Lorenzo D'Angelo
Lorenzo D'Angelo is a socio-cultural anthropologist with interests in natural resources and extractive industries, environmental and economic anthropology.
He carried out fieldwork in Italy on the social suffering of asylum seekers and 'undocumented' migrants (2004-2007). In 2008 he started a collaborative research project with an Italian association of psychoanalysts, the Società di Psicoanalisi Critica (SPC), to develop a critical perspective for the social sciences influenced by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. In 2012 he became a founding member of the newly founded Italian Society of Labour History (SISLav). In 2014 he co-founded the EASA Anthropology of Mining network.
He has been a Fellow at the IGK Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (RE:WORK) in Berlin (2013-2014); an Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, in New York (2015), and a Visiting Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin (2017).
From 2019 to 2020, Lorenzo D'Angelo was a research fellow at the University of Reading, UK, where he worked with Professor Eleanor Fisher on the EU Horizon 2020 funded NORFACE/Belmont project Gold Matters: Sustainability transformations in artisanal and small-scale gold mining: Trans-regional and Multi-Actor Perspectives .
Lorenzo D'Angelo has conducted historical and ethnographic research on the economic, cultural and religious aspects of artisanal mining in Sierra Leone and Uganda. His anthropological research on the extractive industries in Uganda and Sierra Leone argues for the value of an approach that combines micro- and macro-historical analyses and establishes a dialogue between ethnography and history. Indeed, his ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and Uganda has been complemented by archival research in various institutions, including the UK National Archives, the Selection Trust Archives at the London School of Economics, the British Newspapers Library and the National Library in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Since 2019, Lorenzo D'Angelo has also been conducting field research in Tanzania. In this country, he has focused on agro-pastoral systems and climate change in Maasai communities. In 2024 he founded the Laboratory of Anthropology of Social Change in Tanzania (Lab-Tanzania), officially recognised by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. The Laboratory aims to study the issues of climate and social change, agro-food systems, sustainability and biodiversity, and how they affect Tanzanian society and its people.
Il corso intende esplorare alcune pratiche e riflessioni teoriche che attraversano gli scenari patrimoniali e museali dei contesti africani. Una parte del corso sarà infine dedicata all’analisi della trasmissione dei saperi e all’impiego di particolari tecniche e tecnologie in alcuni contesti rurali africani, in particolare, in Sierra Leone, Uganda e Tanzania. L’obiettivo di questa parte è riflettere sulle diverse forme di “estrattivismo” e sulle possibili modalità di collaborazione con gli attori sociali locali, sul rapporto tra tecnica, tecnologia, società e ambiente.