SIN,SAINTS, AND SHEEP IN SARDINIA 1

Narratives of Catholicism, gender, and criminality are entangled with social constructions of ‘resistance’ to a new Gennargentu National Park on areas of traditional common lands in central Sardinia, Italy. Embodied identities are strategically implicated in moral discourses of grassroots opposition to a park. The notion of Sardinian resistance as a form of cultural authenticity is rooted in a local sphere of social practices and expectations that are not shared by the wider Italian or European public. Ethnography in the town of Orgosolo demonstrates that a ‘politics of the weak’ can reframe relations of authority in local spheres and work to empower cultural recognition and control over common lands. Transgressive acts of violence, however, highlight embedded tensions, ambiguities, and disruptions in local identity practices. The gendered construction of cultural discourses in Orgosolo points to the paradox of a politics that seeks to affirm the authority of embodied traditions yet actually perpetuates ambivalent stereotypes based on cultural essentialism.