Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco. Rural Affective Economies: An Ethnographic Approach to Local Developmen in Rural Italy. Palgrave Macmillan. 2024. xiii, 223 pages. eBook ISBN 978-3-031-70826-8.
Carole Counihan (Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Millersville University)
carole.counihan@millersville.edu
This insightful book confronts the interrelated problems of rural depopulation, global climate change, and the decline of small-scale agriculture in Italy and suggests strategies to counter them. Anthropologist Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco uses detailed, long-term, multi-sited ethnography in several struggling villages in northwest Italy’s Piedmont Region to uncover “which resources a local community can leverage to promote grassroots local development initiatives successfully” (6) while “ensuring sustainability and building resilience for communities, to preserve biodiversity and cultural diversity” (8). He focuses in particular on local heritage products from the agrifood sector as these have excellent potential for revitalizing rural affective economies.
Chapter 2, “Apocalyptic Atmosphere,” describes the depopulation of the countryside and the decline of rural culture through a focus on the village of San Giovanni in the Monferrato area of the Piedmont region. Focusing on the concept of paese or village, “a place of belonging” (35), Fontefrancesco tells six villagers’ life stories to illustrate the massive transformations in rural social and economic life. The vivid recollections of older villagers describe the decline in cultivated lands, the abandonment and crumbling of rural dwellings, the loss of small businesses and shops, the lack of jobs and opportunities for young people, and the shrinking community. Their tales cry out for “a different affective economy for the community, projecting San Giovanni from the atmosphere of apocalypse and ruin to that of development” (48).
Chapter 3, “Just Agriculture?”, asks, “Can agriculture, in and of itself, (re)build the core of the economy and, thus, the affective economy of San Giovanni?” (54-55). It documents agriculture’s “progressive socioeconomic marginalization” through the history of San Giovanni’s three main crops–cereals, hazelnuts, and grapes (55). Like so many villages in Italy, San Giovanni’s long history of agricultural production began to decline after World War II as growing land fragmentation made agriculture more challenging and residents increasingly migrated to urban centers in search of better paying, more prestigious, and less taxing jobs. Today only a few agricultural enterprises are large enough to sustain families. Wheat and maize are the most important crops, but the price of wheat has dropped significantly in the past decade, threatening farm livelihoods. Farmers started growing hazelnuts seriously about twenty years ago and they have proved to be a more lucrative crop than wheat or grapes, a lifeline for villagers who believe in the potential of agriculture. Fontefrancesco writes, “For all those interviewed, agriculture is always related to the future and, to some extent, to hope” (72). But for agriculture to provide a solution it needs to have a foundation “in specific local products” (75).
Fontefrancesco goes on to examine three specific local products from three different communities to explore the conditions fostering a product’s development and valorization. “It must have the ability to align the expectations of various community’s share- and stakeholders and, above all, must be an element capable of creating a solid bond between the territory and the community. In other words, the product should have a centrality in the community’s life” (83). Chapter 4, “Be Central!” examines one such product, the Formatge di San Lazzaro, a heritage cheese produced in a small remote alpine village from the milk of cows fed only with local hay. This cheese has a longstanding place in the community and expresses rich relations between producers, consumers and the environment. As Tina, the proprietor of the only grocery store left in San Lazzaro put it, “It’s our cheese. It’s ours because generations have been making it: it’s the result of hard work and the love we put into cultivating these mountains and caring for our animals” (89).
Chapter 5, “Make It Central!” counters the received wisdom that only heritage products can spur development by examining the case of a newly invented product—Torta Mattone or Brick Cake—in the village of Bressana Bottarone. Tied to the community’s long history of brick-making, this product has become “a fundamental resource for tourism development—and thus for local development” (18). Torta Mattone involves “a story of gastronomic creation and an active search for local typicality… through a confectionery product and a festival” (104). Exploiting the growing interest in gastronomic tourism, Bressana used the festival to stir up interest in the cake and strengthen its embeddedness in the community, benefitting from its centrality to stakeholders—the local government, non-profit organizations, pastry producers, and local residents. Torta Mattone shows that new products can inspire economic development just as heritage products can if they involve key community stakeholders, reflect central cultural concerns, and achieve spatial and temporal continuity.
Chapter 6, “Here It Is!”, presents a case of applied development anthropology by showing how to investigate which products achieve centrality and are suitable for promoting. Based on his participation in a government-backed effort to revitalize the dying rural villages in the province of Alessandria, Fontefrancesco shows how ethnography can identify the community’s leverageable resources, particularly its culinary heritage. He describes food scouting—the ethnographic identification of foods with historical centrality, contemporary practitioners, and environmental suitability. He looks at the rediscovery of chestnut production in Carrera Ligure where it has been important since the Roman Era and shows how a heritage product that has fallen out of use can be revitalized to stimulate the local economy and attract tourism.
Chapter 7, “Be Aware!”, focuses on short agrifood chains (SACs) in Italy and their potential for spurring the economy by enhancing the value of food products that tie together diverse economic actors. This chapter aims to pull together the material in the previous chapters to provide a model for entrepreneurs and policy-makers interested in developing viable heritage food products. It outlines the conditions for success and the challenges faced because SACs are typically small-scale, economically fragile and distant from significant markets.
The book is a valuable resource for students, scholars and policy-makers around the globe interested in leveraging food products to revitalize moribund communities and economies. It goes beyond vague idealized hopes for gastronomic regeneration to analyze case studies where products are successful because culturally and historically central, environmentally appropriate, and meaningful to diverse stakeholders. Fontefrancesco’s rich ethnographic data on the communities and their products animate the book and enhance its accessibility to students at all levels. The stories of Italian villagers give life to concepts such as marginalization, affective economies, development, and heritage foods, and they engage readers in an empathetic understanding of the dilemmas of modern agricultural economies.
