7 - Local Communities as Strangers In-Between: The Paradigm of Aleatory Politics in Post-earthquake Central Italy (2016– 17)

Summary

The disaster: ghosts in the crater

It all started in August 2016. Suddenly, on the night of Wednesday 24 August, a powerful tremor with magnitude 6 hit the Tronto valley, a narrow geographical area that surrounds the homonymous river, with small villages situated across three regions (Abruzzo, Marche and Lazio). The earthquake swarm continued in the following months, with two major shocks on 26 and 30 October: the epicentre moved north in the Monti Sibillini, along the Apennine ridge that divides the Marche and Umbria regions. Another four tremors took place on 18 January 2017, after which the swarm became quiet. The territorial proportions of the disaster immediately looked unprecedented: over 140 towns and villages suffered significant damages, with some places entirely reduced to dust.

I have been conducting ethnographic research in the Apennine inland territories since October 2017, with alternate stays that for personal circumstances have allowed me to reside in Macerata (Marche Region) for many months until 2021. Initially, my research was focused on how emic representations of the disaster channelled past and present conditions of vulnerability and disparity. As a follow-up, I began investigating how the disaster governance and its political framework were shaping the local reconstruction experience. Adopting a multi-sited approach (Marcus, 1995), I have been able to collect interviews with inhabitants, administrators, technicians, and journalists. However, the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on the prosecution of fieldwork between 2021 and 2022. Therefore, I decided to combine different research methods such as online research, netnography and institutional documentary analysis until my last visit in March 2022. Fieldwork issues and ethnographic research innovations as such have been brilliantly reframed as ‘patchwork ethnography’, a methodological shift that ‘helps us refigure … how we can transform realities that have been described to us as “limitations” and “constraints” into openings for new insights’ (Günel et al, 2020). Acknowledging material difficulties, political constraints, and frictions between personal and academic concerns made me rethink my research approach by experimenting with unusual forms of ethnographic engagement (such as social media interactions on post-disaster activists’ groups) with my interlocutors, especially during the lockdown policy imposed between 2020 and 2021.