At the Dawn of the Technological Civilization: The Marchese del Grillo and Cultural Anthropology in the Age of Instagram
by Matteo Corsini
Instagram as the New Ethnographic Field
In classical anthropology, researchers traveled across oceans to study distant tribes — observing rituals, symbols, and systems of kinship.
Today, the anthropologist no longer needs to leave home: it is enough to open Instagram.
The platform has become a true cultural field, where millions of individuals live, interact, and express values, beliefs, and emotions.
It is, to use Clifford Geertz’s words, a “web of meanings” through which humans orient themselves in the world (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973).
Viral videos — like the “Julia Roberts in Rome” clip — or everyday confrontations, such as those with a train conductor or a hotel porter, are not trivial incidents.
They are micro-rituals of our age.
They reveal how individuals react to authority, how they negotiate freedom, and how they construct their public, moral, and aesthetic identity within the networked world.
2. From Tribal Rituals to Digital Feeds
Where once people danced around the fire, today they “post.”
A like has become the new ritual gesture; a comment, the new collective invocation.
Each interaction functions as a small social act defining belonging and status.
Yet the anthropologist of the twenty-first century — whom we might ironically call the Marchese del Grillo 2.0 — observes a disturbing paradox:
in the information society, many remain culturally and civically illiterate.
They fail to grasp the boundaries between public and private authority, between legitimacy and abuse.
This is evident, for example, in the viral “argument with the train conductor,” which exposes a confusion between power and authority, between justice and force.
The train conductor who cannot demand an ID card becomes a symbolic threshold — delicate but crucial — between personal liberty and social control.
It is a frontier that ignorance and apathy risk erasing.
3. The Anthropology of Everyday Conflict
Anthropology does not concern itself only with distant cultures but also with micromoral worlds: the gestures and conflicts of daily life that reveal how a society thinks about itself.
The hotel porter who treats a loading zone as private property — photographing luxury cars for Instagram glory — becomes a symbol of contemporary narcissism.
His behavior is not merely crude; it is the symptom of a deeper mutation.
As Pierre Bourdieu explained, it is the effect of a new habitus shaped by symbolic capital that no longer resides in knowledge or competence, but in visibility (La distinction, 1979).
What matters is not to understand the world, but to display it.
4. From the Marchese del Grillo to the Urban Anthropologist
In Monicelli’s film, Il Marchese del Grillo was the aristocrat who mocked the lower classes from a safe distance, shielded by privilege and wit.
But the modern “Marchese” — the one who documents, provokes, films, and tests social reactions — is his cultural inversion:
a participant observer of the digital world, an urban ethnographer embedded within the crowd.
Like any anthropologist, he immerses himself in the field, recording and provoking reactions.
Each video becomes a small experiment in social psychology — an attempt to reveal how Italians think about justice, decorum, freedom, and authority.
And through those reactions — passionate, hostile, or naïve — emerges a portrait of a society adrift, uncertain of its moral compass.
5. A Devitalized Society
What emerges from this digital ethnography is troubling.
A vast number of users are deprived of civic, legal, and historical literacy, unable to distinguish between what is legitimate and what is abusive, between freedom and license.
Critical thinking has atrophied, replaced by instinctual reflexes — the guttural “throat click” that, as Mark Zuckerberg might wryly say, defines engagement.
We have moved, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote, from a society of producers to a society of consumers, where even dignity becomes a form of currency.
Culture yields to spectacle; reflection to reaction; thought to impulse.
The cafés where Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Nausea and interrogated the meaning of existence are replaced by the neon glitter of Ibiza nightclubs, bottles of champagne held aloft to celebrate — with fireworks — the emptiness of a generation that has mistaken attention for understanding.
6. Education, Symbols, and the Cognitive Drift
Cultural anthropology studies not only what people believe, but how they learn to believe — how meaning is transmitted through practice and example.
Today, education no longer flows primarily through schools or books, but through the feed.
Generations learn from videos, influencers, and the behavioral scripts of digital life.
Where civic education once shaped consciousness, social media now cultivates reaction without reflection.
The result is a new relational illiteracy: the inability to tell freedom from caprice, or difference from threat.
From this arise the familiar outbursts of xenophobia and contempt — against migrants, minorities, or the so-called maranza youth — born of fear, envy, and confusion.
Yet those very “others,” refugees and outsiders, carry within them stories of pain and endurance — narratives of hope that remind us of humanity’s shared search for meaning.
7. Social Media as Cultural Mirror
In this sense, social media has become a cultural seismograph.
Not merely a communication tool, but a stage on which a civilization’s subconscious is projected in real time.
To observe it — as the modern Marchese del Grillo does — is to trace the deep structures of our collective psyche:
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the crisis of authority,
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the erosion of ethical language,
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the transformation of freedom into spectacle.
This work — half provocation, half inquiry — is a form of visual anthropology.
A living documentation of how Italians (and by extension, all hyperconnected societies) negotiate meaning, justice, and identity in the digital age.
8. From Chaos to Reflection
In this new global village, man no longer dances around the fire, but around the cold light of the screen.
And yet, within this digital confusion lies the possibility of awakening:
to film in order to understand, to provoke in order to educate, to observe in order to awaken thought.
The “Marchese del Grillo” who descends daily into the marketplace of social reality is more than a character — he is a metaphor for the anthropologist of the present, using irony and instinct to map the human condition.
Through his lens, and the reactions he elicits, we may still glimpse the hope that humanity — even in the glittering noise of social media — can rediscover its path toward consciousness, culture, justice, and the light of reason.
Selected References
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Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.
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Bourdieu, P. (1979). La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Les Éditions de Minuit.
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Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). La pensée sauvage. Plon.
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Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press.
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Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press.
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Turner, G. (2014). Understanding Celebrity. SAGE Publications.
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Driessens, O. (2013). The Celebritization of Society and Culture. Media, Culture & Society.
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