The Italian historical anthropology of the 1970s had experienced a circularity of themes and methods between historians and anthropologists who worked to investigate, in a ground-based research, the historical evolution and transformations of popular culture. In line with the perspectives of British cultural anthropology and with the French "Annales" school which is interested in collective mentalities, that tradition had cultivated cultural history together with political history. Subsequent Italian historiographical directions lose that close link, which was born from a closer comparison of historiography with cultural anthropology, which instead continues outside Italy. The perspective of some more recent research topics that place the morphology of rituals, myths and ethos at the center of attention, in relation to legal knowledge, the economy of professions, religious life, iconography, the culture of revolt and class conflict in the ancient regime, however suggest the recovery of that great legacy, the openness to comparative history and the dialogue between historiography, anthropology and other social sciences for a contextual reading, in the given historical context, of cultural and political behaviors.
