Resilience as an ethnographic object in Cinque Terre, Italy: A multisited ethnography in conversation with the environmental humanities

This thesis examines resilience in Cinque Terre: a major Italian tourist attraction comprised of five coastal villages set in a picturesque terraced landscape. The thesis positions resilience as an object of ethnographic inquiry, which allows participants to describe resilience as they understand it. The thesis also sets up a conversation between anthropology and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities to ask fundamental questions about the nature of resilience in a multispecies world. Adopting a multisited approach, the thesis explores three different perspectives on resilience in/of Cinque Terre. Each of these perspectives combines the trajectory of the ethnographer - from tourist to migrant to (semi) insider - with the views of participants in stage of the ethnographic research journey. Along with empirical ethnographic data from humans and nonhumans alike, the thesis draws on literary texts, visual data, historiographies and other tools to show how resilience has been imagined by tourists, how it has been used by migrants who moved to Cinque Terre for love, and how it has been enacted by the region’s famous drystone vineyard terraces and their caretakers.

The resulting insights suggest that resilience does not have to be out of the ordinary, nor does it have to occur only after an extraordinary event. Indeed, this thesis argues that resilience is embedded in the everyday with a substance of its own, entangled yet distinct from any event or process that precedes it. It also reveals that resilience is imagined to be heroic yet other factors more likely have influence than heroism, that it is used to create legitimacy and belonging, and that it is enacted over various temporalities, often with cyclical effects. This thesis is, moreover, an example of the creative capacity of single-authored interdisciplinary work where disciplines and fields are merged to co-create in engaging ways.