Manuela Vinai is an anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin (Italy). After graduating in Sociology in 2001, she worked for over fifteen years as an independent social researcher, focusing on social change and territorial transformations in the Biella textile district through the Osservabiella project. Her direct experience of the economic and social consequences of deindustrialization led her to pursue further academic research in anthropology.
She graduated in Ethnology at the University of Nice in 2019 and subsequently began a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Turin, in cotutelle with Aix-Marseille University (France). Her doctoral research adopts an ethnographic approach to investigate the social consequences of deindustrialization in the Biella textile district, with particular attention to intergenerational experiences, labour, and collective memory. Her work analyses how the decline of the textile industry has reshaped everyday life, local identities, and social expectations in a territory historically structured around industrial labour and manufacturing prestige. She is particularly interested in the processes of impoverishment and social resignation that accompanied the crises affecting the district in the last decades, as well as in the memories and narratives through which local communities interpret economic transformation. She also explores the possibility of reading dominant local representations of Biella’s industrial past and decline as a hegemonic “industrial fairy tale.”
Her current research also explores the relationship between anthropology and trade unions. She participates in a working group bringing together Italian anthropologists and CGIL Piemonte trade unionists. This collaboration emerged from the workshop organised during the SIAA conference in Messina (2024).
She also collaborates with Alessandro Ponsi for the INTRA project (Fondazione Einaudi, Torino)
Through the network developed within the Depot project, she is currently working on a possible comparative perspective between her Italian research context and the Chilean case studied by Marcelo Becerra (University of Concepción).
Project statement
What happens to an area when it goes from an unemployment rate of 3% to one of 9% within five years? When the number of workers in a sector that has characterised the local economic structure falls by 2/3 within fifteen years? Although there are statistics on workers’ riots, what we saw happening in the Biella region was a slow slide into a kind of collective depression. The local elites, both entrepreneurial and political, faced the first period of awareness of a non-transitory crisis with the proposal to intensify the processes of excellence in the supply chain. Also clinging to this anchorage to the prestige of the workings was the community’s desire not to give up the wealth it had acquired, now the only element shared by the population, in an area that had already seen a radical weakening in the 1980s and 1990s of the feeling of worker unity and trade union claims.
Under these conditions, the further crises of 2009 and 2013 have affected in the direction of inevitable resignation, in a territory that shows one of the highest old-age index in Italy, the ones to pay the price are the younger generations, accustomed to the scenarios of disused factories and the resentment of parents who have been denied a way of life they had taken for granted. My thesis is an anthropological analysis of this social change in a northern Italian textile district.
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