Let us introduce ourselves: ATRA at the University of Trieste

Principal investigator: Ilaria Micheli

Internal members: Franco Crevatin
External members: Ethnorêma association (Moreno Vergari and Giovanni Dore)

Our team is made up of ethnolinguists and anthropologists, researchers whose first aim is to understand different ethnic and social groups in their different ways of thought and ecological contexts. Ethnolinguists go through problems of identity, cognition and culture using language as a key tool. Any language, in fact, witness of many aspects of the evolution of its speakers and of the contacts and influences they had with / from other people in the past. Anthropologists reach the same objective, studying people’s habits, their ways of doing things, their mechanisms of socialization, the tools they use in everyday life, their beliefs and their values. We are a mixed team because we think that the dialogue between, and the union of, different perspectives are pivotal to enrich and complete a picture of the world which we would like to be as realistic as possible.

Role of the team and its approach.

Given that the University of Trieste represents ATrA’s leading team, its members, Ilaria Micheli and Franco Crevatin, have as a priority the idea to enter the international debate on those issues of language, cognition, culture and identity which are characteristic of unstable, fragile and unpredictable contexts of transition, especially in Africa. We aim to a comparative analysis of all the different case studies conducted by the three units involved in ATrA (i.e. Triest, Turin and Naples).
To get to the point, our team will be involved, sometimes in collaboration with other units, in the fieldwork for five of the 11 case studies proposed in the general project: 1. "Language, culture, identity in the buffer region of the prefecture on Nassian (Côte d'Ivoire)" - Ilaria Micheli; 2. "Linguistic and Cultural Ethnogenesis of the Bawlé of Côte d'Ivoire" - Franco Crevatin; 3. "Construction of the Tira cultural and linguistic identity" - Franco Crevatin; 5. "Language, material culture and self-determination of the Saho of Eritrea and Ethiopia" - Moreno Vergari and Giovanni Dore; 10. "Construction of the linguistic and cultural identity of the Okiek of Kenya" - Ilaria Micheli.
For first hand data collection linguists will follow the guidelines of the German tradition of Wörter und Sachen, focussing mainly on lexical documentation and oral tradition, while anthropologists will use the methodology suggested by the French school of Techno-Cultural anthropology, focussing mainly on material culture and on the documentation of given cycles of activities.

Ilaria Micheli

PhD in African Studies (2005), expert in linguistic anthropology, member of the Department of Juridical Sciences and Languages of the University of Triest. Since 2001 she works on the language and culture of the Kulango (Gur - Niger-Congo) of Côte d'Ivoire. In 2010 she studied the linguistic expressions and cultural representations of mental illness among the Gun (Gbe - Niger-Congo) of Benin and since December 2012 she's been studying the language and Culture of the Okiek (Kalenjin - Nilo-Saharan) of Kenya. Since 2010 sh's also working on problems of language-cognition-identity among the African immigrants in Italy. She has a particular interest in material culture, oral tradition and traditional medicine. She teaches African Languages and Cultures at the University of Venice "Cà Foscari" and African Identities in Transition at the University of Triest.

Contacts

Department of Juridical Sciences and Languages of the University of Trieste, via F. Filzi 14, 34100 Trieste.
Mobile +39 393 9672220
imicheli@units.it*
micheli@unive.it
ilanassian@gmail.com
IlariaMicheli on academia

Franco Crevatin

Full professor of ethnolinguistics, member of the Department of Juridical Sciences and Languages of the University of Triest and Chairman of the MA course in Intercultural Cooperation for Development. Franco Crevatin can be defined an eclectic. His research interests include Romance Philology, Indo-European studies, Slovenian dialectology, Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit, Anthropology and Cognitive linguistics. For what concerns Africa, he has been working for 30 years on the language and culture of the Bawlé (Kwa - Niger Congo) of Côte d’Ivoire, but he also studies Kodofanian languages.

Contacts

Department of Juridical Sciences and Languages of the University of Trieste, via F. Filzi 14, 34100 Trieste.
Tel. +39 040 558 2329
fcrevatin@units.it*
Franco Crevatin - University of Trieste
FrancoCrevatin on academia

External members

Ethnorêma

The Italian non-profit association Ethnorêma works to promote study and research activities in the fields of linguistics, literary enquiry, ethnography, anthropology, history and in all those sectors which have to do, in some ways, with the languages and cultures of the world. Moreno Vergari, linguist, is President of the Executive Board of Ethnorêma Association, Editorial Director of the Ethnorêma journal and since 1994 is working on the documentation and description of the language and culture of the Saho of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Contacts

Ethnorêma Association, Viale Druso 337A39100 Bolzano ITALY/ITALIA
Tel. +39 0471 238025
info@ethnorema.it
www.ethnorema.it
ethnorêma on academia - Moreno Vergari

Giovanni Dore

Giovanni (Gianni) Dore, anthropologist, member of the Scientific Committee and partner of Ethnorêma, is currently associate member of the Department of Asian and North African Studies at the University of Venice "Cà Foscari", where he had been teaching Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and History of Africa since 1993 to 2010. Since 1993 he's been doing anthropological research among the Kunama of the Eritrean lowland and since 2008 he's member of the linguistic and ethnologic Mission among the Saho of Eritrea.

Contacts

Dipartimento di Studi sull'Asia e sull'Africa mediterranea, Palazzo Vendramin dei Carmini, Dorsoduro 3462, 30123 Venezia - Italy.
Tel. +39 040 558 2329
dore@unive.it
maskabara@tiscali.it
Giovanni Dore - University of Venezia

Moreno Vergari

Moreno Vergari, linguist, is President of the Executive Board of Ethnorêma Association, Editorial Director of the Ethnorêma journal and since 1994 is working on the documentation and description of the language and culture of the Saho of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Contacts

Ethnorêma Association, Viale Druso 337A39100 Bolzano ITALY/ITALIA
Tel. +39 0471 238025
info@ethnorema.it
www.ethnorema.it
ethnorêma on academia - Moreno Vergari