Matteo Bortolini

Time of Indifference. Italian Sociologists, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Process of Modernization

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Abstract

Poet, writer, and director Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most famous and outspoken Italian intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. In the early 1970s Pasolini's interpretation of the process of modernization in Italy aroused a wide and harsh debate, in which sociologists, who had been studying the same topics since the late 1940s, only dimly and loosely participated. Using an implicitly Bourdieusian framework, I interpret the stance of social scientists toward Pasolini as the effect of a boundary-defending strategy, aimed at excluding literary and poetic understandings of Italian society from the then-unbounded field of Italian sociology. In the conclusion, I reflect on the possible uses of Pasolini's understanding of intellectual practice within the current, and recurring, crises of the social sciences.

Keywords

  • Pasolini
  • Italian sociology
  • boundary-work
  • intellectuals
  • modernization

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