L’immaginario del Made in Italy. Note per un progetto di ricerca

In recent years, the “Made in Italy” has become a kind of powerful across-the-board brand able to give Italian products a collective “aura” of quality and prestige. The paper does not deal with the issue from the purely “productive” standpoint, as in most recent works, instead, it tries to identify the intangible, “imaginary” aspects. Our definition of imaginary is that of a real power, the capacity to produce and influence the way we feel - our taste and, hence, our consumption choices. The imaginary, therefore, does not identify itself with the "made-in-Italy" but is a "performative" intangible capacity. In order to trace its profile, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities, and in particular linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, is thus required.