Roberto Malighetti (a cura)
The politics of identity

Contemporary cultural anthropology offers new approaches to the concepts of culture and identity: today de-localized identities are dynamic, open and artificial artefacts, involved in contingency and precarious processes.
This collection of essays deals with identity as a bundle of strategies actively promoted by group members at different levels – with the invention of tradition and the construction of a common past. The “fictional” state of identity, reinvented and reinterpreted according to specific ends is explored in the analysis of ethnographic case studies – Baluchistan, Nepal, Gambia, Iran, Mexico and Brazil –, showing how symbolic systems and power relationships are intrincially embedded.