Tuesday, May 19, 20264:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
The Center for European and Russian Studies hosts a quarterly graduate student lecture and mixer. The lecture by Nicco La Mattina (Department of Anthropology) is entitled "Lamentela: A Poetics of Absenscing on Pantelleria, Sicily" and will include a presentation, time for Q&A, culminating in an informal mixer for students of all disciplines with an interest in Europe and/or Russia. This event is cosponsored by the UCLA Department of Anthropology and will be held in Bunche Hall Room 10383 on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 4:00 pm. Register here.
About the Talk
An elderly islander on Pantelleria, a Sicilian island near Tunisia, once complained to me that nowadays everyone complains that nobody can get by, and she wondered “in what sense?” I take up this question by examining how islanders on Pantelleria formulate lamentele (rueful and sometimes indignant complaints) through poetic contrasts between “then” and “now.” Within Italian political, intellectual, and popular discourse about the Italian South (the Meridionalist tradition), southern Italy is characteristically lamentoso (whiny, sorrowful); complaints of this kind are routinely dismissed as backward-looking, nostalgic, or simply part of southern culture. Rather than taking this dismissal as analytic, I examine the poetic upshot of lamentele. By holding then and now apart through its formal grammatical (deictic) structure, the lamentela draws on and actively exercises the ways of paying attention that islanders were socialized into in post-war, rural Pantelleria: what things were noticeable, what mattered, and what is therefore noticeably, relevantly absent now. In this talk I examine two lamentele, one from an ex-socialist and the other from a self-described sympathizer of Mussolini, chosen for their breadth, patent difference, and difficulty. On this basis, I argue that the lamentela is a poetic form in Nancy Munn’s sense of metamemory: not a record of the past but a formal structure through which a socio-biographical way of attending to the world is exercised and communicated.
About the Speaker
I am an anthropologist whose research examines historical documentation and memory in rapidly changing societies, based on ethnographic fieldwork in the central Mediterranean, specifically Sicily, with archival and collaborative work extending into Italy and Libya. I am interested in how the past becomes a practical problem and a resource for people living through major change, from agricultural decline to political upheaval, and in the linguistic practices (acts of complaint, etymological performances, appeals to what should be "common sense") through which people negotiate these transformations. My broader interests include the anthropology of language, nationalism, experiences of loss, and the impact of environmental, infrastructural, and social changes on communities and individual lifespans.