of Roman and Southern sociologists. It ends with an interpretation of the process leading to the foundation of the Associazione italiana di sociologia , established in 1982.

The Hubs of Newborn Sociology

This chapter focuses on one crucial element of post-war Italian sociology: extra-academic research centers . These institutes were venues for training young sociologists, creating scholarly and political networks, and promoting the discipline and its institutionalization. After a survey of major research centers, the chapter focuses on three cases: the Centro nazionale di prevenzione e difesa sociale in Milan, a research center with close relations to the political establishment; the Associazione il Mulino in Bologna, a cultural association, which created an intellectual infrastructure for the discipline; and the Ufficio Relazioni Sociali of the very large Olivetti enterprise in Ivrea, which framed sociological research as an element in a wider political–cultural project of social reform.

A Fascinating and Precarious Project: Sociology in Trento

This chapter considers the creation of the first academic institution granting accredited degrees in sociology as a case study in the institutionalization of sociology in Italy. The Istituto Universitario Superiore di Scienze Sociali was established in Trento in 1962 thanks to the visionary drive of Christian Democratic politician Bruno Kessler . The process involved local and nationwide networks of politicians and social scientists, the elaboration of innovative scholarly and educational programs, and continued quarrels about the influence of scholars from disciplines other than sociology. Trento quickly became one of the hotbeds of student revolts, with different waves of protest and occupation peaking in 1966–1968 and the emergence of a newer generation of sociologists who forcefully contested scholarly and academic conventions in the early 1970s.

The Dream of Institutionalization

The consequences of the full entrance of sociology within the Italian system of higher education in the 1960s are the main focus of this chapter. After a brief description of the Italian centralized-but-fragmented ‘chair system ,’ the chapter describes the emergence of a new generation of sociologists, properly trained in research institutes and much more professionalized than their teachers and academic patrons. The 1960s were also the time for a revolution in scholarly journals, which quickly became venues for the publication of sociological work identified with a school, and a time of intense editorial work regarding translations of major sociological works from abroad. As sociology became an academicized discipline, non-academic institutions and research centers underwent a profound transformation that left them weakened and fragmented.

Routinization and Globalization: The 1980s and Beyond

The chapter presents one final thesis: After the normalization of the early 1980s, the history of Italian sociology came to an abrupt end. The current state of the discipline is one of routinization without standardization, profoundly influenced by nationwide higher education reforms and political–academic relationships among the three camps. The chapter describes the establishment of doctoral programs in sociology and the unprecedented wave of theoretical work in the mid-1980s, the recent development of the three camps, and the debut of sociologists at the apex of Italian government. It also hints at the ‘new careers’ of sociologists trained after 1990, who have increasingly widened their geographical and intellectual horizons, and ends with a hesitant note on the future of Italian sociology.

After ’68: A New Generation of Sociologists

Sociologists born in the late 1930s came of age as a ‘disobedient generation’: They contested established ways of doing social science and introduced, for the first time, a massive dosage of Marxism into Italian sociology. Many young sociologists developed a new style of ‘co-research ’ based on a radical critique of Italian modernization . At the same time, the emergence of ‘mass university ’ helped them find a quick pathway to tenured jobs within the academic system . This weakened their radical stance and led to a rapid process of normalization. In the 1970s, the enlargement of the Italian sociological community gave rise to geographical and subdisciplinary cleavages, with a prevalence of Northern and Roman scholarly clusters and the importation of new sociological trends from outside Italy.