Editoriale

Ethnographies of the contemporary is the name chosen for this new magazine, in which we will try to explain phenomena of permanence and change through the priority recourse to ethnographic practice. The magazine takes up some of the talks held on the occasion of the permanent Ethnographies of the contemporary seminar, conceived and coordinated by the writer, which is based at the Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum in Palermo. The Permanent Seminar was established on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Association for the Conservation of Popular Traditions, responding to one of the main wishes of its founders: that the Museum could become a place and engine for the promotion of anthropological research and the dissemination of its outcomes. The idea was to o er free space for the voices of young scholars, making a wider audience participate in their investigations and their passionate ethnographic commitment, in a time when few are the places of real debate and the seats of publication not bound by the asphyxiated and oppressive containment grids of the tangled contemporary world. The initiative was also motivated by the historical moment in which the demo-ethno-anthropological knowledge is found: "after having known, among the end of the sixties and the end of the eighties of the twentieth century, a season of academic expansion and broad and positive recognition from public opinion, appear clearly in decline, manifesting a structural crisis, a fragmentation of themes, theories and methods and [...] the closure in an altered self-referentiality that denounces, more than any other fact, their decay and their socio-cultural irrelevance "