TECHNIQUES AND MATERIAL CULTURE
- Overview
- Assessment methods
- Learning objectives
- Contents
- Delivery method
- Teaching methods
- Contacts/Info
None.
The course provides an indepth knowledge of the dynamics of poverty in different historical and social contexts, necessary for the implementation of a conscious territorial planning and efficient measures of social promotion and international cooperation. The course consists in the comparison of a wide array of various forms of poverty as can be observed in the Social Sciences and shows the different approaches to the description and interpretation of the phenomenon in both urban and rural landscapes.
The course explores the origins, meanings, and the material and immaterial logics behind the formation of different ways of living and perceiving poverty within different political and social systems. Particular attention is devoted to the correlations linking the emergence of different experiences and representations of poverty to the evolution of different subsistence strategies, production techniques, social bonds, political hierarchies, and national and international institutions. The end of the course ponders the mechanisms through which the populations who benefit from cooperation projects in present-day developing countries tend to accept or refuse changes and technical innovations proposed by external actors. The analysis focuses on the bonds and conditions that make the implementation of such changes possible, as well as the combination of symbolic-social and technical-material components involved in the transformative processes.
Among the learning objectives we find:
- knowledge of the different cultural dimensions, representations, and interpretations of poverty in different historical-social contexts;
- knowledge of the causalities related to the processes of deprivation and impoverishment;
- knowledge of the main social responses and institutional actions to support food safety;
- capacity to analyse and plan development projects aimed at reducing the material vulnerability.
The course is structured in two parts. The first part reconstructs, in general terms, the evolution of poverty and its social representations in history. Different case studies are presented and analysed in order to highlight the great variety of interpretations, values and behaviours related to different experiences and approaches to the phenomenon in the framework of different societies and state formations. The second part focuses on some elements that heavily influence the implementation and results of international cooperation initiatives. The course specifically explores the dynamics of cultural interaction between native and external actors, the problems connected to the transfer of technical and organizational models, and the processes of community engagement.
1- General part (24 hours)
-Definitions, terminologies, and preliminary classifications: The social construction of poverty
-Concepts, dimensions and historic figures of poverty
-The gift economy in the hunter-gatherer’s populations
-The origins of inequality in the Neolithic transition
-Reciprocity, redistribution and markets in the agro-pastoral civilizations
-Begging, compassion and religious charity
-Pauperism, dangerous classes, and immoral poverty
-Famines and colonial markets
-Impoverishment and chronic deprivation in the systems oriented towards the export of agricultural commodities
-Epidemics, wars, and climate calamities in post-colonial Africa
-The political famines of the 21th century
-Adaptive responses and people’s coping strategies in conditions of extreme poverty
-Politics of food safety: paradigms of scarcity and paradigms of access denied
-Phenomenology of the twentieth-century industrial unemployment
-Phenomenology of precarious work in the late-industrial age
-Integrated poverty, marginal poverty, and disqualifying poverty
-Poverty, social bonds and systems of social protection
2- Monographic part (24 hours)
-Cultural contact, hybridization e assimilation
-Ethnocentrism, symbolic significations and identity attributes
-Native knowledge vs technical and scientific knowledge
-Technical and symbolic compatibilities in the acquisition of productive technologies
-Logics of risk minimisation, psychologies of scarcity, and tunnel effect
-Factors of innovation, environmental pressures, diffusions, and people’s experimentation
-Local practices of selection, deviation, and re-interpretation
-Models of community engagement.
The educational aims of the course will be achieved through 48 lecture hours.
Students are required to previously schedule a meeting by sending an e-mail to the lecturer.