Domesticating artifacts and the construction or desctruction of identities

Bozen, 15.11.2019
Alvise Mattozzi
amattozzi@unibz.it
Workshop
Local identities an their external sources: Communities in South Tyrol
Domesticating artifacts.
Or, how artifacts coming from
beyond the borders of a
community contribute (or not) to
the becoming of identities.

A methodological
contribution
Domesticating Artifacts
Alvise Mattozzi
Local identities and their external sources: Communities in South Tyrol
how can we describe-analyze how artifacts coming
from beyond the borders of a community contribute
(or not) to the becoming of identities?

Case 1. The fork
Alvise Mattozzi
https://www.peoplesrepublicofbolzano.com/

Case 1. The fork
Alvise Mattozzi

Case 1. The fork
Alvise Mattozzi
Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard (1616)

Case 1. The fork
Alvise Mattozzi
William Hogarth, The Industrious 'rentice grown rich, & Sheriff of London (1747)

Case 1. The fork
Alvise Mattozzi
Giorgio Sommer, Mangiamaccheroni (before 1886)

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 1. The fork
Fork: 1. an implement with two or more prongs used
especially for taking up (as in eating), pitching, or digging.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
A tool to get in contact with food.

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 1. The fork
A tool to keep food (and other bodies) at distance
A tool to regulate social relations.
A tool that contributes to the articulation of individuality
and to the construction of the modern subject.
… then, not “just” a tool, but a social actor.

Alvise Mattozzi
Artifacts as mediators
Not an intermediary, but a mediator
+ =
+ =
INTERMEDIARY
MEDIATOR

Alvise Mattozzi
How can we describe artifacts as (potential) mediators?

Alvise Mattozzi
How can an artifact become part (or emerge within) a certain
network?
How does an arttifact contribute to reconfigure the network?
How can we describe these processes?

Alvise Mattozzi
Think artifacts beyond and besides their function.
Not in order to take into consideration their meaning or
symbolic or communicative value:
- avoid the “not only, but also” approach.
Think artifacts as networks part of a network, thinking
them relationally, without the need to right away file the
relations artifacts take part to and the relations they
contribute to reconfigure under the label of function or
of symbol.

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 2 – Steel axes
Adult Men built
Knowledge of
materials
Women, non
adults can use
Man's control
Permission
to use
Wood for fire
Shelters
Gather food
Wood for fire
Shelters
Gather food
Gather Honey
Decoration for
cerimonies
Trading
Men from other
aborigenal tribes
During cerimonies
Symbol of
masculinity Totemic symbol
in a closed
cosmology

Alvise Mattozzi
Unexpected / Rejected /
Adjusting / Yearned
artifacts
unexpected
Trojan Horse
adjusting
rejected

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 3 – Espresso machines

Alvise Mattozzi
Domestication
consumer’s appropriation [of technologies and objects], by taking [them]
home or into other private cultural spaces, and in making, or not making,
them acceptable and familiar
Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon, 1996, p. 46

Alvise Mattozzi
Domestication
In pursuit of this notion of the household as a moral economy we draw on
a literature, principally in anthropology (Appadurai 1986; Cheal 1988; Parry
and Bloch 1989) and, albeit on a broader canvas, in historical research
(Thompson 1971), in which households are conceived as part of a
transactional system of economic and social relations within
the formal or more objective economy and society of the public sphere.
Within this framework households are seen as being actively engaged with
the products and meanings of this formal, commodity- and individual-
based economy. This engagement involves the appropriation of these
commodities into domestic culture—they are domesticated—and through
that appropriation they are incorporated and redefined in different terms,
in accordance with the household’s own values and interests.
Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch and David Morley, 1992, p. 14

Alvise Mattozzi
Domestication
Four phases of domestication
- Appropriation: purchase and reasons for the purchase
- Objectification: positionning within the house
- Incorporation: use in everyday practices
- Conversion: use with outsiders in order
to display values and status
from the outside
to the inside
inside
from the inside to
the outside

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 4 –
Domestication of toast / grill

Alvise Mattozzi
Domestication
- Symmetrizing: there is a reciprocal domestication.
- Extending and abstracting: from the outside of the self to the self
- Getting before the metaphor
- Recovering the actual processes of domestication and comparing
with them with “domestication” as intended by Silverstone
-

Alvise Mattozzi
Becoming
Reciprocal domestication: reciprocal becoming
Becoming together

Alvise Mattozzi
Case 5 – Raw milk in Italy
[…]
Then, I believe, that Italian people especially, have lost the culture of
drinking milk – this is how I see it.
Differently from other realities, which, if you want … let’s say mmh
Rumanians, also in the Rumanian mileu, or Eastern countries, let’s say, or
mostly Indians or Pakistans so that they … it is really the key food as for
eating …
[…]
Fermented milk it is not pathogen, it is a taste that we, we Europans are
not able to drink, let’s say … clear indeed, we are not able
from an interview with dairy farmer,
owner of a raw milk vending machine
(Trento, February 2016)

Alvise Mattozzi
[…]
why these people look for this milk? This is the concept. They, when taste
raw milk, remember the kind of milk the were used to consume in their
countries. And for them that one is milk. They when the buy a bottle of
milk at the supermarket, that milk does not meet their taste, because it is
not their milk. And what I am saying regards everybody: the Arabs, the
Egyptians, the Ukrainians, the Moldavians, the Croatians, the South
Americans, the Peruvians, the Ecuadorenians, the Bangladesh, Indians,
Pakistans …
These are our clients. 

Alvise Mattozzi
 And then they use our milk for … for making cheeses, for making their
cakes… because they make traditional cakes, … say, the cakes that
Ecuadorenians or Peruvian make with renneted milk – I do not know how
– that then they put mais inside … the Bangladesh they make very peculiar
cakes – very sweet –, with sugar, and they need raw milk, not the
pasteurized one.
from an interview with dairy farmer,
owner of a raw milk vending machine
(Milan, March 2016)

STUDIO DEI MEDIA
E DELLA COMUNICAZIONE
Latte e lotte
Tiziana Piccioni and Alvise Mattozzi

STUDIO DEI MEDIA
E DELLA COMUNICAZIONE
INTRODUCTION
Latte e lotte
Xxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxx
Xxxxxx
Tiziana Piccioni and Alvise Mattozzi

Alvise Mattozzi
(GI, agronomist, 2008)
“We had the farmer gaining something, starting to acquire bargaining
power, starting to get some income, and on the other hand the
consumer was happy”
(AS, dairy farmer, 2016)
2003
- Re-appropriation
- Bargaining power
“Here is the concept from where we started. We see that the dairy
farmer gets the 25% of the final price-per-liter of milk – today is even
less – [….] the more time passes, the more the difference. And the
goal was: from 25%, let us try to bring everything back home”

Alvise Mattozzi
Dairy farm
Production
Tanker
collection
Dairy
Transformation
Bottling
Plant
Distribution
Retail
Final sale
Consumer’s
Consumption
Short chain

Alvise Mattozzi
Raw milk at vending machine:
€ 1 per liter or less
vs
A shed price of around
€ 0.30 per liter
vs A shelf price of around
€ 1,30 per liter for
fresh pasteurized milk
A better product at a lower price

Alvise Mattozzi
Not just an economic re-appropriation:
- acknowledgement of dairy farmers work and role.
2003
“The idea is that together with the product, within the farm, you sell
those other things: culture, history, our history”
(GI, agronomist, 2008)

Alvise Mattozzi
2003 2004 2005
on farm premises off farm premises
before

Alvise Mattozzi
yearned

Alvise Mattozzi

Alvise Mattozzi
End of 2008
Raw Milk.
A fad that takes you
to the hospital
To drink unpasteurized raw milk is like playing at Russian roulette[…]"If you are lucky you can
to save up to half Euro per liter. If you are not, you can get a pathogen bacteria and end up
on dialysis or even kick the bucket[…]”
GOODBYE PASTEUR. The
last trend is to drink
unpasteurized milk. In
Legnano a three year old
girl was for twelve days in
intensive care for having
being infected with E.Coli
Unfortunately a clear
regional regulation is
missing.

Alvise Mattozzi
How can raw milk be domesticated?
What kind of network is needed?
What kind of moral economy is needed?
The only one to posses such network and/or
moral economy seem to be migrants.
Thanks to it a becoming togheter of migrants
and dairy farmers seems envisageable.

Alvise Mattozzi
Conclusions

Alvise Mattozzi
Conclusions
traitor?
+

Domesticating artifacts and the construction or desctruction of identities

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Similaire à Domesticating artifacts and the construction or desctruction of identities

Similaire à Domesticating artifacts and the construction or desctruction of identities (11)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Domesticating artifacts and the construction or desctruction of identities