Itineraries and specificities of Italian medical anthropology

Abstract

This paper describes the birth (or rebirth) of Italian medical anthropology around the middle of the 1950s, and its subsequent complex development up to the present. During this fairly long process, the author played a role that was probably of some importance, that of both a direct witness and active participant. Here these developments are briefly reviewed, in an attempt to single out some of the stimuli and the most significant occasions that have happened, their theoretical and methodological reference points, the main lines of research that have been tackled along the way, as well as the ‘social demand’ and the ‘social use’ that have integrated and oriented the practice of the new discipline within the horizon of some of the more general problems of Italian society. In outlining here the profile of and the various events in Italian medical anthropology, this paper takes into account the fact that, although a medical anthropology with that name and the disciplinary set-up that are now internationally attributed to it began in Italy only in the mid-1950s, important lines of research to which we would today attach that name had been undertaken long ago.

Keywords:

• medical anthropology
• history
• Italy
• de Martino
• ethnopsychiatry
• Perugia

Acknowledgements

Translation from the Italian by Derek Boothman. The paper was presented at the conference ‘Medical Anthropology in Europe’ funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Conflict of interest: none.