Abstract

This essay has two intertwined goals. First, it seeks to bring keyword analysis, the «cultural materialist» approach to lexical change pioneered by Raymond Williams, into conversation with ethnographic practice. It argues that the diachronic and synchronic analysis of common concepts can heighten the ethnographers’ attention to the socio-historical contexts that shape research and challenge assumptions about the meanings of the keywords that they take into the field and encounter therein. Second, the essay examines the consolidation of precarity as a concept and object of academic analysis in Anglophone social sciences over the last two decades and considers the different dimensions and histories that have been elided in the process. In order to demonstrate the possibilities of keyword analysis and to question the ways in which precarity has been appropriated by scholars, it turns its attention to excavating the overlooked and ambiguous meanings and uses of «precarietà» in Italy and in Naples since the 1960s