The aim of this paper is to situate the Sardinian village within the flux of contemporary social transformations that stand poised to redefine it. Specifically, it examines the highland village of Orgosolo, understanding it as a site that concentrates a clear set of cultural self-definitions that stand opposed to perceptions of life beyond the locality. A key element of local discourse is a view of the collective historical experience that underscores the social, political, and cultural marginality of rural life in central Sardinia, and associates the village with a dissident identity that is reaffirmed by a social memory of violence suffered at the hand of powerful outsiders from Antiquity onwards. Yet, this perspective on the locality is not the sole one, and as such the village presents a contested site where the normative traditionalist vision holds little traction among an ascendant generation of urban-oriented youth who, for their part, reject the past and any definition of village identity explicitly associated with it.
BaileyFG (1971) Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation, New York: Schocken Books.
2.
BassoK (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
3.
BechiG (1997 [1914]) Caccia Grossa. Scene e Figure del Banditismo Sardo, Cagliari: Ilisso Edizioni.
4.
BellR (1979) Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Italy since 1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5.
BlokA (1975) The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860--1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs, New York: Harper and Row.
6.
BrigagliaM (1971) Sardegna: Perchè Banditi, Milano: Carte Segrete.
7.
CagnettaF (1975) Banditi a Orgosolo, Rimini: Guaraldi.
8.
ChapmanCG (1973) Milocca: A Sicilian Village, New York: Allen and Unwin.
9.
ColeJWWolfER (1999 [1974]) The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley, Berkeley: University of California Press.
10.
ConnertonP (2009) How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11.
EscobarA (2001) Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography20(2): 139–174.
12.
FentressJWickhamC (1992) Social Memory, Oxford: Blackwell.
13.
GaltA (1991) Far from the Church Bells: Settlement and Society in an Apulian Town, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
14.
GeertzC (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books.
15.
GeertzC (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.
16.
GibsonM (1998) Biology or environment? Race and Southern “Deviancy” in the writings of Italian criminologists, 1880–1920. In: SchneiderJ (ed.) Italy's ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, Oxford: Berg, pp. 99–115.
17.
GiordanoC (2005) The past in the present: Actualized history in the social construction of the present. In: KalbDTakH (eds) Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History Beyond the Cultural Turn, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 53–71.
18.
GiordanoC (2012) Anthropology meets history: Investigating European societies. Anthropological Journal on European Cultures21(2): 20–34.
19.
GluckmanM (1961) Ethnographic data in British Social Anthropology. Sociological Review9(1): 5–17.
20.
HannerzU (2010) Anthropology's World: Life in a Twenty-first-century Discipline, London: Pluto.
21.
HeatheringtonT (1999) Street tactics: Catholic ritual and the senses of the past in Central Sardinia. Ethnology38(4): 315–334.
22.
HeatheringtonT (2010) Wild Sardinia: Indigeneity and the Global Dreamtimes of Environmentalism, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
23.
La Nuova Sardegna (1899) Trecento e piu arrestati nei circondari di Nuoro e di Ozieri. 9(132): 2. 17/05/99. Daily newspaper, published in Sassari, Sardinia.
24.
La Nuova Sardegna (1899) Un conflitto tra carabinieri e latitanti. 9(185): 2. 11/07/99. Daily newspaper, published in Sassari, Sardinia.
25.
La Nuova Sardegna (1899) Gli scontri nel territorio di Orgosolo: Quattro latatanti uccisi. 9(186): 2. 12/07/99. Daily newspaper, published in Sassari, Sardinia.
26.
LaiF (1998) Il Pastoralismo e la Formazione dei Confini Comunali nella Sardegna Centro-Orientale. La Ricerca Folklorica38: 75–82.
27.
LambekM (2011) Catching the local. Anthropological Theory11(2): 197–221.
28.
MastinoA (2006) La Sardegna Romana. In: BrigagliaMMastinoAOrtuGG (eds) Storia della Sardegna I: Dalle Origini al Settecento, Rome: Laterza, pp. 33–57.
29.
PitkinDS (1985) The House that Giacomo Built: History of an Italian Family, 1898–1978, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
30.
SattaG (2001) Turisti a Orgosolo. La Sardegna Pastorale Come Attrazione Turistica, Napoli: Liguori Editore.
31.
Satta S (1987) The Day of Judgement. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.
32.
SettenG (2004) The habitus, the rule, and the moral landscape. Cultural Geographies11: 389–415.
33.
SilvermanS (1975) Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town, New York: Columbia University Press.
34.
SorgeA (2015) Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
35.
SorgeA (2008) Divergent visions: Localist and cosmopolitan identities in Highland Sardinia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.)14: 808–824.
36.
TakH (1990) Longing for local identity: Intervillage relations in an Italian mountain area. Anthropological Quarterly63(2): 90–100.
37.
WolfE (1957) Closed corporate peasant communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology13(1): 1–18.
38.
WolfE (1986) The vicissitudes of the closed corporate peasant community. American Ethnologist13(2): 325–329.
