In conversation with Mara Benadusi

Between 2015 and 2020 I did fieldwork at a petrochemical complex in southeastern Sicily, after moving south from Bergamo to study disasters and environmental upheaval. As the only anthropologist in my department, I knew a problem this multifaceted couldn't be handled by traditional solo fieldwork, so I built a group – students, colleagues from other disciplines, and local residents – to research it together.

For me, public anthropology means continuity. You can't understand a place like this in a year, or alone: the problems people live with – pollution, the slow effects of contamination, the absence of rights – unfold over decades. So I try to start things that outlast me. A German PhD student, Luisa Mohr, now works in the same area, and others will follow her, because the trust built there belongs to the process, not to any one researcher.

I no longer do fieldwork there myself; I support Luisa and the local groups when they need me. Recently that meant helping them lobby the municipality to turn a disused railway into a permanent cycle path. Being useful matters to me more than publishing.

Ethnography is a transformative experience – you can't understand complex things without being changed by them. An Italian anthropologist I admire calls this the curvatura dell'esperienza, the "bending of experience": a stretch of your life curves into a new shape, and afterwards you see everything differently. That change endures long after a project ends, in how you teach, how you relate to people, how you write.

For me it's also a kind of writing. When I write ethnography I have to feel what I write, and I have to be sure the reader feels it too – otherwise it makes no sense to me. It's almost theatrical: rather than telling you "this is A, this is B, here's the result," I want readers to arrive at the understanding through their own effort.

And ethnography is increasingly something people ask for. But anthropology can't answer the big questions – toxicity, pollution – on its own. When a community needs monitoring equipment or scientific data, you have to bring those in too. What ethnography adds is a protected space for reflection and criticism: a way of asking, together, how knowledge is being produced and who it serves.

The "afterlife" of oil is not only about what remains after extraction or industrial production decline. It is about how people continue to live with oil's residues – material, social and imaginative – and how they rework them into new visions of the future. Former industrial infrastructures become heritage sites, contested spaces, ecological projects, or objects of memory. To understand these transformations, I followed people as they engaged with these remnants in everyday life.

Some of these abandoned sites acquire new meanings over time. They are reclaimed by activists, explored by local residents, and sometimes revisited by adolescents as part of informal rites of passage. The former Agusta hangar, for instance, has become one such place. I'm less interested in the objects themselves than in the layers of time and affection attached to them.

I borrow the term "scratching" from what a DJ does when mixing records. It refers to the practices through which local actors scrape away the most dominant layers of the late-industrial landscape, making visible histories, presences and possibilities that are otherwise difficult to perceive. At events that are half-organised and half-improvised, layers of history, materiality and time rub against each other. In the very same spot, one person watches migratory birds and imagines a nature reserve, another hunts for ancient archaeological remains, a third traces wartime tunnels – all while the petrochemical chimneys sit in the background. The most revealing moments are those in which these different temporalities and visions briefly come into friction, unsettling what appears self-evident and opening up alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting the territory. My work is to follow those scratches and understand how people reconnect pasts, presents and possible futures through collective action.

I'm wary of explaining these places only through "vulnerability." In Sri Lanka the 2004 tsunami was widely seen as an opportunity – people even called it the "golden wave": a chance to rebuild, to attract foreign aid, to shift political power. Disasters are always also openings to do
something.

I studied a village rebuilt afterwards where 218 families received houses though they hadn't really been affected – rural farmers coached to present themselves as displaced fishermen. To qualify for humanitarian aid you had to perform the right kind of vulnerability, but also its opposite: resilience, by building your own house and forming a community organisation. People had to hold both faces at once – I think of Janus, the two-faced god.

This taught me that disasters aren't single events. They are long processes, with roots reaching back here to colonial-era decisions about where to settle people, and very long aftermaths – I returned after eight, ten, fifteen years. You can't separate the tsunami from the civil war either: some families ended up with two houses, one in a camp rebuilt after the wave, one in a camp rebuilt after the fighting. The vulnerability lay in living between those overlapping crises.

Very different, and my research there is still young. Around Etna the risk is layered – eruptions and earthquakes – but what struck us was how selective the disaster became. Only the families living directly on a fault line were relocated. So the "disaster" almost disappears as a shared event: people no longer talk about the earthquake, they talk about the fault line beneath their house.

That changes everything. In a small town where everyone is connected by kinship and daily life – your cousin next door, your shop across the street – the authorities say, in effect, that none of this matters; the fault line runs here, so you move and your neighbour doesn't. The experience becomes intensely individual. You begin to feel the "verticality" of your situation – your relationship to the ground beneath you – while your neighbours carry on horizontally, as if nothing had changed. The disaster stops being something a community shares and becomes a problem that is yours alone.

I'm always an outsider – even in Sicily, after twenty years, the divide between Italy's north and south means I'm still seen as one. I've stopped treating that as a problem to solve. When I first arrived in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, the place was crowded with foreigners working for NGOs; there was no way to be recognised as "the anthropologist" rather than just another white aid worker. So instead of studying affected people directly, I followed the aid workers themselves – and that gave me a close view of how humanitarian giving actually worked.

Only after the war did I return for more intimate, long-term fieldwork in a single village. There I had to accept that ethnography itself gets reshaped by the place. People lie – to survive, to defend themselves, to hold a position in a tense, surveilled society – and to stay, I had to become part of that world rather than stand above it. You can't force the closeness anthropology sometimes romanticises; you have to be realistic about what your presence can and can't be.

It often means getting your hands dirty: giving your time to things local people consider important, even when they won't produce an academic paper. That's how you build trust and a shared sense of what is useful.

A good example is unfolding right now near one of our case-study sites in Sicily. With local associations we spent months – and a fair amount of conflict – building a critical exhibition in a public hall. It was meant to last a month; a year later it's still there, and the groups now effectively manage the space. Out of that we built a "geoportal": an online map layering energy projects, archaeological sites and natural heritage. The region is filling with solar-panel developments on farmland, and the municipalities had little real say, because the land is simply rented from farmers. People wanted to understand where they actually live, and what renting their land for thirty years really means.

We even took the geoportal to a large green-energy trade fair in Catania – and found ourselves surrounded by the very companies we had been mapping. For me that is the point: creating a democratic space where people can see the frictions for themselves, and decide.