Alessandro Testa
Alessandro Testa works at the intersection of religious studies, ethnology and the historical and cultural anthropology of Europe, intellectual terrains he has explored extensively through scholarship and teaching.
He is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Prior to this, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna.
Dr. Testa studied history, ethnology, and religious studies at Universities of Florence, Rome, Paris, and Messina; he received his PhD in social anthropology in 2013. Later he obtained academic habilitations for professorship in social anthropology (2017), the history of religions (2022), and European ethnology (2022) - suggesting a commendable resistance to intellectual narrowness.
In the past fifteen years, he has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic research in central Italy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Austria, and Catalonia (Spain). Over this period, he has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a resident visiting scholar in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Iceland, and the U.S.
His main research fields are social and historical anthropology and religious studies, with a focus on the ethnology and cultural history of Europe, ritual studies, comparative religion, and cultural heritage studies. His research interests encompass topics ranging from public rituality to secularisation and re-enchantment, from longue-durée cultural continuities to current social transformations, from popular cultures to vernacular forms of religiosity, from ancient mythologies and paganism to esotericism and new forms of spirituality, from cultural heritage-making to collective memories, identity formation, and nationalism in Europe, and from theories and methods in the social and historical sciences to epistemology. These topics have been approached in a multidisciplinary fashion. He moves with equal ease between theory and fieldwork or archive work, and between global or pan-European comparisons and close regional focus - particularly on Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe.
Alessandro Testa's research outputs to date (2025) include five authored books (which have received two dozen scholarly reviews), six edited volumes, and over ninety peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, and several dozen other pieces of writing (reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.). His works have been published in nine different languages, and his research has also been presented orally in over 250 key-note talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations worldwide. The Max Planck Institute in Halle/Saale, Sorbonne in Paris, Humboldt University in Berlin, Boston University, Harvard University, University of Southern California, and the University of California, Berkeley, are among the institutions where he has been invited and where he has taught.
For years he has been teaching courses in historical anthropology, anthropology of religion, cultural heritage and museums, anthropology of central-eastern Europe, globalisation, social memory, collective identities, theories of magic and the occult, and ethnographic methods. Numerous theses and postdoctoral projects have been supervised by him.
After having successfully completed several individual projects for prestigious national and international research schemes (e.g., Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship and Marie Curie / OPVVV), he was Principal Investigator for the ERC CZ project “ReEnchEu – The Re-Enchantment of Central-Eastern Europe” (2020-2022), for which he led and managed a team of five scholars from four different countries.
He is also a member of the most important national and international scientific societies in his fields (EASR, EASA, SIEF, SISR, SIAC, CASA, CSR, and others) and chairs or sits on several scholarly and editorial boards as well as in a number of doctoral and academic committees throughout Europe.
His long and profound international experience has led him to become a committed polyglot: he can write and speak seven languages and has a good understanding or a passive knowledge of another half a dozen.
In addition to his recognised expertise, his intellectual appetite reaches into philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and biology – though his curiosity extends beyond academia, and, like any well-rounded humanist, he ultimately returns to literature, music, cinema, and the fine arts.
Email: [email protected]
Web-page: https://cuni.academia.edu/AlessandroTesta
He is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Prior to this, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna.
Dr. Testa studied history, ethnology, and religious studies at Universities of Florence, Rome, Paris, and Messina; he received his PhD in social anthropology in 2013. Later he obtained academic habilitations for professorship in social anthropology (2017), the history of religions (2022), and European ethnology (2022) - suggesting a commendable resistance to intellectual narrowness.
In the past fifteen years, he has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic research in central Italy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Austria, and Catalonia (Spain). Over this period, he has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a resident visiting scholar in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Iceland, and the U.S.
His main research fields are social and historical anthropology and religious studies, with a focus on the ethnology and cultural history of Europe, ritual studies, comparative religion, and cultural heritage studies. His research interests encompass topics ranging from public rituality to secularisation and re-enchantment, from longue-durée cultural continuities to current social transformations, from popular cultures to vernacular forms of religiosity, from ancient mythologies and paganism to esotericism and new forms of spirituality, from cultural heritage-making to collective memories, identity formation, and nationalism in Europe, and from theories and methods in the social and historical sciences to epistemology. These topics have been approached in a multidisciplinary fashion. He moves with equal ease between theory and fieldwork or archive work, and between global or pan-European comparisons and close regional focus - particularly on Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe.
Alessandro Testa's research outputs to date (2025) include five authored books (which have received two dozen scholarly reviews), six edited volumes, and over ninety peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, and several dozen other pieces of writing (reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.). His works have been published in nine different languages, and his research has also been presented orally in over 250 key-note talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations worldwide. The Max Planck Institute in Halle/Saale, Sorbonne in Paris, Humboldt University in Berlin, Boston University, Harvard University, University of Southern California, and the University of California, Berkeley, are among the institutions where he has been invited and where he has taught.
For years he has been teaching courses in historical anthropology, anthropology of religion, cultural heritage and museums, anthropology of central-eastern Europe, globalisation, social memory, collective identities, theories of magic and the occult, and ethnographic methods. Numerous theses and postdoctoral projects have been supervised by him.
After having successfully completed several individual projects for prestigious national and international research schemes (e.g., Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship and Marie Curie / OPVVV), he was Principal Investigator for the ERC CZ project “ReEnchEu – The Re-Enchantment of Central-Eastern Europe” (2020-2022), for which he led and managed a team of five scholars from four different countries.
He is also a member of the most important national and international scientific societies in his fields (EASR, EASA, SIEF, SISR, SIAC, CASA, CSR, and others) and chairs or sits on several scholarly and editorial boards as well as in a number of doctoral and academic committees throughout Europe.
His long and profound international experience has led him to become a committed polyglot: he can write and speak seven languages and has a good understanding or a passive knowledge of another half a dozen.
In addition to his recognised expertise, his intellectual appetite reaches into philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and biology – though his curiosity extends beyond academia, and, like any well-rounded humanist, he ultimately returns to literature, music, cinema, and the fine arts.
Email: [email protected]
Web-page: https://cuni.academia.edu/AlessandroTesta
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For many scholars of religion, the conference’s overarching topic “religions and (in)equalities” immediately evokes the idea of hierarchy, first because religious hierarchies – human, spiritual, or divine – are well known in history and anthropology, and second because the very word “hierarchy” is etymologically connected to the sphere of the sacred. And yet inequality and hierarchy are two very different things, although they are obviously semantically and conceptually connected: inequality is assessed quantitatively, whereas hierarchy is inherently qualitative. Indeed, the two ideas might even be considered opposites, for inequality evokes imbalance, whereas hierarchy evokes order.
This panel invites papers to address hierarchy in different religious traditions, theoretical approaches, and geographical and historical contexts, offering a comparative conceptual exploration of it as a key analytical concept in the study of religions, examining its transformations from classical to contemporary thought. The papers will investigate how hierarchy has been conceptualised, exalted, contested, and reconfigured religiously as well as through reflections on religion, sometimes in utterly original and creative ways.
The ideal temporal alpha and omega of the panel have been identified in Plato and Marshall Sahlins. In fact, Plato’s reflection is perhaps the first in history to systematically tackle the (metaphysical) principle of ordered difference (although he did not use the Greek word “hierarchy”), providing an early and influential framework for thinking about hierarchy as a principle linking cosmology, ethics, and political organisation. Similarly, but very recently, after decades of reflection on human societies and cultural orders, Marshall Sahlins came to the conclusion, contrariwise to his disciple David Graeber, that hierarchy (or rather the principle and the mythopoetic imagination thereof) is in human societies inevitable, or rather inescapable.
this intricate blend of traditions, presenting a compelling case for examining the roots of this holiday. Understanding the origins of Christmas customs and their evolution over time can provide a deeper appreciation for the significance of this festive season.
ABSTRACT Von der Kirchenbank ins Yoga-Studio: Der Historiker und Anthropologe
Alessandro Testa erforscht die vielen Gesichter moderner Religiosität.
Wie säkular ist Mittelosteuropa heute tatsächlich? Wo suchen die Menschen
nach Sinn? Einblicke in den Trend zum Glauben nach Maß.
Books by Alessandro Testa
This book analyses these themes from the perspective of social anthropology and European ethnology. The workings and entanglements of cultural heritage, popular beliefs and practices, the invention of new symbols, and ritual forms of collective action are all hereby explored ethnographically and comparatively, while the concepts that we use to define and characterise them are thoroughly rethought and theorised. This book also systematises and reviews the conceptual state of the art of these terms and ideas, which are fundamentally crucial in the understanding of European cultures today. Notions of "rituality," "cultural heritage," and "re-enchantment," for instance, are the object of special scrutiny.
https://cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781531026738/Ritualising-Cultural-Heritage-and-Re-enchanting-Rituals-in-Europe
This book presents a brief but detailed and updated overview of the main problems concerning the religiosity of the Samnites, and particularly of the Samnites " Pentri " , who for centuries, in ancient times, were the fiercest amongst Rome's enemies. In order to do so, several thematic chapters have been developed where the general trends of the cults are introduced. The treatise also focuses on a few exemplary case-studies that contribute in a peculiar way to the understanding of the times, the spaces, the objects and the rites of this Italic civilization. These chapters are devoted to the following themes: • An introduction to the sources, the topics, and the studies of the Samnites' religiosity • The Italic ver sacrum • The funerary practices of the Samnites • The sacred places of the Samnites • The gods of the Samnites • The so-called " Tavola Osca " , a document of extraordinary historical value • The political-religious complex of Pietrabbondante and the supreme divine triad that was worshipped there • The triad from Pietrabbondante and the Indo-European comparative hypothesis A rich bibliography as well as a selection of images of meaningful sites and objects furnishes the text. Although the published works of archeologists, philologists, and epigraphists are considerably more numerous, the forms and the structures of the religious culture of the Samnites have not been to date amongst the most visited subjects by historians and anthropologists of religions in ancient Italy. This is in fact the first book that focuses on these themes from a historical-anthropological perspective exclusively. The treatise is introduced by two prefaces written by two eminent scholars: Dominique Briquel (Sorbonne, Paris) and Gianluca Tagliamonte (University of Salento, Lecce).
Edited volumes by Alessandro Testa
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Catalonia has seen the rise of
nationalist sentiments, moving from a desire for linguistic and cultural recognition to greater fiscal and economic autonomy to outright independence. Grounded in ethnographic research, this edited collection examines the intersections between grassroots culture, local identities, and the politics of catalanisme and independentisme from the end of the Francoist period to the present day. Through studies of various cultural manifestations including festivals, human tower-building, gastronomy, and bull-runs, chapters explore how civil mobilisation, women’s increasing participation in the public sphere, and issues of gentrification and heritagisation have intertwined with identity politics and nationalist trends. An important consideration is how a popular culture centred on sociability responded to the lockdowns and restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. More generally, the book reflects on the politicisation of culture and its role in nation-building, problematising such concepts as ‘inclusion’, integration’,
‘authenticity’, ‘belonging’, and ‘identity’.
ALESSANDRO TESTA is Associate Professor of Social and Historical Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague.
MARIANN VACZI is Assistant Professor of Basque Studies and Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno.
CONTRIBUTORS: Lluís Bellas, Camila del Mármol, Manuel Delgado, Mireia Guil, Venetia Johannes, Sarai Martín López, Romina Martínez Algueró, Dorothy Noyes, Xavier Roigé, Alessandro Testa, Mariann Vaczi.