The evaluation of social communication in the town of Orgosolo is implicitly engaged with definitively Sardinian and traditional practices of hospitality. Sensually rooted in meaningful material culture, these practices enwrap participants in a moral world within which positive reciprocity and co-operation can be presumed as normative. Both language and everyday sociality in Orgosolo operate symbolically to transform verbal exchange so that the processes involved in making words fit social consumption largely mimic the rigorous local standards of authenticity applied to baking bread or roasting meat. Townspeople highlight their own regional and national marginality by affirming their ideas of real in contrast to the untrustworthy discourses of bureaucrats and party politicians. By cultivating hospitality as a sphere of political expression, they attempt to subvert cultural constructions of their backwardness and legitimize the authority of their own informal discourses. (Italy, Sardinia, politics of hospitality, authenticity, the senses) ********** Over the course of fieldwork in the town of Orgosolo, in central Sardinia, I often asked people to explain how the political climate had changed over the past twenty or 30 years. The seeming apathy of residents toward la politica appeared to be a recent trend. In postwar rural Sardinia, as in Italy generally during that period, party politics was an important part of social life. One woman described how even through the 1970s, political parties held public demonstrations and assemblies for everything ... you were always hearing an announcement on the loudspeakers or a car going around advertising a meeting one party or another, and if the Christian Democrats had a meeting, the Communist Party had to have one too, they vied with one another to see who had more meetings. At the end of the 1960s, there were vibrant sections of several political parties, and two circles led active lobbies on several issues. Yet two decades later, people in their teens, twenties, and thirties often insisted they knew nothing about politics, that they were uninterested in political parties and did not see any differences between them. Most would talk earnestly and thoughtfully about issues and events, but not about political parties. Few people had party memberships, and many skipped official town assemblies as a general rule, saying that they already knew what would be said and who would speak. Quite apparently the political climate had changed much in the course of one generation. Older people agreed that the role of organized political parties had declined. Many people who had once participated in various political projects spoke nostalgically about the period prior to the 1980s, and no longer thought it was useful to work within the party framework. Some expressed disillusionment with the left-wing activists who got their permanent job posts and ran out of steam lobbying and organizing, Si sono tutti sistemati (they all got settled). An artist, teacher, and former youth activist at Orgosolo suggested that the problem lay not in the degeneration of political organizers, but in the people, who had become more diffident toward the politicians. A former mayor also explained the changing mode of politics in Orgosolo as a decline in popular participation: [T]he indifference [today] towards the problem of employment, or the lack of [political] participation to change our life, waiting others to change it, is something unpleasant. Political life today is less intense than that of yesterday: probably one believes less than before, one has less faith, one is tired of the behavior of the political world or of the government. This phenomenon of political refusal is often attributed to the changing national context within which party politics in Sardinia takes shape. Following World War II and the creation of the Republic of Italy, extensive patronage networks evolved in association with key political parties. …