Interracial Encounters in an Era of Identity Politics: The Study of Population Admixtures in Italy after the Second World War

Scientific interests in both the origins and the respective qualities of the different “races” (or “stocks”) that made up the Italian population predated the unification of the country, when they prompted heated political debates. However, the question gained further actuality in the interwar period, when the Fascist government launched a highly ambitious policy that aimed to reclaim vast amounts of marshlands located in different regions of Italy. As tens of thousands of peasants from the North East of Italy were moved around the country to drain swamps and cultivate the reclaimed land, anthropologists and biologists undertook to study both their adaptation to the new environment, and the product of their intermixing with “autochthonous stock”. Remarkably, the interests in the intermixing of Italian populations did not disappear with the fall of the Fascist regime. On the island of Sardinia, for example, a team of anthropologists and geneticists of local origin carried on studying the prevailing “human ecology” of the newly reclaimed lands, up into the 1970s. More surprisingly even, they built on their studies to take a stance in then ongoing political and cultural discussion on Sardinian identity and its future. The aim of this presentation is to explain how a racial style of thought that dated back to the late 19th C. was successfully adapted to the new context of Identity politics.