Sicilianità versus Sicilianismo: Thinking from the South with Sicilian Oliviculturalists

Amanda Hilton

Italian Studies, January 2026

Amanda Hilton

Anthropology Department

Europe

Italian Studies

Amanda Hilton

Abstract

This ethnographic contribution considers Sicilian oliviculturalists’ navigation and implementation of stereotypes about Sicily and Sicilians – specifically, Sicily’s metonymic misrepresentation, vis-à-vis the Southern Question, as the ‘backwards South’.

My interlocutors employed forms of strategic essentialism to put negative stereotypes and their counternarratives to work, narratively and economically. Interlocutors used strategic essentialism to create and claim a place identity, sicilianità, which reflected how they saw and imagined themselves, their livelihoods, and their place.

I argue that in this, they are participants in a long tradition of Southern thought, or thinking from the South, that has the potential to open up horizons for postcolonial futures in Sicily marked by specificity, creativity, and solidarity—interlocutors’ version of Sicilianness or sicilianità—rather than by generalisations, immobility, and backwardness—markers instead of sicilianismo or the ‘myth of Sicily’.