Hemp and Industry in Italy: Between Pasts and Present

Abstract

This text proposes a diachronic analysis of the relation between hemp and industry in Italy. It first retraces the history of hemp in modern times. As a strategic fibre for navigation, a material used in various dimensions of rural life, or finer cloth, textile hemp spanned different worlds and maintained a complex relation with industrialisation until the collapse of Italian canapicoltura during the second half of the 20th century. I will then focus on the case study of a contemporary recovery of hemp farming in the Susa Valley (Piedmont). Here, hemp is a material from which actors imagine a bottom-up reconstruction of the local economy, in the aftermath of deindustrialisation and environmentalist criticism of the harmful effects of economic development. The text is based on an analysis of the historical literature of hemp in Italy, and on ethnographic data collected in Piedmont between 2018 and 2019. This variation in scale and temporality of analysis allows me to highlight long-term lines of inquiry into the social life of hemp: the blurred forms of connection between agriculture and industry, the importance of the technological questions and the role of economic pasts.