The challenge of telling “something anthropological” about a social cooperative. An ethnographic study among Sinti collectors of scrap metal

Abstract

The scrap-metal collection carried out by Sinti families in Italy is integrated into local ecological structures and economic circuits and is part of the overall circular economy process. The legal apparatus related to this activity, however, is complex, and to deal with it many scrap metal collectors rely on social cooperatives. Normally, cooperatives offer assistance by trying to address the equity dilemma, but, in some cases, they hybridize their identity with the for-profit identity and seem to depart from the principle of equity by turning into instruments of vulnerability abuse and forced assimilation to the organizational behaviors of central governance. I will try to say something anthropological about the relationship between social cooperatives and Sinti scrap-metal collectors, highlighting the tension between a non-materialist and non-utilitarian conception of the cooperative and a distorted potential realization of it, which, in my ethnographic experience, has revealed an (almost) predatory action and a normative capacity derived from a securitarian and capitalist organization.