We’re not here to go back to the handcarts,
to the family with all its misery
in one room; we’re here
to continue in our own way
that time in which things were real.1
—Franco Arminio
A couple of days in, I started pondering whether I had made the right choice. A combed town, as I’d say in Italian, this is. Which means: less disheveled than I expected; orderly, and not so very…farmed. I climbed up to the top of the biggest of the bare rocks lining two-thirds of the village, a handful of homes laying at its feet like a resting dragon. I scanned the landscape, eagle-eyed from as far above as my human body would allow. Landscape reading, I’d call it in my head: looking hungrily at the now while searching for yesterday and tomorrow; a seasonal scan, a hunt for signs of how things—human and not—work. I certainly did not come up with this, but the only shoulders I’m standing on today are those of this rock.
Woods. Rolling hills of woods. Piles and piles of wood, cut, big and small, orderly and disorderly, inside houses and outside porches, in the streets and on car trailers, in garages and on sidewalks. Wood everywhere. Okay, a wood economy, it appears. Not much more than beech, oak, and the southernmost hints of silver fir. What on earth did I expect? Did I think I was going to find olive trees 1,000 meters above sea level? I squint and spot a trace of the silvery-green, geometric fashion of olive, down towards the valley. I can see three, four patches max; not more than a couple of hectares in total. Is that it? It’s March. On my Mediterranean shores, further south and further below, broad beans are in full ripening. But here it’s fireplace season, full swing.
During my first weeks, I made it a routine to walk through the town and the close surroundings to keep on reading the landscape, a word where land means land and scape means someone’s shaped it. Every day, a couple more tiny gardens revealed themselves to me, as if I had to gradually earn their trust: snug between walls, hanging on cliffs’ ends, hidden between a house and the bare rock. A few chickens started popping out here and there as I proceeded. I soon realized a rooster’s good morning, when wind allowed, could be picked up from my balcony among the abundant bird song of a clear day. The town started appearing a bit less combed and bit more farmed.
One day, on one of my walks, Rosa, a seventy-year-old woman, appeared carrying a full plastic bag of something she must have acquired from the town center, the direction she came from. She greeted me as I was taking a break in the sun on a bench that I soon discovered was right in front of her house. Rosa stopped to comment on how nice the day was. In our chit-chat, she told me that until some years ago, there were many livestock farms here; most of them have closed, besides a couple that still produce sausages, even some grains, just out of town. As I asked if anybody keeps animals for themselves, she said not really, “but most of us have olive trees and vineyards and vegetable gardens down there in the valley, at 400 or 500 meters. You don’t see them from here; it’s all hidden by the hill.” I must try the eggs from her chickens, she added eagerly.
As our lives become ever more computed, and every bit of both reality and virtuality is pushed into commodification and sold at inflated market prices, some forgotten corners of Europe’s post-industrialscapes keep on eluding statistics. These places escape economic calculations almost to the point of marking a blank spot on the map: entire areas become discursively non-existent. And with them, entire realms of human activity become hidden from sight, as if behind a thickly wooded hill.
Perhaps because of its recent separation from the neighboring region, or its meme-worthy figures when it comes to the stubborn impossibility to grow its economy, rampant depopulation, low tourism, topographic resistance to industrialization, record out-migration, and the stark absence of cities, the most (in)famous trope about the southern Italian region of Molise is that it doesn’t exist. “We only exist when catastrophe hits,” I heard several times in different flavors this spring, following the extreme climatic events that resulted in floods, two meters of snow (in April), a collapsed bridge on a major road, and the awakening of Europe’s biggest landslide. Molise’s supposed non-existence might also be due to the region counting less than 300,000 inhabitants spread over a territory that has been defined as ruralissimo (the Italian superlative for rural) by the historian Gino Massullo, which counts 80 percent of its municipalities as part of what the Italian government defines “aree interne” (inner areas): territories far from basic services, whose most efficient destiny is some form of assisted death.
Molise is not alone. Many European rural areas are the vast sacrifice zones of metropolitan capitalist growth: either molded into agro-industrial monocultures, grazed by flocks of corporate windmills, dammed to drown under the liquid weight of development, or packaged with impeccable shine for the urbanite’s consuming eye—one that meets them only on the weekend, at best. As a last resort, they’re left to their own devices, plummeted into slippery demographic collapse and erased into virtual abandonment. They bear the shame of blushing red in every statistical representation: economic depression, depopulation, unemployment, withdrawal of public services. They are economically invisible and devoid of people: non-existent.
Despite capital’s attempts at absorbing non-existing Western rural places into a thick, planetary urban matrix, they still exist. For economics of absence fail to capture material existence: the wooded hills and olive-dotted fields down in the valley; the rock flowing with source water; the land laboriously decorated with orderly vegetable gardens. Wherever statistics end, there is life. There is sowing, planting, harvesting, watering, cutting, burning, milling, transporting, ploughing, tying, mixing, baking, cooking, raising; there is sharing, helping, gifting, reciprocating.
Historian Fernand Braudel distinguished between “material life,” or the tangible layer of ancestral routines at the root of everything; “economic life,” that higher level requiring constant calculation, trade and markets; and finally, the capitalist mechanism, or “the anti-market,” which encroaches all other forms. But material life remains as “the ground floor (as it were) of history…that lowest stratum of the non-economy, the soil into which capitalism thrusts its roots but which it can never really penetrate.”2 In Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, Braudel charted how this layer of material civilization existed and evolved across four centuries before being seemingly broken up with industrialization: “the repeated movements, the silent and half-forgotten story of men and enduring realities, which were immensely important but made so little noise.”3 This layer of material existing, this kind of life has always made such little noise to the point of staying diligently unnoticed, even as, against all odds, it persists in the crevices of today’s “developed” European economies: invisible places where the anti-market has certainly thrusted its roots, but which it never really penetrated.
Out of sight, out of mind, which in Italian translates as out of heart. Out of heart means also out of our stories, imaginaries, and ideas for the future. “I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. “Isn’t it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? … When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.”4
This is the paradox of our contemporaneity: our lives are dominated (both metaphorically and materially) by abstract constructs that arguably don’t actually exist (growth, money, progress, finance, value), while the most material expressions of existence, the most tangible acts of making and remaking material life, remain unseen, unrecorded, nameless, and at best make a nest in the archives of long-forgotten pasts. Hiding in plain sight, today’s persisting and widespread activities of subsistence and self-provisioning are completely absent not only from statistics and economics, but also from politics, rural development, the repetitive boring discourses on rural revival, and even the narratives of local inhabitants themselves. Subsistence is everywhere but seemingly nowhere to be found.
During ethnographic fieldwork, as the novelty in town, I’m often asked who I am and what I’m doing there. I usually puzzle up something along the lines of “I research self-production, subsistence agriculture, you know, what remains of the peasant economy.” People tend to respond with fascination, surprise, and relative confusion. With a sad, nostalgic tinge, they usually say: “We used to do everything ourselves but we really don’t do anything anymore. You should check out this and that professional farm, they’re the only ones who do anything in the area.” I’ve had this conversation a thousand times, and it is usually followed by some unprompted comments on the latest olive harvest, the potatoes to be planted, the sausages that did not dry well this year, or the Sonchus (sow thistles) to be foraged before the neighbor ploughs.
Inhabiting the realm of common sense, this subsistence economy is so ingrained in daily life as to be fully hidden. It is not an object or abstractable category of thought, only one of material existence. These untold, parallel economies exist silently alongside jobs, salaries, and commutes, but steer clear of market transactions, are based on direct land cultivation, labor exchange, and gifts. The dense networks of human-land and human-human relations they are enmeshed within seem to elude capitalist dynamics, unintentionally but unapologetically, while living right inside of an economy—and an imaginary—for which they do not exist.
One of the few contexts in which non-existence acquires a positive note is that of utopia: a far-away ideal state relegated to unreachable futures, a horizon to walk towards that moves as you approach it, a non-place by definition. Yet inspiration for desirable futures can be found in actual places, in the fruit that you can harvest, in the dinner you’re invited to join. Anthropologist David Graeber interpreted the engaged researcher’s role as one consisting of two moments: “one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in a constant dialogue.”5 He invited us to look at the inspiring ways in which people actually live in the here and now, while envisioning desirable societies starting from those observed, contextual, messy-yet-real modes of making and remaking life. If there is a utopia we’re prompted to walk towards from here, one that has many of the characteristics of what we can call degrowth—low material throughput, social relations of reciprocity, living well with little—it is one that is all but suspended out of place.
These economies of material life that, as ungraspable as utopia, seem to not exist, are all but no-where. They are, instead, remarkably some-where. In places like rural Molise, the utopia of degrowth becomes real. As imperfect, incomplete, damaged, and fragile as it is (as everything in which capitalism thrusts its roots is), it is tangible and material. There’s always something in material life that capitalism can never really penetrate. We can read degrowth, then, not as the non-place of a utopia, but as a topia: an actual place that does not postpone desirable material relations to unreachable futures. A place that is so much to the people that inhabit it that we could talk of topophilia, an expression of place-love that forms the basis of the socioecological attentions that living well demands.6 Perhaps degrowth utopianism can find its highest fulfilment in hypertopianism, or “the most intense sense of being somewhere; in a specific place wherein reality is manifest.”7
If it is true that capitalism has never fully penetrated material life, which oddly but surely persists in places that seem to not exist, then degrowth is not to be found in a non-existing, distant utopia relegated to the future, but in the material, existent topia of a world we can smell and prune and be hosted in. It can be found in the lives and towns and homes of those of us who remember when corn is planted, those who know the sound of geese migrating in early spring nights, those who can tell how wet scotch broom must be to tie the vineyard, those who smell the perfect humidity for the March mushroom to peep out of fir wood litter, or those who make medlar’s liquor, year after year, just to gift it to their neighbor who’s always helped them with wood cutting.
I couldn’t find Rosa at the center of her world the other day. Knowing I was looking for her, she came to visit me, with four eggs from her chickens in a paper box in her hand, “so you can make a cake.” She apologized for not being home when I looked for her: she was getting some “natural fertilizer,” as she called it, for preparing the soil for the soon-to-come tomatoes. “Where did you get it?” “From a place down towards the neighboring town.” “Did you buy it?” “Buy it?! It’s from people we know! There’s this eighty-five-year-old man who has cows and sheep; we went to fill five bags of manure. My husband brought him a bottle of our wine to thank him; he almost didn’t accept it.”
If, in the words of Le Guin again, we are to “speculate safely on an inhabitable future,” the material life of non-existent places reminds us to search for that “sense of where we live, where we are right here right now,” and what can be found within it—in that topian moment suspended between observation and utopianism. Because, maybe, “if we really lived here, now, in this present—we might have some sense of our future as a people,” and learn to live in our own “centers of the world.”8
Franco Arminio is a Southern Italian poet who writes about rural areas and small towns. These verses are from the book Canti della Gratitudine (Bompiani, 2024). Translation from Italian by the essay’s author, emphasis added.
See Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life: 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: BCA, 1983).
Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, xv.
Ursula Le Guin, Voices (London: Orion Children’s Books, 2006), 69.
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 12.
See Ben Garlick and Liesl King’s interpretation of Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home: Ben Garlick and Liesl King, “A Geography Beyond the Anthropocene: Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as Topophilia for Survival,” Cultural Geographies 30, no. 3 (2023): 411–427.
Eliza Nichols and Steffen Silvis, “Robert Brayton Nichols: a Critical Introduction,” in Robert Nichols, Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (Verbivoracious Press, 2017).
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” The Yale Review (Winter 1983), ➝.
