Antonio Maria Pusceddu is a researcher (FCT CEEC 2018) at the Centre for Anthropological Research (CRIA), Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. Before moving to Portugal, he worked in Italy and Spain, doing field research in Greece, Albania, Italy and, more recently, Portugal. He has investigated issues of power and social differentiation in a variety of rural and urban contexts, through the lens of borders, labour, ethnicity, crisis, environment and social reproduction. He’s currently developing new research on popular ecologies in southern Europe.

He received a laurea (M.A) in Philosophy from the University of Cagliari, with a dissertation that critically examined the anthropology of Fredrik Barth (Un’approccio generativo allo studio della cultura: L’antropologia di Fredrik Barth, 2004).

In 2010 he obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Siena, defending a thesis on a Greek frontier region (Luoghi al confine: Un’etnografia del Pindo settentrionale).

In 2010 he earned a postdoctoral grant to develop a biannual comparative project on borders, mobilities and religions in the Mediterranean (Mobilità, confini, religioni: Studio comparato di due contesti transnazionali in area Mediterranea – Marocco-Italia/Albania-Grecia). The project was funded by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia and developed at the University of Cagliari (with F. Bachis).

Between 2009 and 2013 he contributed to research on the social memory of deindustrialization in the Sardinian mining regions. Based on this research experience, he started to develop a more focused interest in the history and transformation of southern industrial regions.
 
In 2014 he joined the ERC project Grassroots economics [GRECO]: Meaning, project and practice in the pursuit of livelihood (PI Susana Narotzky) at the University of Barcelona, where he has worked until 2019. He is still part of the Reciprocity Study Group (Grup d’Estudis sobre Reciprocitat – GER), based at the Department of Social Anthropology. Within the framework of the GRECO he carried out extensive fieldwork in Brindisi, an industrial town in southern Italy, where he set out to explore the links between practices of making a living, social reproduction strategies and the moral and conceptual frameworks that underlie the social and material worlds of working people in a crisis-ridden context.

In 2019 he joined the Centre for Anthropological Research (CRIA) in Lisbon, initially as a post-doctoral researcher, until he was granted a CEEC research contract from the Foundation for Science and Technology (2020) to develop the project: Political ecologies of social reproduction: A comparative study of livelihoods, grassroots ecologies and socio-environmental conflicts in Southern Europe. This new research project will integrate ongoing research on resource politics and lithium mining projects in Portugal, started in the framework of the research project Negotiating livelihoods under transformative politics: crisis, policies and practices in Portugal 2010-20 (P.I. Antónia Lima).

Antonio is associate editor of Anuac – Journal of the Italian Society for Cultural Anthropology, and correspondent of Il de Martino: Storie Voci Suoni, journal of the Institute "Ernesto de Martino".

He has been a member of the Code of Conduct Working Group for the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Between 2020 and 2022, he served as member-at-large of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

He's also a member of the CRIA-IUL scientific committee (2021-24).