Séminaire ABBA - Maddalena GRETEL CAMMELLI (Università di Torino) "Rethinking fascism and the f-word. An anthropological approach to contemporary European landscape."

Maddalena GRETEL CAMMELLI (Università di Torino) "Rethinking fascism and the f-word. An anthropological approach to contemporary European landscape."

In 2025, we live in a world where fascism is an increasingly common term, used by political parties and electoral candidates in different geographical areas and in both a political and common sense. What does this evidence tell us about the very meaning of this concept? If 1945 was not really the year that marked the end of fascism in history, what can a reinterpretation of history and current events tell us about these meanings and their spread? Is there something we can define as fascism or multiple fascisms manifest themselves in different social forms? Or can a capitalist society with a desire for progress and technological and economic growth exist without its own fascism? In this lecture, I will attempt to do a contribution to these questions, drawing on long-term ethnographic research on the subject, ranging from third-millennium fascist activists in Italy, state-level racism and immigration control, to the ERC F-WORD project, which studies the spread and manifestations of fascist performances and symbols in contemporary Europe.

BIO :

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli, PhD in Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and the University of Bergamo in 2014, since 2023 she is Associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Turin, where she is the PI of the ERC project "The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth." (F-WORD). She is the co-convenor of the EASA Network Anthropology of Fascism(s). Among her publications: Third Millennium fascists, An anthropology of CasaPound (Italian ed 2015, French ed 2017), and Fascism as a style of life. Community life and violence in a neofascist movement in Italy, Focaal, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Her researches focus on political anthropology, peasant movement, contemporary fascism, migration policies, feminist ethnography and violence.

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