Agricoltura, lavoro e migrazioni in Sicilia. Una ricerca etnografica sulla filiera olivicola

Abstract

In Italy, regulatory and academic interest in farming has developed in parallel with that for the rural. This represents an anomaly with respect to European and especially global trends. The main differences are twofold: in Italy attention to the rural has grown since the 1980s, when paradoxically it lost weight, in fact the 1981 Census noted an increase in the population of urban centres and a progressive decrease in rural centres. The second reason for the Italian anomaly is the interchangeability of the terms rus and agricultura; in fact these were distinct since the Latins who indicated with the former the countryside and with the latter the cultivation of the soil. This failure to distinguish two such different aspects according to Barberis (2009) is a legacy of fascism, which was engaged in launching the fashion of the rural from which politicians and institutions later distanced themselves to avoid being associated with that ideology (Barberis 2009).