Informal Social Organisations, Friendship and Belonging: New Research on Expatriates in Puglia, Italy

ABSTRACT

This note presents partial results of an on-going study of whether and how informal social organisations that include both host country and expatriate members serve as settings for expatriates to establish new relationships and develop a sense of belonging in a new environment. It is set in Puglia’s farthest southern reaches, a cultural and geographic zone called Salento. Salento has become known internationally for its distinctive folk music and dances, wine production and eco-friendly beaches. Its expatriate population continues to grow. The investigation has focused on four organisations to date. It tests the hypothesis that informal multicultural social organisations contribute to building trust among expatriate and local members, provide an interface across cultural and linguistic differences, and contribute to intercultural understanding. Research commenced in 2016 and has been conducted over multiple site visits for a combined total of 38 months. Although the organisations' activities were dramatically affected by the SARS COVID-19 health crisis, it has been possible to collect descriptive, interview, and survey data on their operations and members’ aspirations and draw some preliminary conclusions. The note presents, in particular, findings and discussion regarding the organisation English Practice in Lecce.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural friendships
• informal social organisations
• Italy
• expatriates
• belonging

Acknowledgements

The author expresses her gratitude to interlocutors in Lecce and Brindisi for allowing her to participate in their organisations and for generously sharing their interests and insights. She offers special thanks to conveners and members of The Berkeley Circle, Salento Interculturale, Pirates of Apulia, and English Practice in Lecce. Readers who would like more information about The Berkeley Circle or Pirates of Apulia may consult the organisations’ respective websites: https://www.theberkeleylecce.com/ and https://www.piratesofapulia.com/.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1652 [Accessed 18 December 2021].

2 George Mason Institutional Review Board Approval 1405634-1.

3 The choice of responding ‘I don’t know’ was included to acknowledge that definitions of friendship vary among individuals, cultures, and interculturally, although probing those subtleties were beyond the pilot survey’s scope.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this report is based was supported by grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program (2016); Fondazione CON IL SUD (2016); and, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University (2018, 2019). The author is grateful for their generous support.

Notes on contributors

Anne Schiller

Anne Schiller earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Cornell University. Her interests include identity and social relations in Italy and Indonesia. Her fieldwork has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and others. The results of her fieldwork on social change and identity in Florence, Italy is the subject of her most recent books, Merchants in the City of Art: Work, Identity, and Social Change in a Florentine Neighborhood (University of Toronto Press 2016), and Commercianti a Firenze. Identità e Cambiamento nel Quartiere di San Lorenzo (Carocci Editore 2016). In 2016 she was selected as a Fulbright-Fondazione CON IL SUD Awardee to conduct research and teach in the southern Italian region of Puglia. As Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Universitá del Salento in Lecce, she lectured on qualitative research methodology and on writing in the social sciences. Her current ethnographic projects, both based in Lecce, concern the representation of the Salento's material and immaterial cultures, and the role of voluntary social organisations in building multinational social networks and intercultural understanding as part of expatriation experiences.