Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy 9781789201987

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Raccomandazione

European Anthropology in Translation Published in Association with the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (AAA) General Editor: Nicolette Makovicky, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies This series introduces English-language versions of significant works on the Anthropology of Europe that were originally published in other languages. These include books produced recently by a new generation of scholars as well as older works that have not previously appeared in English. Volume 7 Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy Dorothy Louise Zinn Volume 6 Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness: An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland Tomasz Rakowski Volume 5 Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal António Medeiros Volume 4 The Colours of Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism Patrícia Ferraz de Matos Volume 3 Developing Skill, Developing Vision: Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps Cristina Grasseni Volume 2 Strangers Either Way: The Lives of Croatian Refugees in Their New Home Jasna Čapo Žmegač Volume 1 Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism Birgit Müller

Raccomandazione Clientelism and Connections in Italy

Dorothy Louise Zinn Translated from the Italian by the author

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition © 2019 Berghahn Books Italian-language edition © 2001 Donzelli Editore Originally published by Donzelli Editore as La raccomandazione. Clientelismo vecchio e nuovo All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any informationw storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Zinn, Dorothy Louise, author. Title: Raccomandazione: Clientelism and Connections in Italy / Dorothy Louise Zinn. Other titles: Raccomandazione. English Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: European Anthropology in Translation; Volume 7 | Translation of: La raccomandazione: clientelismo vecchio e nuovo. Roma: Donzelli, 2001. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059389 (print) | LCCN 2018059946 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201987 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789201970 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Patron and client—Italy, Southern. | Patronage, Political—Italy, Southern. | Italy, Southern—Politics and government. Italy, Southern—Social conditions. Classification: LCC DG442 (ebook) | LCC DG442 .Z5613 2019 (print) | DDC 306.20945/7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059389 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-197-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-198-7 ebook

For Odile and Pauline

Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless, we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream. This is an intelligence which is clearly useless. It is not used to benefit any institution that might to some extent improve the human condition. All the same, it warms and consoles the heart, even if this is an illusory comfort and perhaps a foolish one. —Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues

You can say, “In Italy, you enter knocking with your feet, because your hands are full.” You can sum it all up like this. —Gilda, Bernaldese friend and raccomandazione artist

Contents

Preface to the English Edition Acknowledgments Introduction. The Art of Raccomandazione

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Chapter 1. The Ethnographic Setting

22

Chapter 2. Patronage/Clientelism: Some Theoretical Considerations

40

Chapter 3. Toward a Poetics of Patronage

69

Chapter 4. Raccomandazione, Tangente, and Mafia: An “Amoral” Family of Genres

107

Chapter 5. Raccomandazione, Class Relations, and the Southern Question

130

Chapter 6. Employing the “Little Shove”: Raccomandazione and Work

155

Chapter 7. “We’re Not Uganda, but Almost”: Raccomandazione and Southern Italian Identity

176

Conclusion. Raccomandazione and the Bourgeois-Liberal World Order

196

Epilogue. What Happened When They Read What I Wrote: Mediterranean Clientelism and Corruption Revisited

212

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Contents

Glossary

230

Bibliography

232

Index

247

Preface to the English Edition

As its central theme, this work addresses the phenomenon of using connections to get things done, known in Italy as raccomandazione. To issue this volume in English translation is an operation that requires a rethinking of it in time and in space, and as Goodwin and Duranti have written, “To rethink something means to recontextualize it, to take it out of earlier frames and place it in a new set of relationships and expectations” (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 32). I therefore open this edition with some information and reflections that should be helpful for an English-language reader a good many years after the publication of the Italian original in 2001. The approach I have adopted by common accord with Berghahn Books has been not to overhaul the text, but instead to respect its initial structure and content, in keeping with the spirit of a book series comprising works of European anthropology in translation. Bearing in mind a new, non-Italian audience, I have subjected the manuscript to some light editing as well as the addition of supplementary notes and a glossary. For an author, the choice of remaining faithful to the original in such circumstances means being able to live with certain anachronisms, resisting the temptation to alter them: just to name a minor one, I mention compulsory military service, which used to constitute an arena for using raccomandazioni among young men and which was abolished in 2005. A much more weighty matter, however, is the treatment of the scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published: to incorporate the abundant literature on relevant issues in an organic way within the text would have entailed a substantial rewriting. Given this dilemma and the decision to forego such a radical transformation of the book, it is perfectly legitimate for the reader to wonder what relevance a millennial ethnography of Southern Italian clientelism might have in the contemporary world. To respond to such a query, I seek in this new introduction to reinscribe the book in new relationships and expectations by providing a brief overview of the pertinent transformations that have taken place from the time of fieldwork to today,

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not only in the field setting itself but also in the germane scholarship. The other substantial modification with respect to the original edition is the epilogue I have appended that relates the developments subsequent to the publication of the book, a situation of “what happens when they read what we write” (Brettell 1993). The book drew a surprising amount of attention in the media and in the local community, and I unwittingly became known as a (sometimes recalcitrant) talking head on the subject of raccomandazione. The analysis I provide in the epilogue is not simply a recounting of the events but a reflection that takes seriously the ambivalent, even contradictory character of people’s positions, weaving this back into current thinking about clientelism and corruption.1

Contextualizing Empirical Continuities and Changes On 22 February 2017, Italy celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of Tangentopoli, the juggernaut corruption scandal that led to the fall of the First Republic and overhauled the political scene, paving the way for the ascent of nontraditional parties and forms of antipolitics that have gained large swaths of consensus in present-day Italy. I followed some of the media coverage commemorating that day, where commentators variously called upon by the media reflected on corruption in Italy, then and today. By all accounts, corruption has not gone away, and by many accounts, it has even worsened. In one of the discussions, Antonio Di Pietro, a prosecuting magistrate who was among the most famous protagonists of the Operazione Mani Pulite [Operation Clean Hands] period, stated that what is needed was not only a regime change, but a cultural change. Di Pietro was confirming the need that I had seen, twenty-five years earlier, to place the analysis of corruption in Italy within a much broader cultural context: ways of social being that at that time I identified with the ideology and practice of raccomandazione, a widespread cultural institution in Italy.2 Most anthropological monographs typically see the light of day some years after the fieldwork has been carried out, and this book is no exception. The initial research that provided much of the data took place in 1992–93, the height of Italy’s Tangentopoli scandal, a dating and datum that triggered innumerable insights for me into the relationship between raccomandazione, morality, corruption, and Southern Italian identity. Having settled into the community on a permanent basis through marriage, my ethnographic experience and knowledge of the area subsequently benefitted from a gradual, continuous accretion. Though already somewhat distant from that crucial inaugural moment of research, the first edition of the book wove in some updated depictions and data. The fundamental issues and situations described

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remained the same, but some important transformations were already beginning to be felt at the dawn of the new millennium: the fall of the First Republic ushered in by Tangentopoli coincided with the unfolding of a gradual process of neoliberal restructuring in Italy that has led to a decline in welfare provisions and numerous guarantees and benefits for citizens (Molé 2010; Muehlebach 2012). As I describe in chapter 6, the unemployed youths with whom I had long been working were now the new addressees of discourses of “entrepreneurship” and the objects of a new crafting of “active” subjectivity. They were supposed to forge this subjectivity through attendance of all kinds of newly offered training programs thanks to the generosity of European funds, and a new cottage industry of training companies and European projectification took root in the area. The spoils of political control, epitomized by the Christian Democrat hegemony meeting its demise in 1992, were becoming much more limited than in the past: these resources, especially public jobs and discretionary control of the pension system, were precisely many of the arenas in which connections through raccomandazione described in this book operated. Members of the younger generations were visibly more ambivalent about using raccomandazioni than their parents, having by then absorbed an ethos of meritocracy alongside that of connections. I was already witnessing other changes in everyday life: for instance, the lines at the bank or post office—notorious in the past for Hobbesian scenes of the masses of townsmen elbowing each other out of the way as they jockeyed their way to the counter, but simultaneously also the site of privileged people bearing the queue-jumping raccomandazioni I describe here—began to be regulated with numerical turn-taking systems. And if someone did still attempt to cut in line, now someone else would loudly complain about it. Indeed, one of the changes I began to notice at the turn of the millennium was the fact that people were much more willing and assertive to publically denounce injustices they claimed to have experienced as a result of other people’s clientelistic machinations or bald uses of clout, and in spheres where the stakes were higher than simply waiting in a queue, they would even file formal complaints or denunciations. Dovetailing with this development, the fall of the First Republic regime dragged traditional party politics aground, and it opened the way to various strains of antipolitics that have been received locally, promulgating a conspiracy-theory outlook that sees clientelistic maneuvers lurking around most corners. From today’s vantage nearly a full two decades on, this reconfiguration of Italian society and its effects are even clearer. The agrotown setting of Bernalda in the heart of Southern Italy has definitively set aside its brush with industrialization that was already ending at the be-

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ginning of the research, and which occasioned the deployment of innumerable raccomandazioni for jobs. Agriculture in this “California of Italy” remains important, and it has even seen a degree of revitalization in quality niches and in the promotion of local gastronomic specialties; seaside tourism, too, still engages many townsmen in summer work, despite a significant erosion of the coastline. Bernalda has gained new renown through its most famous descendant, film director Francis Ford Coppola, whose grandfather immigrated to America. After several visits to the town through the years, Coppola purchased and renovated one of the patrician homes on the main street in the early 2000s, converting it into a luxury hotel that opened in 2011. Even more than from Coppola’s efforts alone, however, tourism in Bernalda has expanded through the locals’ perspicacious capacity to capitalize on the rise in popularity of the nearby Apulia region and the provincial capital of Matera, the latter designated a European Capital of Culture 2019. Despite Bernalda’s reputation as an enjoyable place to be, there, as throughout much of the South, the persistent socioeconomic gap with the Center-North of Italy continues to weigh on the population, and the historic “Southern Question” has only been transmuted, never resolved. Levels of unemployment—and youth unemployment in particular—remain among the highest in Europe; the resumption of emigration I began to record in the mid-1990s has over the last decade burgeoned into a hemorrhage on the national level, and this has had particularly devastating effects in the Mezzogiorno (as the South is known). Not long after the book’s publication, the regions of the South reared a collective head in 2003 in a concerted revolt against a decree by the Berlusconi government that would have created a nuclear waste dump very near Bernalda, in the coastal town of Scanzano Jonico.3 As I have observed in my accounts of the revolt (Zinn 2007, 2011, 2017), this was an important signal from the new Italian South, one that disavowed some of the negative stereotypes of the area and inverted many disparaged elements of Southern culture into a matter of pride. But as the Italian saying goes, however, “One swallow does not make a spring,” and despite the glorious and ultimately successful moment of the revolt, Southern Italy has remained in a subaltern condition with respect to Norths of Italy, Europe, and America. As I outline in the book, this perduring subordination has its counterpart in a long history of producing knowledge about Southern Italy that has represented it as an unmodern Other. Within this history, studies of patronage-clientelism in the Mediterranean have played a prominent role (Ben-Yehoyada 2014), and they have facilitated dominant discourses outside of the academy that would attribute the persistence of

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the Southern Question to this purportedly flawed, corrupted modernity rather than to historical and contemporary transnational structural processes impinging here, as in other Souths. To explore the emic concept of raccomandazione as I do here, disembedding it from the processes of orientalism and ethno-orientalism in which it is imbricated, is an undertaking that conveys the analysis in an antihegemonic direction, one that reflects back on what we mean by a Weltanschauung of Euro-American modernity that has at its center concepts like “rationality,” “the meritocratic individual,” and “universalism.” Such an analytical pursuit is what the Comaroffs have cited as the “Verfremdung-effect” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012: 19), or as Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino exhorted in a similar vein decades earlier, a stance of “critical ethnocentrism” (de Martino 1977; Saunders 1994). To emphasize this point, I would now like to connect my treatment of raccomandazione to related forms in other cultural contexts, a task that in the Italian edition was mostly circumscribed to the Mediterranean region, long the epicenter of patronage-clientelism studies. I will then expand my purview to some of the influential developments in the study of clientelism and corruption that are wholly in line with this manner of theorizing “from the South” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).

Raccomandazione in a Cross-Cultural Context In chapter 2, in order to situate my approach, I retrace the tradition of studies on clientelism, primarily within the history of Mediterraneanist anthropology and the anthropology of Latin American peasant societies. Much of the scholarship on clientelism has fallen within single-area studies, and it continues to do so, but the new post-1989 world order has concomitantly seen greater opportunities for a comparative attention to how people have used connections in vastly different settings. The fall of the Berlin Wall not only coincided with the decline of Christian Democrat hegemony in Italy, bastion against what was once the largest Communist party in the West, the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiana), but of course it also ushered in a new era in the former Socialist countries. Phenomena that present affinities to raccomandazione in many such settings include Russian blat, which is among the most prominent in the literature. Among her numerous works on the topic, Alena Ledeneva traces the history of blat to the Soviet era, in a society marked by regime rigidity and a chronic climate of shortage resulting from the centralized, planned economy (Ledeneva 1998, 2009). Within this setting, an informal “economy of favors” flourished as a coping strategy to

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obtain goods and services, to circumvent or even hoodwink the system. As I document here with raccomandazione in postwar Italy, blat, too, has undergone mutations alongside broader socioeconomic and political developments: in Ledeneva’s post-Communist findings, blat remains widespread, but its status in the new market economy has become trivial and banal in some respects, while at the same time it is more deeply entangled in moral ambiguities related to corruption (Ledeneva 2009; Rivkin-Fish 2005). The picture Ledeneva draws reflects some similarities to the evolution of traditional patronage relations in Southern Italy into a banalization or “democratization” of raccomandazione that I discuss in chapter 6 and elsewhere, and people’s subsequent insistence that “what really matters nowadays is the money” —that is, bribery and corruption. Since her early research on blat, Ledeneva has turned her attention to the informal networks and patterns of governance in the upper echelons of Russian society, what people term sistema (Ledeneva 2009), effectively tracing cronyist mechanisms that have remained relatively understudied to date. Another cultural category that has seen extensive study since the early 1990s is Chinese guanxi: much like blat, it is in many respects a cognate of raccomandazione. While China remains officially Communist, amid the economic reforms that have accompanied post-Mao society, the use of connections epitomized in the concept and practice of guanxi has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Yang 1994, Yang 2002, Yan 1996, Smart and Hsu 2007). Indeed, Yang has recently described the proliferation of “guanxi studies” as a veritable “cottage industry in China Studies” (Yang 2018: 75). Guanxi (literally, “relationship” or “connection”) refers to the multistranded bonds created through mutual assistance and gift-giving over time; it characterizes a network of social connections actively cultivated through gift-giving (Yan 1996). Yan finds guanxi to be a Maussian total social phenomenon, present in both ritualized moments and in everyday life, and in this work I similarly evince how raccomandazione also fits such a characterization. Yang (1994) traces the history of guanxi to a combination of Chinese cultural norms regarding reciprocity and gift-giving, together with the needs arising from the Socialist-controlled economy, much as Ledeneva sees for Russia. In her analysis, the skilled use of guanxi also relates to personal attributes of cunning, much in the same way that we find with raccomandazione (chapter 4). Moreover, like blat and raccomandazione, guanxi exists in ambivalent moral evaluations, ambiguously combining rational, instrumental, moral, and affective relations (Yan 1996); where instrumental aspects predominate, people may judge guanxi to be corruption. Like other guanxi scholars, Osburg (2018) has observed that

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in the Chinese business world, guanxi has permitted the rise of many entrepreneurs within the post-Maoist economic framework since the 1990s. Yet in the last few years, he argues, it would appear that its effectiveness has declined in the midst of both anticorruption campaigns and the social reproduction of the new Chinese elite, among whom beijing (close relatives and friends) enjoy implicit benefits of connection, much in the same way as my own interlocutors recognized class privilege as a tacit form of raccomandazione (chapters 5 and 6). What both Osburg and I are indicating is the role of social capital as an underexplored factor. With regard to this point, it is from the related area of corruption studies, which is contiguous and often overlapping with the newer studies of clientelism, that the question of social capital is receiving the most treatment. As Smart (2008) has demonstrated, scholars contrast social capital positively against the negativity of corruption, yet they do not heed the ways in which the two categories overlap. He writes more recently that “networks, trust, obligation and a reliance on informal arrangements are all part of both corruption and social capital” (Smart 2018: S39). Wedel echoes his observation, noting how social capital is often hailed as “the antidote to corruption,” but forms of social capital themselves are ingrained in mechanisms that can feed corruption (Wedel 2012: 471). The dichotomy of “good” social capital and “bad” corruption gets reiterated in much the same way in raccomandazione, where subaltern categories of people disproportionately bear its negative connotations while others benefit from social capital by virtue of their dominant positions (chapters 5 and 7). What Hetherington (2018) states of his field site in Paraguay is true of many other settings—that anticorruption rhetoric reinforces class marginalization by stigmatizing the lower classes: “The practices of the lower- and street-level bureaucrats become labeled as corrupt, whereas those of the professional classes are considered forms of social capital.” Analogously, within a moral economy of “merit” and Weberian rationality, the use of raccomandazione is denigrated precisely by those who have implicit connections: that is, those who are able to convert their economic capital into social capital and vice versa (Smart 2008). As I emphasize in this book, categories like cronyism that make extensive use of social capital but manage to fly under the radar must become objects of explicit attention. The mechanism of creating status distinctions in this manner, however, does not only take place on the level of the discrete local society. What I have attempted to do in this book is to shed light on how a parallel othering occurs on a global scale, where Southern Italy and other Souths are pilloried for the cultural recognition they give to such phenomena. The issue of recognition is crucial, because the Northern European and

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North American societies constantly invoked by the townsmen in my study have been all but immune to raccomandazione-type ways of going about things, even if it has not been adequately recognized within those societies or in the scholarship. This point certainly merits being teased out to a greater extent than I did in the original Italian edition of this book. The French have their piston; the United States and United Kingdom have “string pulling,” “back scratching,” and “clout”; the Germans have their Vitamin B (B as in Beziehungen, or “relationships”; see Kubbe 2018). As a valuable resource for documentation on related phenomena and further cross-cultural comparison, the reader may want to consult the monumental Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, edited by blat scholar Alena Ledeneva (2018), which assembles together many such concepts and practices under the rubric of “informal practices.” This compendium is by no means simply a curiosity cabinet of phenomena, many of which are similar to raccomandazione, but it instead expands the investigation of informality in a number of directions. It embodies not only an intensive comparative spirit but also the ambitious quest to define some overarching patterns. It is in returning to post-Socialist contexts, however, that we find situations that lay bare the fault lines of the “West and the rest” distinction, in many ways complementing the path that I have forged in my analysis of raccomandazione.

The New Clientelism Studies: Dislodging North Atlantic Ethnocentrism Like the Southern Italy examined here, Eastern European societies have been peripheral to the Northwest European and American hegemony, often viewed in a stigmatizing and orientalist light.4 Within such views, corruption and clientelism are widespread, and they are somehow a result of imperfect and incomplete transitions to market, capitalist societies. The remedy proposed, consequently, would be even greater restructuring along the lines of neoliberal prescriptions. What the research in the new clientelism studies has revealed, on the contrary, is that precisely the uncertainties, ambiguities, and gray areas induced by the collapse of socialism have in fact created unprecedented terrain for a reinterpretation and reapplication of previously existing raccomandazione-type phenomena, in some cases offering them a more fertile humus in which to operate. Wedel’s (1998) research in Poland has, for example, demonstrated how a form of “dirty togetherness” of informal groups that was prevalent under the Communist regime were given a new lease on life in the post-Socialist era, when these groups slid strategically into gray areas

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created by new interstices of a privatizing economy. Similarly, Čarna Brković, who analyzes raccomandazione-like veze and štele relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates how, far from being a residual form of “transitional” states, clientelism and flexible neoliberal forms of government are mutually constitutive (Brković 2017). The scholarship by Wedel and Brković eloquently dispels ethnocentric blame-the-victim notions that essentialize corruption in these societies even as they underplay or ignore the subtle ways in which the Euro-American countries themselves feature cronyism, corruption, and other less-than-pristine means of getting things done. Moreover, such ethnocentric conceptions gloss over how global capitalism and transnational neoliberal processes may actually contribute to this state of affairs (Schneider and Schneider 2004; Shore 2016, 2018). Indeed, it was not only in the ex-Socialist countries that rampant, unregulated privatization created favorable conditions for corruption to flourish (Wedel 2012: 465). Wedel’s earlier work on Poland generated insights that subsequently permitted her to problematize the transparency and democratic accountability of neocon actors and shadow lobbyists in the U.S. context (Wedel 2009, 2011). Her concepts of “flexians” and “flex nets” are particularly apt as descriptors for the actors in this panorama, people and groups capable of marshaling ambiguity to serve their own interests while simultaneously dissembling their actions by donning various hats: even as they occupy official roles, they are acting as pundits, members of think tanks, consultants to private companies. Alongside analyses such as Wedel’s, a vast literature in anthropology has developed over the critical analysis of the anticorruption industry and its selective finger-wagging (Muir and Gupta 2018). I deal with some of these issues in the epilogue to the book, which relates the field of corruption/anticorruption to my work on raccomandazione. The reprisal of clientelism research is not only coming from Eastern Europe, however. Tina Hilgers’s work in Mexico (Hilgers 2008) is an example of research in Latin America. Although she uses ethnographic research methods, her epistemological framework, however, still insists on the etic dimension. In her theoretical treatments of the subject, Hilgers (2011, 2012) clearly espouses a position that favors a strong etic definition of clientelism, recapitulating many of the traits in the classic definitions of clientelism from the 1970s that I treat in chapter 2: “In addition to being an exchange in which individuals maximize their interests, clientlism involves longevity, diffuseness, face-to-face contact and inequality. That is, a lasting personal relationship between individuals of unequal sociopolitical status” (Hilgers 2011: 568). I suggest that the emic perspective emphasized in my study of raccomandazione, as

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well as in the newer anthropological studies of clientelism I cite here, has moved beyond such an approach, due to a number of reasons that I will elaborate on in this volume. In this preface, I limit myself to citing the risks of repeating the sort of North Atlantic ethnocentrism we have seen in the literature, as when Hilgers cites the work of Sandbrook (1985) on personalism in Africa: Sandbrook describes personal rule as turning on a strongman (usually the president) who is the center of the state’s political life, surrounds himself with loyal followers who may be hired and fired at will, forces respect of his persona and image, and creates a system of administrative and economic corruption that can only result in economic decline. (Hilgers 2011: 582)

One scarcely needs prodding to apply Sandbrook’s description to the contemporary United States and thereby reconsider the actual degree of difference among nations. The newer anthropological literature instead moves deeply into an emic perspective, often featuring fine-grained ethnographic documentation and analysis. This has led to a substantial reevaluation of forms of “sociality with a purpose” (Brković 2017) in numerous contexts, a rethinking that, like my own work here on raccomandazione, explores their interconnections with what we have traditionally termed in an etic fashion “clientelism” and “corruption.” This body of work also delves more profoundly into questions of personhood in the societies studied, leading to important findings regarding how affectivity is intertwined in relationships that might seem primarily instrumental, confounding the boundaries that etic definitions would place on the categories. Such elements of affect suffuse not only the relations between actors but also those of citizens and their state. In their introduction to a recent Current Anthropology supplement on corruption, Muir and Gupta (2018) highlight affect among the key domains within the anthropological study of corruption, and their remarks wholly apply to clientelism as well. They write, Affect plays a central role in statecraft, especially in producing practical commitments to state sovereignty and an experiential sense of conviviality among state subjects. [. . .] In negotiating the issue of corruption in both practical and evaluative terms, people cultivate affectively laden relations to one another and to the state, producing along the way new modes of citizenship and national belonging and new horizons for collective action.

Indeed, the new clientelism studies also prod us to place the results in relation to more fundamental questions of citizenship, democracy, and

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people’s relationship to the state. What emerges are views that are counterintuitive within the dominant paradigm condemning clientelism and corruption on the basis of taken-for-granted liberal presupposition of democracy and the nature of citizenship. Tidey (2018), for example, emphasizes the importance of a morality of political care among people in the Indonesian province she studied, even as this may be appear perilously close to corruption. She writes that poor urban voters “view political progress in relational terms as a form of care, founded in politicians’ recognition of them as political subjects. To them, corruption signals a transgression of political care, stemming from an unwillingness to see the ‘small people’” (Tidey 2018). In Bosnia-Herzogovina, Vetters has documented the coexistence of clientelistic and civic relational modes that provide alternative means for citizens to be “seen by the state” (Vetters 2017). Here and in other recent studies, clientelism is not only a matter of instrumental gain but also of inclusion in a wider political community (ibid: 29). Ansell (2015) traces how progressive activists’ critique of clientelism in Brazil’s Piauí state, launched from within a liberal paradigm, stigmatizes the rural underclass associated with it. At the same time, the abandonment of the use of clientelist electoral propaganda photo-stickers among cultivators sheds light on their “alternative democratic imagination,” as Ansell puts it, with respect to the liberal-progressive one offered by the leftist activists. Through a dense linguistic analysis, he proposes that cultivators’ heteroglossic practices revolving around the question of clientelism reveal a different sort of agency from that imagined by autonomy that is a premise of liberal political thought. Ansell has followed up this work in an article on voting that problematizes a liberal critique of clientelism that takes as its basis the atomistic conception of personhood as a “free-moving particle” (Ansell 2018). The emic definition of “corruption,” in this case, refers to a vote “that carries little obligation to affirm the voter’s personhood” (ibid.: S135), and his analysis opens a way to alternative critiques of clientelism. In the Bolivian context, Shakow (2011) suggests that, through the hybrid forms it assumes, clientelism can actually offer a language for radical democracy. Anticlientelist calls for “purity” do not attend to the hybrid ways in which Bolivia’s Sacobans “blended ideals and practices of clientelist reciprocity established by the Bolivian state in the 1950s with ideals of liberalism and left-leaning indigenism” (ibid.: 316). Finally, like these recent works on clientelism, Anjaria’s study of “ordinary corruption” between Indian hawkers and the police (Anjaria 2011) offers an ethnographically informed view that questions the assumption of corruption’s antidemocratic quality. Anjaria examines how hawkers manage to impose their claims to urban space, as articulated

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through small-scale corruption engaging the state in informal practices. The performance of such practices, he asserts, has led to an extralegal recognition of the hawkers, opening thinking of the state to different conceptions of citizenship and democratic participation. In their overview of contemporary literature on corruption, Muir and Gupta (2018) have highlighted three axes of inequality that deserve analytic attention: class/socioeconomic inequality; inequalities tied to race, ethnicity, and nationality; and gender. Looking at raccomandazione in the chapters that follow, I have wrought an analysis that moves along all three of these axes. On the local level, raccomandazione plays a role in social hierarchies and hegemonic class relations, helping to reproduce forms of social stratification. It continues to mark inequalities on wider levels, from the imbalances marking North/South relations in Italy to those of the international arena. Very much in line with the current research, I problematize the acritical assumption of the hegemonic “Northern” perspective as a vantage from which to judge Others, not to mention the recognition that Northern practices themselves are not exempt from such evaluations. The question of gender is not solely a matter of who participates in patronage or corrupt practices, as Muir and Gupta note, but it requires us to attend to how these genres of practice fit into gendered cultural schema. This is exactly the view I present in the concluding chapter of this book, where I recuperate the category of gender in clientelism, and in subsequent publications I have further elaborated this gendered dimension (Zinn 2003, 2005). Although local people often align raccomandazione categories as masculine that are coded as such, a dominant, extralocal gendered distinction denigrates clientelism and corruption as “feminine” for its pollution of the public/private distinction and for the intrusion of feminine affect in rational settings. The line of continuity between my study of raccomandazione and the more recent scholarship on clientelism and corruption is that they are all part and parcel of an innovative anthropology of the state that has developed since the early 1990s, since my own work was influenced by Herzfeld’s landmark study of bureaucracy (Herzfeld 1992).5 Overall, the state is itself no longer reified and assumed to be an abstract, impersonal machinery, nor is it held to be lying on one side of a limpid state/civil society boundary. Whether or not it is explicitly framed as such, much of the current work on clientelism, including my own, moves precisely in this direction. Notwithstanding the affinities with this body of literature, however, my aim to have a fresh look at Italian clientelism does not limit the inquiry here to the sphere of the state: it is a thorough examination of a diffuse cultural ideology and practice from the emic perspective.6 That

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is, alongside my own etic categories and views as an outside observer, in attempting to enter the emic conception and practice of raccomandazione, I am able to situate it in its holistic context. I evince what endures in it and what undergoes variation along with changing sociohistorical conditions, as well as the moral ambiguities and vagaries surrounding it. The emic approach lends itself to discovering the multifarious ways in which raccomandazione figures into how people make sense of their place in the social world, starting from the most intimate circles of family and friends and moving outward to ever-widening spheres, without losing sight of the relations of power in which these relations are embedded.

Notes 1. Without concern for hard-and-fast definitions, I deal with clientelism and corruption here as related, overlapping categories. Chapter 2 outlines the important definitional debates in the earlier clientelism studies; the discussion in Torsello and Venard (2015) with regard to corruption explains the hesitation of contemporary anthropologists to invest too greatly in definitions, and their reasoning applies suitably to clientelism as well. Chapter 4 specifically explores the relationship between raccomandazione and corruption, including ambiguities that are linked to social positionalities in revealing ways. 2. Due to the problem of glossing the word in English (dealt with in chapter 2), I have chosen to maintain the Italian term raccomandazione throughout the text. The plural form is raccomandazioni. 3. Scanzano itself was the site of Maria Minicuci’s detailed long-term ethnography of political developments since the Agrarian Reform of the 1950s (Minicuci 2012). Minicuci effectively grounds the complex conditions lying behind a surface that might appear to reflect Edward Banfield’s notion of “amoral familism” (Banfield 1958), and she traces the shift in contemporary politics in Scanzano from an earlier form of clientelism to a detachment of the political class from the population. Within this gap, personalized, neopatrimonial modes of governing allow cronyist mechanisms to prevail. 4. Yang makes a similar point regarding Western views of guanxi and Chinese awareness of this as a form of cultural intimacy (2002: 462). See also Sharma (2018) for the Indian context and Tidey (2018) on Indonesia. 5. I will not review or detail here the most important contributions to these developments, but the reader may refer to the recent summary provided by Thelen, Vetters, and von Benda-Beckmann (2017) in the introduction to their edited volume. Building on the insights of the new anthropology of the state, the editors offer their own concept of “relational states.” With this notion, they attempt to grasp the state in a nonreductive manner, using ethnographic research to tease out the complexities of state images and practices. They and their authors situate the state as a relational setting that shapes the practices of both state actors and their interlocutors. 6. The edited volume by Henig and Makovicky (2016) on the post-Socialist context forwards a similar project of exploring vernacular conceptions that have important implications for patronage studies.

Acknowledgments

I have a debt of gratitude to the numerous persons who allowed me to bring this project to fruition, both in its original form and in this English edition. Among those who offered crucial assistance and encouragement early on, I would like to thank James Brow, Katie Stewart, and Maria Minicuci; I am also grateful to Renate Siebert for the interest she demonstrated in my work. Valeria Siniscalchi very generously made efforts to help me locate some excellent archival resources. Giuseppe Mininni, Dino Palumbo, and Rosa Parisi all offered precious suggestions for revising the Italian version. Both Gaetano Fierro and the late Filippo Zollino help me to take the work out of a strictly academic sphere. My writer friends Elisabeth Jennings, Nuccia Nicoletti, and Rossana Tinelli have always been close to me with practical advice and precious moral support. The members of my family all patiently dealt with the research and writing process, including moments of writer’s angst, and they coped with the fallout when the book entered into public debate. Of course, writing the text is only one part of the picture, and the rest is the support that comes from the publishing industry itself. I cannot thank Donzelli Editore enough, especially Carmine Donzelli and Bianca Lazzaro, for making the original Italian edition happen and for bemusedly following the book’s vicissitudes with me through the years. It was also through Donzelli’s agreement with Berghahn that the English edition has been made possible. At Berghahn Books, several people have been instrumental in the publishing process: the project started with the editor of the European Anthropology in Translation series, Sharon Roseman, who first learned of the book from editorial board member Jaro Stacul. Sharon enthusiastically and steadfastly saw the publication through until the late stages, when Nicolette Makovicky took over the position, and I thank both of them. I would also like to acknowledge Marion Berghahn and Harry Eagles for all of their concrete efforts in the process, and well as the generous and helpful critiques provided through peer review. Lizzie Martinez efficiently oversaw the production process

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at Berghahn, and the text has greatly benefitted from Ryan Masteller’s meticulous copyediting. For the epilogue, the Mediterranean Institute at the University of Malta has kindly granted permission to use an article I published in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(2). At the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, the outstanding library greatly facilitated my work, and kindly Francesca Gaja was instrumental in providing practical assistance with handling part of the typing and bibliography. It goes without saying that this work would not have been able to see the light of day without the participation of the Bernaldese, who so generously shared part of their experiences and their comments; a theme like raccomandazione touches several crucial aspects of their lives. I also thank the city administration of Bernalda, Angelo Tataranno, Don Mariano Cruciano, and the late Don Mimì d’Elia for their invaluable assistance. I must emphasize that the spirit of this work is not one of labeling Bernalda as “the town of raccomandazione,” also because the Bernaldese know very well that “things are the same world over” (tutto il mondo è paese), and this cultural institution extends well beyond their local context. Instead, with the hospitality, the availability, and the patience for which they are well known in the region, the Bernaldese helped me to grasp the raccomandazione in all of its complexity, in positive and negative, and I am deeply indebted to them. Finally, I would like to send a word of thanks to Santa Maria Raccomandata (Giardini Naxos, Sicily), patron saint of scholars of patronage, and the Madonna of Fatima: this publication was indeed a grazia ricevuta.

Introduction The Art of Raccomandazione

Like the skill of a driver in the streets of Rome or Naples, there is a skill that has its connoisseurs, and its esthetics exercised in any labyrinth of powers, a skill ceaselessly recreating opacities and ambiguities—spaces of darkness and trickery—in the universe of technocratic transparency, a skill that disappears into them and reappears again, taking no responsibility for the administration of a totality. Even the field of misfortune is refashioned by this combination of manipulation and enjoyment. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Long before I actually went to Southern Italy to conduct anthropological fieldwork, I had had some brushes with raccomandazione, even if I did not recognize it as such. During an extended stay in Rome in 1986– 87, my acquaintances would occasionally offer to “talk to a friend” to help resolve some problem or other I was experiencing. I would politely decline, obtuse in my Anglo-Saxon faith in meritocracy and in following procedures to reach a goal, and all told, I really did not see the usefulness of all of this cumbersome mediation. A few years later, I undertook a study of chronic youth unemployment in Bernalda, a small town in the deep South of Italy, in the province of Matera. At this point, the topic of raccomandazione cropped up with great insistence in interviews and conversations with unemployed youths and their families. I noticed, though, that this raccomandazione went beyond the sphere of employment; in fact, the further the study progressed, the more it appeared to be a “total social fact,” to use Marcel Mauss’s famous expression. I designed the research project on raccomandazione more than six months before the beginning of the ground-shaking events of Tangentopoli in February 1992, and by the time I reached the field that May, “raccomandazione” and “tangente” [bribe, kickback] formed a pair on everyone’s lips. As I developed the analysis, I became even more firmly

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Raccomandazione

convinced of the merit of an anthropological study of raccomandazione, because it enabled me to pose the research problem in terms of the people’s emic perspective (or as they put it, “mentality”) and cultural behavior, and to conceive the issue of clientelism more broadly than it had been previously. From the beginning of fieldwork to the publication of this volume, the overarching issue of corruption surrounding the cultural category of raccomandazione has acquired new urgency, even as the memory of Mani Pulite began to fade about the edges. And not only in Italy: it has been apparent how crony capitalism led to a financial crisis in Asia starting in 1997 and to the emergence of oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia. Geographically closer to Italy, the European Commission has been rocked by various corruption scandals, even the hitherto unimpeachable Germany, landing a heavy blow to ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party, the CDU. Bribes and kickbacks [tangenti] are still alive and well in Italy. Considering the political climate in Italy at the time of the initial fieldwork and the optimism over the nascent “Second Republic” in the immediate wake of Tangentopoli, I thought that an anthropologically informed perspective on the issue could be useful by formulating different sorts of questions: for example, how do people elaborate the distinction between corruption and correct behavior? It is essential to avoid devoting our attention exclusively to the tangente, striking though it is; rather, we need to ask what connection bribes and kickbacks have to other practices and ideologies in the culture, if our daily microbehaviors and our common sense about “the way things are” actually offer a valid support for constructing something new and, ideally, noncorrupt. But we should also question ourselves with regard to the nature of the “new” we are seeking: is it to be simply a mirror image of the “old” or, instead, a new synthesis that retains some of the valid elements of the past? An anthropological view can help shed light on the sedimentation of tradition and ideology that make up cultural categories like raccomandazione and the various forms it assumes, like the tangente. With this volume, then, I hope to offer some new observations in this regard. The ethnographic approach is based on long-term qualitative research in a small Southern Italian town, and I have sought to use the community setting as a springboard for considerations that go well beyond the local level. Some very fundamental aspects of an investigation of raccomandazione might initially seem obvious or taken for granted by the average Italian or to Italianist scholars. For such readers, I therefore beg their indulgence in allowing me the opportunity to present such elements,

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which, aside from being considered from a new vantage, are a necessary point of departure for a more penetrating analysis. In the case of this study, by going into and within the very commonplaces and pat expressions that make up so much of local “common sense,” what seemed at first glance to be obvious and shared by all the members of the community instead turns out to be the site of a variety of positions, of numerous points of contention and ambivalence. And if raccomandazione can be deemed an “art,” as I suggest, we must reflect upon what makes some people more talented artists than others. Additionally, I would like to justify the accent I place on the South. Undoubtedly, there is a widespread perception among the general Italian public that there is “more” raccomandazione in the South than in the Northern and Central areas of Italy. One would be hard-pressed to come up with quantitative data to check the validity of this idea, but more than its actual veracity as a reflection of empirical reality, what is really interesting is the ideology that lies behind this perception: that is, the various reasons that it appears natural to us that there might indeed be more raccomandazione in the South. In the Northern context, the word “raccomandazione” might conjure up the well-known revelations of Tangentopoli, but beyond this there are surely other examples of it (as many emigrant participants noted in my study). I have not conducted research on raccomandazione in the North, and therefore I cannot be sure that the raccomandazione existing there is identical to the phenomenon as it is manifested in the Meridione, as the South is also known. Nonetheless, as I observe in this study, while raccomandazione is part of a certain conception of Southern identity, at the same time it also clearly features some elements that are linked to a wider sense of “Italianness.” Ideally, some colleague could carry out a similar investigation in the North in order to have a better basis for comparison. But even without considering the Center-North per se, in the discourse on raccomandazione the Southern Question and the problem of power relations between North and South loom large on the horizon, and the present work considers the role of raccomandazione precisely in this perspective. From Lombrosian anthropology—with its measuring of Southern noses and crania—to Banfield’s “amoral familism,” Southern Italy has often been presented in the social sciences as synonymous with deviance and backwardness.1 Paradoxical as it may seem, this treatise on raccomandazione is in part an attempt to go beyond some of the negative, stigmatizing depictions of the South. In a certain way, then, it proposes a different sort of meridionalismo, scholarship on the South for a land that has adopted me.

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Raccomandazione

Introductory Comments on Raccomandazione Whenever I happen to speak about this study with friends, family, and colleagues in the United States, I usually encounter significant difficulty in my attempt to explain its central object—the ideology of raccomandazione. It is not an easy task to translate, even with several English words, the vast terrain neatly summed up in Italian as “raccomandazione,” but that does not mean that examples of it are unknown or lacking in my native country. In the area of Southern Italy where I live and work, people refer to raccomandazione as a fundamental, deeply rooted element of their society. Sometimes they call it a spinta [push] or a spintarella [little push], a chiave [“the right key to reach a big door,” as one person explained], or even a calcio nel sedere [a kick in the rear end to propel you forward]; the current, more official euphemism is segnalazione [signaling]. Raccomandazione is invoked with reference to agganci [contacts, lit. hooks], conoscenze [acquaintances], amici [friends] and amici di amici [friends of friends]. In its most reductive sense, the concept describes a process of gaining influence or clout through intermediaries in order to achieve a goal. While there are indeed resemblances between “raccomandazione” and its English cognate “recommend” in some of the latter’s significations, raccomandazione also encompasses meanings that have become archaic in present-day American English. The obsolete form “recommend” has completely dropped from the English language, and several senses of “recommend” that relate to the Italian usage are rare, if not awkward, in our contemporary, everyday language (vide the Oxford English Dictionary). We find, for example with reference to Christianity, individuals who “recommend” themselves to the Lord or to another person’s care for protection. The most common current uses of “recommendation” are the following: a recommendation as informed advice or counsel, and a recommendation as a letter of reference that makes up part of an application, especially for a job or entrance into a university. Many Italians with whom I have spoken marveled over the fact that an American job or university application would actually request that the applicant submit a certain number of such recommendation letters, generally from a past employer or instructor who is supposed to praise the candidate’s work and character. Thus, in the United States, the recommendation process is institutionalized in this letter-writing practice, and unlike the Italian raccomandazione, there is little secretiveness to it, though at times there is a modicum of embarrassment surrounding it. Yet what we Americans call a recommendation recognizes only a small part of what the Italian cognate denotes: it does not refer to the “dealing” or clout

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maneuvering that actually does take place among people of influence in the United States (and practically everywhere else in the world). The fact that the active American English vocabulary has collapsed much of the earlier richness of the term “recommendation”—a richness preserved to a great extent in modern Italian—has perhaps led us Americans to believe that such human and divine assistance has little to do with the way in which we conduct our lives; the American concept of personhood, in fact, is quite atomistic, realized in the ideal of the “selfmade man.” For this reason, the question often posed to me by interlocutors left me groping for a satisfactorily intelligible answer: “Don’t you have raccomandazione in America?” Quite aside from the institution of the letter of recommendation, some of what we do have in the United States in terms of raccomandazione remains unmarked, lying hidden in the shadows of our “technocratic transparency,” falling through the cracks of a rational-universal order or veiled beneath the purdah of meritocracy. In the Southern Italian community I studied, on the contrary, interpersonal connectedness is openly acknowledged and ideologically marked, among other things, by the attention given to raccomandazione. The presence or absence of a cultural marking on our constructions of reality draws our attention to the heuristic value of ideological analysis. Phenomena that may appear quite different on one level of (positivistic) analysis—organized crime, old and new forms of clientelism, l’arte dell’arrangiarsi [the art of making do], and even some forms of religious devotion—assume a new hue in an ideological analysis, one that helps us to see some interconnections we may not have noticed before. By the same token, what appears to be the same, even at the level of one word, becomes as dispersed as light through a prism. We are not looking merely at a set of cultural codes that govern thought and behavior; rather, we are interested in the cultural media through which different subject positionalities both connect and clash. The raccomandazione, where it has received attention in the social science literature on Southern Italy, has usually been subsumed under the categories of patron-client relations or clientelism, and in any case within the “political” aspect of social and cultural life. The work I present here, however, attempts to go beyond the bounds of some of the reified descriptions of clientelism in the literature: patronage as a form of mediation between the local community and the “outside world,” as the “patron-client dyad,” or as a relationship based on the more or less compelled dependence of the weaker partner, the so-called “client.” From an ethnographic perspective, the raccomandazione is not merely a utilitarian practice, though some of its subgenres like the tangente approach the purer utilitarian end of the continuum; on the whole, the raccomanda-

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zione is inserted within a wider web of affective relations. Throughout this volume, I argue that raccomandazione is both an ideology and an ideological phenomenon, one that informs the stylistics of many genres of social relations in Southern Italy. For this reason, the condemnation of raccomandazione made by many Bernaldese cannot simply be countered by faithfully enacting its presumed opposite: that is, “following the rules.” To remove oneself from raccomandazione as a modality of social being implies modifying subjectivity itself; it amounts to wanting to declare oneself an “individual” in its most exquisitely post-Enlightenment, rationalist sense—what Bakhtin has called a “monological” or “finalized” consciousness (Bakhtin 1984). While so much good descriptive work has been done on phenomena of political patronage, I aim to complement that literature by analyzing how raccomandazione gets played out in the minutiae of everyday life. Where others have analyzed the local exercise of power, I focus here on raccomandazione as a site of contrasting ideological accents related to class positionality, as well as its role in the consolidation of a certain hegemony. Another, equally important aspect of the study is its treatment of emic evaluations of raccomandazione as a fundamental element of Southern Italian life and its role in Southerners’ sense of identity. That is, in addition to the actual manifestations of raccomandazione phenomena, I am interested in the rich local discourses that weave them into a construction of what it means to be Southern. Finally, I consider raccomandazione as an interface of “democratic” ideologies with class hierarchy and also some of its implications for relations of power both within Italy and without. Much of the literature on patronage has carefully outlined the exercise and management of power in patronage systems, and thus also the construction of hegemony in that context. Early anthropological studies of patronage had the flaw of remaining too confined to the level of the village or small community without considering encompassing and interconnected fields, but this fault was rectified to some extent in later work that made reference to connections between local and extralocal spheres. Here, I will instead shift the analysis from a somewhat mechanical view of the management of power through patronage to one in which power is seen as operating on a discursive level. Thus we cannot look at patronage in isolation from the wider discursive systems that differentiate themselves from it—that is, those perspectives that purport to be “normal” (in linguistic terms, the “unmarked case”), the rational-universal paradigm from which raccomandazione is observed and judged as “deviant.” As such, this study attempts to examine not only the locallevel hegemony of raccomandazione but also the hegemonic struggle be-

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tween raccomandazione and rational-universalism, a struggle that gets mapped onto Italy’s national and international relations, especially with Northern Europe and the United States. Metaphors of gender become one medium through which the struggle takes place: raccomandazione is metaphorically associated with “feminine” irrationality, personal connectedness, and the private sphere. Even if patronage is rooted in patri-, as in patrimonialism and patriarchy, it has been one-upped by a masculinist discourse of formal rationality that positions it as feminine and therefore inferior. If rational-universalism seems to be the perfect antidote to a town, nation, or world pervaded with raccomandazione, then it behooves us to consider it more carefully. On the ground level where ethnography dwells, we see the discourses and daily-life tactics that inhabit these spaces.

A Life Cycle of Raccomandazione The discourse on raccomandazione became most noticeable when I began researching the problem of youth unemployment in Bernalda: so many young people and their parents insisted that they could not successfully obtain work without a raccomandazione. This form of raccomandazione is surely the most “classic” one, the one that most readily comes to mind when the subject is raised. Even so, as I spent more and more time in the community, I learned that the same approach to doing things was present in virtually every sphere of daily life, even if it didn’t always get specifically identified as “raccomandazione.” To give the reader a sense of the pervasiveness of raccomandazione in town life, we may use a lifecycle framework to offer, in a concise manner, numerous examples of its various manifestations, examples that emerged from interview material and participant observation. Let us begin with the birth of a child, our exemplary protagonist in a life cycle of raccomandazione. Many Bernaldese women give birth at the nearby village hospital of Tinchi, which may employ friends or family, and in any case they will find fellow townsmen [compaesani] with whom to socialize during their stay. However, many also choose to give birth in other public hospitals in the province (Policoro or Matera) or in private clinics in nearby Apulia (especially in Bari and Taranto). A pregnant woman about to deliver often obtains a raccomandazione for a bed in a particular hospital, or perhaps to have a private or semiprivate room—that is, alone or with just two beds, rather than six). One woman related her experience of giving birth in a private clinic in Bari: the first two days she was in the convenzionato ward, meaning that it was

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paid through the public healthcare service, and her husband and mother “recommended” her to the nurses by leaving them small sums of money at every change of shift.2 “And then I moved to a private room—it was a completely different thing! Pleasant nurses, cleanliness, the doctor who passed every four hours.” Other interlocutors reported giving “gifts” of £300,000–£500,000 to the nurse obstetricians who assisted their family member in her delivery, and this was in public facilities. As the child grows, parents begin to get information on the available preschool classes. Many townsmen reported that a raccomandazione is helpful to get a child into the class of a teacher who has a particularly good reputation. Similarly, from elementary school on through the entire school career, parents jockey their raccomandazioni to get their children into “better” sections. A raccomandazione might also be employed for special programs offered by the school. People told me that mothers would get themselves recommended with the principal for English and French instruction, the research taking place in a period before these subjects were even part of the elementary school curriculum. Throughout the school years, Bernaldese parents commonly intervene with teachers to have their child pass a class or receive a higher grade, perhaps giving the instructor a gift at Christmas. A student who is the child of a local notable, such as the mayor or a professional, has a certain “autoraccomandazione,” as one man put it, that renders such parental intervention superfluous, while children of other teachers tend to be given special consideration.3 One teacher told me how it once happened that, out of one hundred students preparing to take state school exams, five were without raccomandazioni; given the situation, the school principal declared that she herself would personally recommend the five. Raccomandazioni are commonly used to gain entrance to schools with limited enrollment. For example, a piano teacher observed that a child who studies piano would obtain raccomandazioni in order to be admitted to the music conservatory in Matera. Miraculously, she said, one of her students was admitted the previous year without a raccomandazione, upon which her husband commented, “Yes, but you did put in a word for her. That’s a form of raccomandazione.” The raccomandazione is so commonplace in this setting that it forms an interpretive frame for virtually any situation. A local priest, an active leader in the Association of Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts [Associazione Guide e Scout Cattolici Italiani] complained that the limited number of openings for Scout membership gave rise to the impression among some parents that a raccomandazione was necessary to enter the group. One unfortunate boy had been on the waiting list for three years. Finally, his exasperated father said to the priest, “Ah, I understand . . .

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9

you need a raccomandazione even here!” Shortly thereafter, the priest received a telephone call from another priest in Matera asking him to accept the boy into the Scout group. At age eighteen, young men who face their period of compulsory military service might get raccomandazioni for a desk job, for a transfer closer to home, or even to get out of the service altogether, though the latter rarely occurs. One young man who had recently completed his service related the following: When they take you and you go, they tell you that things function differently there, not in the usual Italian way [non nel solito modo all’italiana]—but it’s all bullshit. If you want to do twelve months sitting pretty [at a desk], maybe you can do it if you know this guy or that. But if you don’t know anyone, they treat you like shit.

The majority of Bernaldese youths who proceed to the university level end up studying in nearby Bari, though a substantial number attend the regional university, with branches in Potenza and Matera, or else migrate to the universities of the Center-North. Students face a highly discretionary environment in which one comprehensive oral examination almost always determines the grade for a subject. As with the primary and secondary schools, university students often seek a raccomandazione with the professor to obtain a higher grade. Again, the autoraccomandazione plays a substantial role. One young man explained as follows: In the classic exam situation, if the professor is pissed off, if he woke up on the wrong side of bed, he treats you badly and flunks you. This sort of treatment doesn’t happen with the son of another professor, so he gets ahead.

Carmelina,4 a law student, told me how her brother asked her if she wanted to get recommended for an exam, since he had a contact [un aggancio]. “I told him, ‘Look. If I wanted to get a raccomandazione, it would only to be treated normally, to receive fair treatment.’” As an occasional member of exam commissions, I myself have been approached by persons who have asked for an occhio di riguardo [favorable attention] for a friend or relative, but on the whole I think my superficially rigid Anglo-Saxon demeanor tends to discourage such solicitations. Overall, however, the students from Bernalda who go on to university are relatively few. Most young people do not continue their education past the compulsory school age of fourteen or after obtaining a high school diploma, and, together with those who leave school before earning a middle school degree, they enter the job market earlier

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than university students. The use of raccomandazioni to obtain a job is undoubtedly one of the most notorious manifestations of the phenomenon. With astronomically high rates of unemployment, and in particular youth unemployment, job selections are extremely tight: the number of applicants always far exceeds the number of positions available. As there is a cultural premium on public sector jobs, a political raccomandazione is commonly sought, since it is presumed to be the most effective. Entering the job market later, university graduates often face similar pressures and cultivate their raccomandazioni as well. There is also a widespread notion that job competitions are rigged in favor of certain recommended people, that the results are already known in advance. In my investigation of chronic youth unemployment in Bernalda (Zinn 1998), the raccomandazione was an ever-present topic. Chapter 6 will present some of my findings in dealing with the role of raccomandazione in the search for work. While raccomandazione in the arena of employment is highly striking, the ideology of raccomandazione also conditions many spheres of daily life in Bernalda. In dealing with what is perceived by citizens to be a slow and labyrinthine bureaucracy at all levels, a raccomandazione may be necessary to get things handled [per sbrigare le cose].5 An example of this application of raccomandazione was offered by a friend who described how he got his passport: Silvio: When I wanted my passport, I didn’t go to the Police Headquarters in Matera. No! [Another friend interrupts:] Because you have to wait too long. Silvio: Because there is clientelism [clientelismo], if a file arrives [recommended], it moves all of the others to the back. So I go to my friend [an officer], and I say, “Ué [an informal, dialect-inflected greeting] X., I need my passport.” And he gets me the papers.

Notice that the presence of other recommended parties is cited as part of the rationale for the inefficiency of the system and for the use of further raccomandazioni. The public healthcare system is apparently subject to the same sort of bureaucratic delays. In this field, a raccomandazione can speed up an appointment with a doctor or for diagnostic work, or it can help one gain entry into a particular medical facility—in many instances, a hospital or clinic of renown. A town priest commented, There are situations in which it’s necessary to intervene, situations of injustice. It gives you a measure of Italy the fact that you need a rac-

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comandazione even for a hospital stay. Especially for a hospital like the Gemelli in Rome, or Fatebenfratelli [two prominent Catholic hospitals]. Sometimes I don’t even know who to turn to for a raccomandazione. In the case of a hospital, I call a priest I know who knows someone in Rome.

A married couple living in Milan, the husband having emigrated from Bernalda, made this observation: Domenico: With healthcare, if I need some testing, I have to wait six months for the test. If I know someone who is on the inside, I get it in the space of ten days. Roberta: Or if you pay, you get it the next day.

Payments of varying degrees of illegality are a key part of the overall discourse on raccomandazione, and they will figure into the discussion of tangenti below and in chapter 4. But returning to our general discussion of raccomandazione, in its broadest sense, we see how it touches yet other spheres of daily life: the deployment of raccomandazioni can also move up a person’s number on the rank list for public housing; a raccomandazione might move things along for obtaining a permit to build where one cannot do so legally, as often is the case in historic centers. Even the legal system is far from untouched by raccomandazioni that might influence a judge. A retired lawyer told me of one such case, which was actually rather amusing and perhaps for this reason less disturbing than some other raccomandazione stories. As one might expect to see occasionally in a small town, both parties in a lawsuit had the exact same name. One side managed to get a raccomandazione with the presiding judge, but it backfired, because the judge was confused by the names and inadvertently ruled in favor of the adversarial party.6 In spiritual matters, Bernaldese often recommend themselves to the Madonna or the saints for grazie [instances of divine grace, even miracles]. The raccomandazione may be punctuated with a vow [voto], a promise to the saint that usually takes the form of a sacrifice. The saint is held to be an intercessor with the Lord for obtaining the grazia requested by the devotee. Officially, the Catholic Church does not advocate some aspects of this relation to the saints, and it seems to be becoming a bit less common as the Church encourages a different relationship with the saints and as contemporary life is increasingly secularized. Nonetheless, raccomandazioni with the saints are still very present in the area and maintain a dynamic capacity despite secularism, as demonstrated by the popularity of the relatively recent cult of Padre Pio. Chapter 3 explores the connection between earthly and divine patronage as two forms of raccomandazione.

12

Raccomandazione

There is another level of raccomandazione that some (but not all) Bernaldese will explicitly label as raccomandazione, which refers to petty manifestations. Just as Bernaldese complain about needing raccomandazioni to obtain what is due by right in bureaucracy or with the public health service, the same might be true in the case of consumers’ rights. In one instance, a young woman couldn’t leave the house and asked a friend to exchange a birthday gift her daughter had received the day before, purchased in a shop in Matera. The shop owner made a fuss about exchanging the gift, until the friend mentioned that it was for her friend “Maria,” who had a personal relationship with the owner. “Oh, why didn’t you tell me before that it was for Maria?” the owner said, changing her tone. “I didn’t know that you needed a raccomandazione even for exchanging an item,” huffed the friend. Probably more often than obtaining one’s due, however, the petty raccomandazione simply offers a means of bettering one’s quality of life in some small fashion. For example, instead of waiting in the usual, interminable bank lines to carry out a transaction, you might cut to the head of the line if you are friends with the bank teller, as Gilda relates: Gilda: I go to the bank every day. I know the cashier, the director. If I go to the bank and there’s a line, since my friend is behind the counter, instead of waiting in line like the other people, I say, “Hey, X., I’m leaving this with you. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” This is a form of clientelism. Of course, it’s a risk for me, because if he wanted to, I could give him this envelope with two million [lire] and he could say, “What? You never gave me anything.” DLZ: So there has to be trust? Gilda: Yes, friendship.

Or, as one shop owner told me, a person identifies himself as so-andso’s relative or friend in order to get special treatment or a discount. In his study of Pantelleria, Galt (1974) cites informants who state that a raccomandazione is necessary even to change a large denomination bill: You know it isn’t very easy to find someone who will change ten thousand lire without recommendations. If you have a friend, he’ll say that he’ll change it for you, but if he isn’t a friend, even if he has the money in his pocket, he won’t change it (Galt 1974: 200).

During my period of fieldwork, I once visited with an American friend who was working nearby on the archaeological excavations in Metaponto. Although she had been to Italy a few times previously and

Introduction

13

spoke a good bit of Italian, I was having some difficulty explaining my research project to her, in particular clarifying the concept of raccomandazione. About a week later I saw her over coffee, and she told me excitedly that she had received her first raccomandazione a few days before. She entered Nuccia’s coffee shop to buy some croissants, and Nuccia gestured to her to come forward ahead of a long line of people waiting. My friend, who is very polite and unassuming even by American standards, hesitated to cut in line, but then she was given to understand that she was being recommended. “It’s a good thing you had just explained raccomandazione to me,” she said. “Now I get it.” She was thrilled, and buoyed by this positive experience, she subsequently attempted to test out her fledgling ability in trying to locate a good pizzeria in Matera, with mixed results.7 The small advantages to be accrued in daily life also regard leisure time, as I learned from a group of young people at a private beach in Metaponto, as I recorded in my fieldnotes: When the subject of raccomandazione arose, everyone emitted a knowing “hmmmmm.” One of the women burst out, “Right now, we’re all raccomandati.” “Why is that?” I asked. “We’ve all taken these spots [on the beach] because we know these people [the owners]. If someone else came here, eh, they’d throw him OUT [gestures with a kicking motion, adding in dialect for added effect:] with kicks in the ASS! [Everyone laughs heartily] And on this little level—imagine the bigger things.” “So this is a form of raccomandazione for you?” I probed. “Yes,” she replied, “In this moment, we are on a private beach.”

The life cycle of raccomandazione does not necessarily wind down with age. With the astronomically high level of unemployment in the area, many Bernaldese approaching retirement are still preoccupied with seeing their grown children squared away [sistemati]. To obtain one’s retirement pension with less delay, the bureaucratic raccomandazione is often of great assistance. One elderly woman who had immigrated to Germany for work told of her difficulty in this regard: I had the Italian pension, they took it away. To get an Italian pension you need a raccomandazione. [. . .] For pensions, you need a raccomandazione, or you wait years. While in Germany, they send you the form. You don’t even have to apply for it.

Finally, upon the death of our exemplary raccomandato, a bureaucratic raccomandazione may also be helpful for settling the inheritance.

14

Raccomandazione

The reader has perhaps noticed the use of conditional forms in the picture drawn here. Indeed, raccomandazione is by no means mandatory in the absolute sense, and many people either refuse outright to seek raccomandazioni on principle or else feel that they do not need an explicit one. With this life-cycle frame, I do not mean to imply that every aspect of a person’s life in Bernalda is perforce touched by raccomandazione; rather, I am attempting to indicate the vastness of the spheres in which it potentially (and very often) takes place. As one person put it, “With the raccomandazione, if you don’t do it, nothing [bad] happens. But it’s effective to do it.” By using the frame of the life cycle, I have presented a view of raccomandazione that has stressed the position of the raccomandato trying to achieve some aim. However, it is important to note that it is not always the case that he initiates the process by looking for someone to recommend him, a raccomandante. Sometimes, the latter offers his help to someone he knows to be in a possible situation of need. Depending on their relationship, this knowledge may be used for instrumental gain. For example, my friend Cristina had been looking for a job for quite some time. During the last election period, a politician up for election came by her parents’ shop and said, “Hey, Cristina still hasn’t found a job? Tell your daughter to present herself in Matera on [day x] . . .” Cristina went on the appointed day and was hired for ten days in the pre-election period, and her whole family voted for the man who helped her obtain the job. Immediately after the elections, she was let go. In such a case, the raccomandante may not be sincere in his or her offer to help. Not all instances of volunteered raccomandazioni are so bleak, however. I have heard of some situations in which teachers on their own initiative offered students raccomandazioni for their exams, as there was a certain kinship or family friendship between them. Carmelina offers such an example: In the fifth year of high school, while I was preparing for my [graduation] exam, I received a proposal for a raccomandazione. A friend of my mother’s. She said, “If you want a raccomandazione, even to get a higher grade . . .” She knew one of the teachers on the commission. I refused: I want to be capable of making it on my own.

In yet another situation, a young woman who had just taken the bar exam to practice law told me how a family friend on the commission was almost offended that she had not sought a raccomandazione from him. The various manifestations of raccomandazione that I have outlined are attributed to diverse, yet related, ideological justifications by members

Introduction

15

of the community. The prevalent raccomandazione used in job-seeking is motivated by the claim that there is “no work” in the South. Despite government-backed discourses in recent years aimed at dismantling the predominant aspiration of young people to get permanent public jobs, the perception of the lack of employment is still intimately bound up in the ideal of a steady job, preferably as an office employee in the public sector, and hence a political raccomandazione is among the most highly prized. What I group broadly under the heading of “bureaucratic raccomandazioni” is justified by the perceived inefficiency and slowness of the bureaucratic apparatus, which, as we have seen, may be attributed to the presence of other raccomandazioni. Other raccomandazioni dealing with public institutions may be used to obtain what one is not due, strictly speaking, for example passing a child who has not studied or awarding a construction permit when it should not be given. The general heading of “petty raccomandazioni” that I described, such as in shopping or banking, permit the raccomandato small privileges that enhance his quality of life. These various justifications for using raccomandazioni are closely related to perceptions of the state and to the cultural code of furbizia [cunning, slyness].8 First of all, many Bernaldese complain that “the system forces them” to seek raccomandazioni to obtain what they should have “by right,” and thus raccomandazione is depicted as a survival mechanism. Second, some interlocutors suggested that raccomandazioni introduce an element of flexibility into an excessively rigid system, a point developed in the work of other scholars (for example, Campbell 1964; Galt 1974). Above and beyond this, though, there is a use of raccomandazione to enhance one’s image, as when one asserts and makes visible a privileged position, even in as banal a situation as that of waiting in line in a bank. In some cases, more than enhancing one’s image, it may be a matter of face-saving: since people claim that “everyone is recommended,” this in itself becomes a compelling motive for action according to furbizia. Corrado, the wealthy member of an old family of landowners, made the following observation: If nine out of ten are furbi [wise guys], the one [who isn’t] maybe appears to be an idiot. So even he gets caught up in the desire to behave this way. If you don’t adapt yourself, you get left behind as the last idiot.

Whether or not one succeeds in achieving a given goal through the use of raccomandazioni, there is at least the benefit of positioning oneself in the camp of the furbi and not that of the fessi [fools].9 However, the evaluation of raccomandazione as advantageous or harmful to one’s

16

Raccomandazione

image is not as straightforward as it might initially seem: as will become apparent in this work, raccomandazione is a double-edged tool for carving public images.

Subgenres of Raccomandazione The preceding discussion drew several examples of raccomandazione in sundry spheres of life, according to the social space in which they take place, but the distinction between various subgenres of raccomandazione also has analytical importance, for these subgenres have divergent moral evaluations in the community. The classification of the subgenres takes shape, basically, according to the modality of mediation employed, for mediation is central to all forms of raccomandazione: one turns to another person for intervention with other parties. The following categories are etic, externally imposed groupings to the extent that not all members of the society would formally or explicitly classify some of the phenomena as raccomandazione. Nonetheless, despite the etic perspective, the analysis has drawn upon a number of indigenous concepts and terminology to delineate what appear to be stylistic affinities. One of the subgenres would seem to be an exception to the central fact of mediation in raccomandazione: the autoraccomandazione, in which the raccomandazione is itself implicit by virtue of the person’s social position. For a youth, the autoraccomandazione might derive from his parents’ role in the community if they are prestigious figures like the mayor, a doctor, or a university professor (the latter having far greater social prestige in this setting than generally held in the United States). The autoraccomandazione would seem to lack the quality of mediation, but in terms of the “poetics of voice” it features, as I describe in chapter 3, it actually functions in the same way as the other raccomandazione genres do. The next subgenre of raccomandazione to consider is the raccomandazione di simpatia [fondness, liking], in which no material exchange such as a gift or payment takes place between the parties. The raccomandazione di simpatia may come from a friend, a relative, or even a fellow townsman when the two parties are in a foreign setting, and it can range from favoritism without a concrete raccomandazione to outright nepotism. A teacher on good terms with a student might offer this sort of raccomandazione by raising a grade. In one case described, a woman wanted to see a “big shot” medical doctor [un professorone]. First she saw his associate, a less important doctor, who told her it would take several months to get an appointment with the “bigger” one, until he learned where the woman was from and noted that he had relatives in the same town. By

Introduction

17

virtue of this simpatia, tenuous as it was, she was then able to see the big doctor after a much briefer wait than she would have otherwise. The subgenre of raccomandazione that undoubtedly draws the most attention is that which entails some form of exchange: as many interlocutors stressed, “You can’t get anything for nothing.” The item of exchange offered by the raccomandato might be one of any number of things: a vote, a favor, a gift of food, sexual favors, or money, just to name some examples. There is a strong moral emphasis on reciprocity in this setting, and as the distance in relation between the two parties increases and a simple raccomandazione di simpatia becomes less probable, a “gift” is commonly used to create an obligation for action—that is, the execution of the raccomandazione on behalf of the gift-giver. The “purchased” raccomandazione [la raccomandazione comprata], particularly when money is given, straddles the boundary between the raccomandazione of exchange and the genre of tangente, the latter including payoffs, kickbacks, bribes, and extortion. Here the lines of distinction become rather fuzzy, but on the whole we may recognize that the purchased raccomandazione is subject to greater legal and moral sanction than what might be considered gift-giving.10 The introduction of money into the transaction is not the decisive factor for this classification, though many purchased raccomandazioni do take place through monetary payments. Instead, one of the key distinguishing elements in the purchased raccomandazione is that it is the raccomandante who stipulates a price instead of receiving a spontaneously offered gift. In Bernalda, for example, I heard numerous stories of people willing to help someone get a job (particularly in the civil service) for a payment of several million lire. In one episode told to me, a woman who obtained a job as a nurse through a raccomandazione was obliged to purchase a car for her raccomandante. In some cases, the recommended person agrees to forfeit his salary to the raccomandante for a period after being hired. As public jobs offer great security and benefits, many people view such a sacrifice as worthwhile. During the fieldwork, I encountered a great deal of commentary to the effect that a “mere” raccomandazione, especially one based on friendship, is no longer enough and that a raccomandazione purchased with money provides surer and/or quicker results. Some interlocutors speculated that buying a raccomandazione entails the risk that one is hired, only to be let go shortly thereafter and thus swindled out of the money. In practice, however, I never heard of an actual instance of this occurring when money was involved, whereas there were cases of this happening when a vote or sexual favors were used for the exchange. While the purchased raccomandazione might promise surer results, it did not create or

18

Raccomandazione

contribute to an enduring bond between the parties in the way that the raccomandazione di simpatia or some of the other raccomandazioni with exchanges do. In the context of discussing raccomandazione, the topic of tangenti emerged quite consistently. Undoubtedly this was partly an artifact of the Mani Pulite investigation, which had erupted only a few months before beginning fieldwork in the town, and which subsequently extended from Milan to other areas of Italy throughout the research period. When the Tangentopoli scandal broke, shocking many Northern Italians, the reaction of many Bernaldese was, “So, they’ve found out the obvious [hanno scoperto acqua calda]. What else is new?” People explained to me that a tangente was often paid in order to move things through the bureaucracy, to receive a license or obtain a public works contract, and even for things to which one is entitled as a right, such as specially earmarked funds from the government. While both raccomandazione and tangente were discussed in the same breath, no clear-cut, absolute distinction between the two emerged from the fieldwork data. On the contrary, there were conflicting views as to their boundary or equivalence, and precisely the fault lines for disagreement on this issue offered me rich insight. Generally, though, people do perceive the phenomena as related, though tangente consistently has a more negative moral evaluation than raccomandazione. Another meaning of tangente that is notorious in the South, and which has arrived fairly recently in Bernalda and the surrounding towns, is that of extortion: a shopkeeper is threatened with violence (often a bombing) if he does not pay the pizzo [payoff money]. This brings us to the last category to include in this overview of raccomandazione subgenres, that of mafia. As with the tangente, people often spontaneously introduced the concept of mafia into conversations about raccomandazione. Here, we are not dealing with a reference to mafia as an entity, a bounded, secretive organization, but rather as a form of behavior with highly negative moral evaluations. When they allude to the “mafia” of some public institution, for example, people do not mean a literal crime syndicate, but a style of behavior that, in this analysis, bears an important relationship to raccomandazione. In chapter 4, I consider the interconnections of raccomandazione, mafia, and tangente in greater detail.

Polyvocality of the Term “Raccomandazione” While the concept of raccomandazione is ubiquitous throughout Italy, its actual definition is in point of fact quite ambiguous. But from the

Introduction

19

perspective of this anthropological analysis, precisely these variations in its definition, with all of their nuances, are of great interest: they make up what we may term the polyvocalic qualities of the word, rendering it a rich mine for ethnographic prospecting. Moreover, as some thinkers from literary theory and the philosophy of language note, a word is an ideological sign, and its polyvocality reveals traces in which ideological struggle takes place. The different interpretations of raccomandazione are therefore not casual linguistic subtleties: the various inflections of the word must be correlated to the social and ideological positions of the speakers who experience raccomandazione as a reality. I conclude this general introduction to raccomandazione by outlining three important aspects that emerged from the analysis. The first aspect has to do with the denotative qualities of the word raccomandazione. If the term raccommandazione arises spontaneously in a local conversation, the listener usually tends to assume that it refers to a raccomandazione for a job, this being one of its most common uses. Yet as we saw above, the term has a much wider denotative resonance beyond the concept of the raccomandazione for employment, and on the broadest level of denotation it can mean advice or counsel (as in English) or a recommendation with divine agents, especially the saints. While I devote some consideration to these denotations, the main focus of this study is those forms treated above as stylistic subgenres: the raccomandazione di simpatia, the raccomandazione di scambio, the raccomandazione pagata, tangente, and mafia. Taken together, these subgenres form an ideological complex, an overall paradigm of raccomandazione that may be contrasted with rational-universalism. A second aspect of the word “raccomandazione” lies in its connotative qualities. Again and again, I would casually mention to someone that I was doing research on raccomandazione, upon which they would present me with a decisive nod and a meaningful syllable: “Eh!” For these people, raccomandazione conjures up an entire vision of “the way things are” and “the way people are” in Southern Italy, sometimes even Italy as a whole. Here, raccomandazione does not merely refer to the act of recommending per se, but it also connotes certain qualities that members of the community see as, in part, defining their identity. As such, chapter 7 deals with the role of raccomandazione in conceptualizing Southern Italian identity. The polyvocality of the lexeme raccomandazione is also manifested in what we may call the diverse, intersecting evaluative accents it bears. Following Volosinov (1973), these accents linguistically embed evaluative orientations in an utterance and affect its meaning. With respect to raccomandazione, the evaluative orientations may be positive, neutral,

20

Raccomandazione

or hostile; it often happens that people adopt more than one of these orientations simultaneously. For example, the raccomandazione may be reviled as a violation of “democracy,” “meritocracy,” and “rights,” or else it can be appreciated as an instrument for protecting the weak. It might even be regarded with a certain indifference, as many Bernaldese suggested that today the raccomandazione “no longer has value.” Yet a close analytical attention to such different orientations reveals that they tend to be associated with specific class positionalities. Basically, members of the subaltern classes give much greater weight to the raccomandazione in assessing their life chances than do members of the dominant classes. As I will argue in chapters 5 and 6, this class-based difference is partly an artifact of the dominant classes’ capacity to manipulate cultural capital, gathering implicit or invisible raccomandazioni while at the same time possessing the authorized forms that enable their success to appear “meritocratic.” Finally, in addition to such class considerations, the contrast in the evaluative accents of raccomandazione also has consequences in terms of political discourse. Some Bernaldese expressed a blanket rejection of raccomandazione in favor of what they termed “order” or “normalcy.” The last portion of this book offers a critical examination of the dichotomy between the paradigms of raccomandazione and rational-universalism, where formal rationalism has become a modern fetish that aspires to curb the feminine “disorder” of raccomandazione. The opposition gets played out against the background of relations of dominance between North and South, both within Italy and without. This study, therefore, is meant to be a scientific inquiry into the raccomandazione, one that attempts to go beyond facile moralistic assessments and instead takes its object as a starting point for identifying some of the threads of meaning, subjectivity, and power that are cast by people and in turn cast the people themselves. I apologize to the participants in the research for the presumption of being able to say very much about raccomandazione in the few pages of this book: several of them asserted that an encyclopedia in several volumes would be needed in order to deal adequately with the subject, and they are doubtlessly correct.

Notes 1. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) founded the Italian school of criminal anthropology, which promoted the idea of using anthropometrics to predict deviant behavior. For a review of how Lombroso contributed to negative stereotypes of Southern Italy and influenced nascent pseudoscientific race theory on an international level, see Gibson

Introduction

21

(1998, 2002). With regard to Southern Italy, Gribaudi (1997) offers a good discussion of denigrating images; see also the preface in Petrusewicz (1998).   2. When conjugating the Italian verb raccomandare in the past tense, here and elsewhere in the text I switch to the English cognate “recommended.” As a noun, however, I maintain the Italian raccomandato (fem. raccomandata), indicating someone who has received a raccomandazione. The person who issues a raccomandazione is a raccomandante. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations from Italian are my own.   3. I found this neologism of autoraccomandazione to be quite useful to denominate a widespread phenomenon that receives relatively little mention, so I adopt it in my discussion in this book.   4. The name is a pseudonym, as are nearly all of those presented; I mention public authorities with their real names.   5. See Herzfeld (1992) for a discussion of negative stereotypes of bureaucracy.   6. While the episode seemed to have the makings of an urban legend, it was actually confirmed in its substance by other interlocutors.   7. The experience of this friend calls to mind the commentary of Norman Douglas, who wrote travelogues of Southern Italy at the turn of the century:  No wonder even Englishmen discover that law-breaking, in Italy, becomes a necessity, a rule of life. And, soon enough, more than a mere necessity. [. . .] For even as the traveler new to Borneo, when they offer him a durian-fruit, is instantly brought to the vomiting-point by its odour, but after a few mouthfuls declares it to be the very apple of Paradise, and marvels how he could have survived so long in the benighted lands where such ambrosial fare is not. [. . .] Even so, in Italy, the domesticated Englishman is amazed to find that he possesses a sense hitherto unrevealed, opening up a new horizon, a new zest for life—the sense of law-breaking. At first, being an honest man, he is shocked at the thought of such a thing; next like a sensible person, reconciled to the inevitable; lastly, as befits his virile race, he learns to play the game so well that the horrified officials grudgingly admit (and it is their highest praise): “Inglese italianizzato—Diavolo incarnato.” Yes, slowly the charm of law-breaking grows upon the Italianized Saxon: slowly, but surely. There is neo-barbarism not only in matters of art. (Douglas 1915 [1985]: 36)  8. Furbizia as a cultural code in Southern Italy has been discussed at length in Galt (1974) and in Schneider and Schneider (1976); I will treat it further in chapter 4.   9. Schneider and Schneider (1994) present some examples of grassroots efforts in Sicily to remove positive connotations from furbizia as a cultural code and value. 10. According to the Italian Penal Code, Articles 318, 320, and 321, “gifts” to public officials and civil servants may be considered corrupting under certain conditions: one may give gifts, but only if they are of modest value and in no way proportionate to the service rendered. They cannot be gifts of money no matter how modest. Moreover, “retribution” must not be obligatory in order to obtain a service from a public office.

Chapter 1

The Ethnographic Setting

There is often nothing to see at all except an expanse of scrub or sandhills, with blue mountains in the distance, and at one’s feet a torrent bed full of stones winding its way across the desolation to the sea. Yet such places bear such high-sounding names which live only in a few stray references from Greek and Roman writers. This is Magna Graecia: this is a country for scholars. —Henry V. Morton, A Traveller in Southern Italy

On my first trip to Basilicata in 1987, I immediately felt very much at home. There was something about the region that recalled to me the south central Texas of my youth, even before the discovery of vast petroleum reserves in the Val d’Agri. It was not just the searing July heat: the landscape itself looked surprisingly like the Texas Hill Country, and moving east toward the murgia lying between Basilicata and Apulia it became more like the limestone cliffs of the Rio Grande Valley. In the stretches of land not sown with agricultural intent, I saw agave cactus and prickly pear erupt onto the surface. Later I learned that the Spanish had brought them over from the New World (perhaps from Texas itself?) during the centuries in which they controlled Southern Italy. Like my compatriots the cacti, I too have made this area my home. I cannot identify myself as an indigenous anthropologist, but I am married to one of “my natives” and live in the nearby capital of the province, Matera. In this sense, my connection to the research site is rather anomalous, making “participant-observation”—the anthropological methodology par excellence—somewhat of an understatement. Nonetheless, all things considered, it is not a bad place to go native, despite cultural anthropology’s traditional taboo against adopting the lifestyle of the indigenous inhabitants. Another woman from Texas preceded me in

The Ethnographic Setting

23

moving here and marrying a local, and for a while there was an ex-airline hostess from California who married a restauranteur, though they ended up moving back to California where they now own and run a successful Italian restaurant. All told, after so many years of Italians immigrating to the Americas and other destinations, it seems odd to the locals that the Americans are now migrating here. Since ancient times, the people of Lucania have dealt with immigration from abroad, both peaceful and bellicose. The Oenotri, one of the early indigenous peoples of the area, had contact with the ancient Greeks who established the important colonial city of Metaponto. Nowadays Metaponto is a popular beach resort and a frazione [administrative subdivision] of the principal research site, the town of Bernalda. Following the Greeks, the Romans came to the region, and later it was subject to numerous invasions by Goths, Lombards, Franks, Swabians, and Normans. These invaders left their mark on the Lucanian population along with other groups: Saracens, Jews, Albanians, and most notably, Byzantine Greeks. The Spanish Aragonese rulers divided the territory into feudal possessions, and it remained under Spanish control for several centuries. Subsequently it formed part of the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples until the unification of the Italian State. The research site, Bernalda, dates back as a settlement at least to the period of Byzantine Rome, when it was a station for troops known as “Camarda.” A modern quarter at the eastern end of the main street has risen on the site of old Camarda and takes its name from the settlement’s ancient patron saint, San Donato. The Centro Storico [Historical Center] of Bernalda, however, is a good kilometer away from Camarda; dating back to the 1500s, it takes its name from the Neapolitan-Aragonese nobleman Bernaudo de Bernaudo. Upon entering under Bernaudi’s dominion, the inhabitants of Camarda reestablished their town in the shadow of their lord’s castle and at the same time took on San Bernardino di Siena as their new patron saint, even though the latter had no actual historical connection to the village. San Bernardino did, however, have the merit of homonymy with their new terrestrial patron. Through the gesture of changing their patron saint to honor their feudal lord, I like to think that these early Bernaldese found an effective way to “recommend” themselves to him. In any case, San Bernardino was one of the most important saints the Bernaldese turned to for divine assistance as plague and famine intensified in the seventeenth century. The population, which hovered under two thousand souls, was predominantly composed of agricultural hands. By the mid-1700s, there was a handful of wealthy families—notaries, clerics, and administrators—who would later make of the landed gentry

24

Raccomandazione

or galantuomini, and together with the nobles and priests, they dominated the social hierarchy of the town (D’Angella 1983). A local historian concludes that the reaction in Bernalda to the events surrounding the establishment and fall of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799 was substantially “indifferent,” probably owing to the lack of an intellectual bourgeoisie in the town and perhaps even because the yoke of feudal rule was less harsh than elsewhere in Basilicata (ibid.: 136–37). Even so, the end of feudalism in 1806 during the Napoleonic period severed political feudalism and accelerated the ascent of an agrarian bourgeoisie that would maintain its hegemony until after World War II. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town’s social landscape was characterized by a number of features common to many parts of rural Basilicata and Calabria: a significant concentration of land in the hands of a few owners (the latifondisti), difficult living conditions for the majority of the population, and a social division between signori [gentlemen] and cafoni [bumpkins]. The unemployed and underemployed formed a pool of available, low-cost laborers for the wealthy property owners. From the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, immigration to the Americas was a prime adaptation strategy of the chronically underemployed. Until public works (the bonifica) drained the land in the 1930s, the area around Bernalda was swampy and malaria infested; the malady sapped human resources from an already impoverished population. Referring to the effects of malaria, elderly Bernaldese remember when they were called “green faces” by the inhabitants of surrounding towns; perhaps because Bernalda lay closer to the coast and at a lower elevation, the disease was particularly endemic. Infant mortality was extremely high, and babies were often baptized almost immediately after birth in order not to take any chances with their souls, encased as they were in such fragile bodies. After World War II, together with a growing national attention to the problems of the South, the national government, abetted by U.S. aid, undertook several initiatives to favor development of the area. Bernalda was a part of the ferment surrounding the Riforma fondiaria [land reform] and the transformation of agriculture through the mechanization and modernization of farming, as well as the attempt at industrial development that took place starting in 1964 with the construction of the petrochemical complex of the Val Basento and the Italsider steelworks in Taranto (now known as Ilva). At the time, these industrial centers furnished many jobs for Bernaldese and residents of the surrounding towns. Yet these initiatives were not adequate to halt another important series of migratory waves that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, when approximately 209,000 persons emigrated from Basilicata (Barbagallo

The Ethnographic Setting

25

1973; 1980: 88) and headed for industrial centers in Northern Italy and Northern Europe. In this period, the Bernaldese tended to relocate to Switzerland and Germany.1 The dimensions of this flow appear even more significant if we consider that the current total population of the region is around 600,000. Emigration slowed substantially in the 1970s due to the international economic crisis, but the gradual improvement in living conditions was influential in the reduction of “push” factors. Indeed, from the first half of the 1970s on, the phenomenon of return migration began to take shape: ex-emigrants moved back to their hometowns, bringing a certain economic gain and experience acquired abroad.2 In the 1980s, emigration slowed to a trickle, but in the 1990s it resumed, in part due to the persistence of high unemployment levels, to such an extent that now one speaks of a “new emigration” (Zinn 1998).

Aspects of Contemporary Life in the Setting Bernalda lies on a hill (127 meters above sea level) receding inward from the coastal plain, about twelve kilometers from the Ionian Sea. With a population of approximately twelve thousand inhabitants, Bernalda is an excellent example of what social scientists have termed the “agrotowns” of Southern Italy: compact towns built up on hills dotting the landscape and overlooking cultivated lands below. The relative isolation of these towns, reached by car or bus on winding, steep roads, reflects that of the entire region. There are no major highways in Basilicata apart from a very brief stretch of autostrada on the west coast, where there is also the only port (a touristic one): there is no airport in the region and train connections are poor. While it is situated in one of the more culturally conservative areas of Italy, Bernalda features an interesting mix of the traditional, the modern, and the revisited traditional. One can still see women dressed in mourning wear and an occasional horse and cart, but their ranks are getting thinner and thinner as those of body-pierced youths and telefonini [cell phones] swell. The Bernaldese themselves speak of their town as “young,” which seems odd to someone from the United States—where anything over thirty years old is virtually antique—but what they mean when they say this is that the town is young in comparison to nearby ones like Pisticci and Montescaglioso, which unlike Bernalda had rather extensively developed urban centers in the medieval period. As a consequence of its “late” development, Bernaldese maintain, their town has fewer traditions and is more “open” to change than its neighbors. Cer-

26

Raccomandazione

tainly Bernalda’s location makes it more accessible compared with many of the hilltop towns of Basilicata’s interior: it is close to the Basentana State Road and lies at the intersection of traffic between Calabria and Apulia and between the Ionian coast and Potenza. Archaeologists have been working for years on the ancient Greek ruins in the frazione of Metaponto (a distance of ten kilometers from Bernalda), and along with the archaeological museum the sites attract many tourists. Up through the 1960s, peasant farmers would often throw away cartloads of the “junk” they plowed up: Greek vases, amphorae, figurines, etc., though they might spare a coin if it was of precious metal. Only in recent decades have these antiquities been appreciated by the nonelite classes, and the same is true of antique pieces of more recent origin. In the rush toward plastic and laminated wood modernity, many middle-class and lower-middle-class locals disposed of old wood and wrought iron furniture now worth millions of lire. In the last decade, however, there has been a reconsideration of these items, and especially among the younger generations there is a new appreciation of the “old, used” objects rejected by their elders as signs of backwardness. This is also true of the Centro Storico (vascë a’ Chiesa, lit. “down by the church”), an area still looked askance by many of the older generations who remember conditions of squalor and miseria [abject poverty] in that quarter, which once contained nearly the entire population of the town. In their relative isolation, agro-towns like Bernalda have cultivated their own distinct identities—historic, linguistic, and folkloric. Practically every town in Basilicata has its own dialect, and the Bernaldese dialect has influences from Greek and Latin, as well as traces of Spanish and archaic French. The great majority of Bernaldese have some competence in the local dialect, and many use it regularly or nearly exclusively. All of the Bernaldese understand standard Italian, though many are not fully proficient in speaking and writing the national idiom. Only a few kilometers away, in the neighboring town of Pisticci, there is a different local dialect, and the two are not completely mutually intelligible. Apart from language, the discrete identities of the towns also include characteristics of “mentality” and style that the inhabitants of each town ascribe to themselves and others. While each town maintains its distinctiveness, however, people in the area do identify with a wider sense of being Southern and often refer to “how people are in the South” and “how things work in the South.” Descriptions of Basilicata often refer, in a stereotypic manner, to Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi’s famous account of his experience in the region during exile under fascism (Levi 1945). Yet the region

The Ethnographic Setting

27

has changed dramatically since Levi’s stay, particularly since the 1960s: improved hygiene and medical treatment have reduced infant mortality drastically and made Lucanians among the most long-lived groups in Italy; the Basentana highway from Metaponto to the regional capital of Potenza has done a great deal to relieve the isolation of the agro-towns; irrigation and modernization of agriculture have made the Metapontine the “California of Italy,” as some call it; emigrant remittances and monetary transfers from the central government in the form of pensions and subsidies of various sorts—a good deal of which was achieved through an effective deployment of raccomandazioni—have brought increased wealth to the area and consumer culture along with it; television has placed cosmopolitan images within everyone’s reach, and Bernalda has its own internet service. Of course young people all read Levi’s book in school, but they have difficulty in identifying it with today’s Basilicata. More than by Carlo Levi, my own images and expectations of the area were conditioned by social science literature and the lofty concepts it elaborates such as “honor and shame,” “pagan-Catholic syncretism,” “male/female segregation,” and of course—central to the present study—“patron/client dyads.” In a way, I suppose I was a bit disappointed to see that brides didn’t hang their wedding night bedsheets outside to prove their virginity. Nor did I find a direct correspondence in reality for that other image of Southern life propagated as a stereotype in countless books and films—the mafia, although the presence of some Tarantine “bosses” in mandatory residence [soggiorno obbligato] did spice up the local gossip. The Bernaldese themselves tend to relegate what conditions of miseria might exist nowadays to their image of life in the mountain towns of Basilicata’s interior. Bernalda, by contrast, is a coastal town, known for being a paese allegro [cheerful town] and movimentato [happening]. Lying more or less on a plateau, Bernalda’s streets are drawn on a fairly even grid, in contrast to the winding, labyrinthine alleys of many other nearby settlements. Unlike most towns in the area, which feature a central square [piazza], Bernalda has a long and straight Corso [avenue], a layout that encourages the pleasant strolls the locals take in the evening, during which they gossip, check out each other’s clothes, and perhaps stop for a drink at one of the several cafés. Among the youths in particular, the motorized version of the stroll—be it by car, scooter, or motorcycle—is as popular as the pedestrian stroll; the Bernaldese have a habit that infuriates outsiders of stopping their vehicles side by side in the middle of the Corso for a chat. The rhythm of the agricultural year still manifests itself, although in an attenuated form, in the period of the grape harvest, the olive harvest, and summer festivals that have lost much of

28

Raccomandazione

their original connection to the wheat harvest. The relaxed rhythm of daily life is similar to that of other Lucanian towns and to a lesser extent that of smaller Southern cities. The morning draws to a close with a large lunch, followed by a pause that often becomes a siesta period; the morning routine changes little with the seasons, but in the summer shops reopen at 6:30 p.m. after the afternoon siesta, which is long even by the easygoing standards of the surrounding towns and which contributes to their negative stereotype of the Bernaldese as layabouts. Basilicata—specifically, Chiaromonte (or “Montegrano,” as it was called pseudonymously)—was, of course, the site of the famous study by Edward Banfield that coined the expression “amoral familism” (Banfield 1958). In this concept, ties to the nuclear family were held to be exclusive of other forms of association. While Banfield’s work subsequently created heated debate and was subject to extensive criticism for its weakness and the abuses of its application, we must nonetheless recognize the centrality of family attachments in Bernalda. In an act of what Carrier (1992) has called “ethno-orientalism,” the Bernaldese themselves point to the importance of the family in their society. The rhetoric of “familism” is employed by the Bernaldese to activate mutual support and obligations, though in point of fact families are rarely free of internal conflict. Like the Neapolitan families studied by Goddard (1996), the family in Bernalda plays a central role in its members’ life strategies and emotional relationships. In general, as kinship distance increases outside the immediate family, ties tend to be looser and may even almost be ignored, but often a distant kinship may be strategically activated and emphasized. Gone are the extremely large families of the early decades of the twentieth century, with nine, ten, or even more children; on the other hand, Bernalda has not reached the decline in births of the Center-North, and it is not uncommon to see families with three children. As throughout Italy, the vast majority of young people live with their families until marriage. The traditional dowry is still common, and ideally parents provide an apartment and an elaborate trousseau for the daughter. For this reason, the residential pattern upon marriage tends to be matrivicinal: that is, the couple moves to the wife’s home, which is near that of her mother. The maternal grandmother is thereby conveniently located to take an active role in childcare, helping to compensate for the lack of public daycare. As in the rest of the West more generally, separation and divorce are increasingly frequent in Bernalda, but overall marital ties are quite solid. Parents are highly concerned with squaring away their children and are often active in the latter’s search for work, including the request for raccomandazioni that might facilitate the process.

The Ethnographic Setting

29

The Catholic Church, as throughout Italy, is an important institution, although many Bernaldese are nonpracticing for all intents and purposes. D’Angella (1983) reports that there were over sixty priests in the town in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, serving a total population of about two thousand. Comparatively speaking, priests nowadays have lost a great deal of the power they once held in the community, and in this increasingly secularized world the region has not been untouched by the acute shortage of new recruits to the priestly and monastic orders. Still, Bernalda’s churches have many regular attendants, mostly women. The town is divided into two parishes, “Santi Medici” (or la chiesa di sopra, “the church up above”), under the charismatic leadership of Don Mimì d’Elia, and the Convent Church (la chiesa di giù, “the church down below”), where Don Mariano Crucinio now holds the position of head priest. The Santi Medici parish includes the modern neighborhoods of Bernalda, where the majority of the population now resides, and has very active para-ecclesiastical groups like the Azione Cattolica and a chorus. Don Mimì’s preferences at election time are widely discussed and continue to be influential. Don Mariano took over the town center’s parish only a few years ago; most of the parish residents are older people who have remained in the Centro Storico and the early modern part of the town, but Don Mariano’s own brand of charisma, particularly engaging with the youths, has reinvigorated church life. The cults of the saints have waned a bit in recent years, but their festivals provide an important point of reference in the community, and as we will see in chapter 3, individual devotions are still very present. From Camarda’s original patron saint, Donato is still a popular Christian name in the town, but the cult of the saint here has fallen into disuse, eclipsed by other divine figures with whom intercession is still sought: San Bernardino (the official town patron), Saints Cosma and Damiano (the Santi Medici or Holy Doctors), and the Madonna del Carmine, not to mention Saint Anthony and Padre Pio. The Mother Church of Bernalda, dedicated to San Bernardino, has been closed for restoration for several years, and this has tended to diminish the saint’s status as town patron with respect to the other saints, although his festival in August enjoys great popularity. Incidentally, the widespread veneration of the Santi Medici reflects the influence of nearby Apulia, which was increasingly felt from the nineteenth century on and can also be seen in the town’s architecture. Religious pilgrimages offer a popular occasion to go on an outing, whether to local sanctuaries or further afield, such as to Rome or to San Giovanni Rotondo, the latter associated with the figure of Padre Pio. Along with the Catholic majority, there is a small

30

Raccomandazione

but tenacious group of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the town, as well as some North African and Albanian immigrants of Muslim faith. The Church in Bernalda still exercises considerable influence on local politics, despite the dissolution of the Church–Christian Democrat duo in the post-Tangentopoli and post–Cold War period. With the establishment of the Republic after World War II, the local administrations in Bernalda and nearby towns along the Ionian coast were long dominated by the Democrazia Cristiana (DC). There was a swing to the left in the 1970s, however, controlled by the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties, until the early 1980s, when the DC came back into prominence in the town. Benefitting from the high positioning of party figures in the regional and national governments and from their ability to control patronage resources, local DC officials maintained control until the beginning of 1992, when a mayor took over belonging to the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), the party that was the principal heir to the former Italian Communist Party (PCI) following 1991. Part of the community’s frustration with the DC administration had to do with the exorbitant £30 billion deficit it had run up and questions about the handling of the municipality’s money. Since 1995, the mayoralty and the local administration have been dominated by the center-left Olive coalition, mirroring the overall tendency of both the Province of Matera and Basilicata Region. At this juncture, I would like to offer a brief topography of patronage in this setting. While this work attends to raccomandazione phenomena in several different manifestations, the reader should note that two forms are particularly marked in everyday discourse: the raccomandazione used in the attempt to obtain a job, and the raccomandazione used to expedite matters in government institutions or bureaucracy. It must be kept in mind that in the decades following the end of World War II, in Bernalda as throughout the rest of the South, there was a massive expansion of the role of the public sector. As Gribaudi notes in her history of the Christian Democrat Party in the South, the various schemes to aid and develop the Mezzogiorno through successive phases of the “extraordinary intervention” have all featured the mediation of this governing party between the local community and resources from the state (Barbagallo 1980; Gribaudi 1980). Such resources included, crucially, civil service jobs and positions at white elephant industrial poles that were established in parts of the South, as well as subsidies in the form of pensions or special financing. Several Bernaldese interlocutors remarked that the “right” politics were necessary to have a Land Reform allotment or to get a job in the Valbasento industrial complex. As Gribaudi points

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31

out for the South as a whole, the Christian Democrats managed to position themselves as the “champions” of the Southern cause, installing clientelistic politics that aided their electoral stability (Gribaudi 1980: 47, 86, 100, passim). While the “traditional” patronage of community notables—associated primarily with the prewar era—featured relatively durable ties, the bonds between the participants in the present-day clientelistic relationships vary in their degree of durability.3 One person I spoke with explained as follows: With regard to public jobs, there’s politicization. You turn to a politician for work, but normally there’s little in the way of politics once you’ve entered [the job]. Every once in a while, someone is more militant or grateful to the person who helped him. Maybe the raccomandante telephones him after five years, “We’re helping the person who helped you. See if you can gather some votes.” Acknowledgment for life. Maybe [the raccomandato] sends him to the devil, others continue to vote.

The attempt to obtain something through raccomandazione, be it a job or financing, is not always a straightforward matter of having a connection to just any political figure who happens to be affiliated with the party in power. This is because the local, provincial, and regional administrations are composed of coalitions of various parties, and also because the balance of power between the parties might contrast from one level to another. For example, in the period in which Bernalda was under an administration dominated by the PDS, the provincial and regional administrations were controlled by the DC. Additionally, the “horizontal clientele” described by Tarrow (1967) have until recent years been important adjuncts to the political parties: the old DC had close ties to various trade unions such as the ACLI, CISL, and Coldiretti, as well as the Azione Cattolica organization, while the Communists were associated with the CGIL labor union, for example. With the political changes arising after 1992 with the Second Republic, the connections between the parties and such associations are a bit more tenuous—one need only consider the fragmentation of the old DC—but in Bernalda (as throughout Italy), the various groups still do demonstrate historically conditioned elective affinities in their politics. In any case, small-scale raccomandazioni employed to move things through the bureaucracy, to “grease the wheels,” usually require less complex maneuvering, fewer intermediaries, and little overtly political action. The face-to-face contact that characterizes small-town life certainly facilitates requests for raccomandazioni: having a friend or relation placed in the right office might be sufficient, or else in some instances, a tangente [bribe] might be requested.

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Raccomandazione

The tangente itself in its various forms is in part connected to discourses on organized crime. I will discuss this association at greater length in chapter 4, but here there are a few general remarks to make in the context of an overall description of Bernalda. When I first began conducting fieldwork in Basilicata in 1989, the region was still considered a safe haven [isola felice] with respect to organized crime, which was quite present in the neighboring regions of Calabria, Campagna, and Apulia. Yet research has demonstrated the falsity of the isola felice image (Caserta 1992). In 1989, there was relatively little crime, including illicit drug use, in the town of Bernalda itself. Now, over a decade later, there has been a substantial increase in crime in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The use of heroin and ecstasy among the town youths has become alarmingly widespread,4 and whereas in the past petty theft (such as that of car stereos) was attributed to the area’s high unemployment levels, now drug addicts and criminal groups from adjacent areas are blamed for the unprecedented robberies of homes, automobiles, and businesses. There have even been some shootings among aspiring local crime bosses. Extortion has become a daily affair in many of the nearby towns, though Bernalda seems less touched by it, for the moment. Many locals believe that this crime has its roots back in 1989, when a convicted boss of the Modeo clan from Taranto was punished with mandatory residence near Bernalda. This figure was known as “the Mexican,” a nickname he acquired from having had a bit part in a spaghetti western many years earlier. Indeed, a number of Bernaldese have commented to the effect that the crime situation is turning the area into the “Far West.”

The Economy and Labor Force The expanses of Basilicata’s western-like terrain hint at its lack of industrial development. Despite its wealth in resources—water, petroleum, natural gas, fertile agricultural land—the region is, relatively speaking, one of the poorest in Italy: per capita income is among the lowest, and the unemployment rate is higher than the already astronomical average of the Mezzogiorno. Bernalda and the surrounding territory rely heavily on outside investments, and in particular on financing through national and European Union funds earmarked to help “the other Italy” and “depressed areas.” In order to outline a general picture of the economy, it is necessary to consider the radical change the economic fabric has undergone since World War II. The evolution appears quite clearly in figures taken from the census data for Bernalda:

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Table 1.1. Employed persons per sector in percentages, Bernalda Agriculture

Industry

Services

1951

64.6

21.5

13.9

1961

56.4

27.0

15.6

1971

41.3

35.0

23.6

1981

30.2

31.9

37.9

1991

22.4

31.6

46.0

Source: ISTAT—Censimento generali della popolazione 1991; Camera di Commercio di Matera 1986

From these data we may note the precipitous drop in agricultural workers in the last forty years. With the land reforms of the early 1950s, many Bernaldese peasants and day laborers received small allotments of land that they cultivated—sometimes thanks to a raccomandazione, a number of people affirmed—but these small farmers often sought to remove their children from the harshness and, perhaps even more importantly, the stigma attached to life working the land. Many families currently maintain crops on these “handkerchiefs” of land [fazzoletti di terra], incorporating their own fruits and vegetables into their meals and supplementing modest incomes by selling surplus produce outside the doors of their homes in the town.5 Despite the shrinking number of people employed in agriculture, the sector continues to offer part-time or full-time activity for many Bernaldese, and local crops include fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, kiwi, citrus fruits, fennel, legumes, olives, and grapes. Some townsmen are involved in apiculture as well. Though heavily reliant on regional and European Union subsidies, successful agriculture has been one of the key buffers of Bernalda’s economy, which has been relatively well off compared to many other areas of the region. Jobs in this sector range from manual labor to the management of land, small-scale marketing of produce, and service in dealing in agricultural tools and supplies. However, Bernaldese often complained to me about the lack of a class of middlemen to operate as distributors of local farm products, viewing themselves as shut out from a real profit for their crops. Moreover, in recent years stiff competition from Greece and Spain and poor climatic conditions have led to some difficulty for Metapontine agriculture, reflecting a drastic drop in farmland values. In the industrial sector, the first increase in 1961 was connected mainly to building. From the 1960s to the 1980s, financial incentives offered by the state, ostensibly to help develop the Mezzogiorno, gave rise to an expansion of existing Northern industrial structures rather

34

Raccomandazione

than an independent development of the Southern economy (Barbagallo 1980: 85; Wade 1980). As in many other areas of the South, there were ambitious initiatives in the 1960s for the creation of industry in the nearby Valbasento. Much of the next increase in industrial occupation registered in 1971 was in fact due to the ANIC industrial complex in the Valbasento, which together with Taranto’s Ilva steelworks (exItalsider) continues to provide some jobs for the Bernaldese. However, the decline in industrial workers in 1981 was a first sign of the area’s overall de-industrialization; the ANIC complex turned out to be a typical example of the “cathedral in the desert” projects, as they were called: factories built with government financing that operated for brief periods and then collapsed by the early 1980s. Scores of Bernaldese ANIC workers were laid off with benefits from the national Cassa Integrazione fund for redundancy. Many of the townspeople interviewed commented that these industries generated a flurry of raccommandazione activity for hiring (see Davis 1973 for nearby Pisticci). The establishment of the Fiat plant in Melfi has had an important impact on the region as a whole, but it is too far away to have influenced the Bernaldese economy in a direct fashion. On the other hand, in the late 1980s and 1990s, a few small entrepreneurs from the town created rather successful operations in the industrial zone just below the town, with activities ranging from the manufacture of parts for door and window fixtures to equipment for butchery. Some of the most noteworthy industrial opportunities in the area are being created by the so-called “Distretto dei Salottifici” centered in the area around Matera: the manufacture of upholstered furniture is one of the few industries that offers employment to young people in the province, even at the cost of commuting to work from outlying towns. Construction provides many other jobs, mostly manual, though Tangentopoli blocked many public works contracts, and the recession of recent years has caused the housing market to plummet. There are also other small manufacturing businesses, like a shoe factory and a knitwear factory, that offer employment mostly for the unskilled who have left school early, and these companies operate quite precariously. The tertiary sector, on the other hand, has witnessed a significant expansion, with an overwhelming presence of employees of public administrations and public services (ISTAT—Censimento generale della popolazione; cf. Censis—Camera di Commercio di Matera 1986). The municipality of Bernalda has been seeking to capitalize on the tourist potential of the area, in particular with the development of the coastal strip of Metaponto, which is under its jurisdiction. The Ionian coast in Basilicata offers a fine beach of golden sand, in contrast to much of Italy’s rocky coastline. However, the area still lacks much of the infra-

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structure and services needed to maximize its tourist potential. The area of Metaponto Lido features many summer villas belonging to people from Bernalda and Matera. A number of Bernaldese are involved with small-scale beach establishments [lidi], snack bars, and pizzerias, while some work in the few hotels in the area or at the time-share complex built along the road leading from the Borgo to the Lido. For a period, the Communist-dominated politics of the town led to the development of several campgrounds. In recent years, many local farmers have built or restored apartments on their property, presenting them as farm holiday accommodations. Only a handful of these, however, offer a complete range of services for their guests, such as horseback riding, dining, bike paths, etc.: many were created simply as a means to obtain special funding from the European Union. The trend in recent years along the Ionian coast has been to develop tourist villages that blend time-shares and hotel-type lodging, often with private beaches, but this typology is still limited in Metaponto in comparison with adjacent areas, such as the Marina di Pisticci. Even so, a large luxury complex is currently under construction in the frazione of Serra Marina: one of the main investors in the complex is a Bernaldese who immigrated to Emilia Romagna and became a self-made man. The majority, though, of Metaponto’s tourists tend to be commuters, day-trippers who come to the beach, perhaps bringing along their own drinks and sandwiches. Many locals complain that the working-class character of camping and commuter tourism does not generate the kind of business that the area needs, and despite the fact that the mild climate could permit a longer tourist season, it currently lasts hardly three months. Some Bernaldese work seasonally at the Club Méditerranée Metaponto, which actually lies in the township of Pisticci. Even if tourism has not reached its full potential for the area’s economy, a new phase in local touristic development could perhaps be inaugurated with the valorization of the important ancient Greek archaeological site of Metaponto: following the Olive coalition government’s policy line of emphasizing cultural heritage as an economic resource, the township of Bernalda recently received over £70 billion in financing for the revitalization of its archaeological area. All three economic sectors are touched in some capacity by the informal economy. The informal economy in Bernalda manifests itself in the practice of hiring people in nero [off the books] for work in construction, agriculture, tourism, food service, and even in many white-collar settings. A new addition to the informal economy in the town is the recently developed drug trade described earlier. Locals are also acquainted with other manifestations of the informal economy, such as prostitution and immigrant street peddlers and the trade in stolen and contraband

36

Raccomandazione

goods (such as cigarettes) and counterfeit name-brand apparel and accessories, especially present in the nearby cities of Bari and Taranto. Using sociological categories of class, we may term the majority of Bernaldese as lower-middle class: many Bernaldese families originate from peasants or day laborers who lived in town and worked the surrounding countryside, a common pattern in Southern agro-towns. Bernalda features a solid petite bourgeoisie composed of shop owners and small businessmen; a fairly restricted bourgeoisie, mainly composed of professionals; and an even smaller upper class made up of large landowners, some of whom are from older latifondisti families with a quasi-aristocratic status, while a few others have recently “arrived.” On the other hand, there is a substantial group that may best be termed sottoproletariato [lumpenproletariat], composed mostly of agricultural day laborers who live in very modest conditions: if much of the borghesia [bourgeoisie] and piccola borghesia [petty bourgeoisie] is connected to internet, many of the sottoproletariato families do not even have a telephone in the house (everyone has a television, however). The traditional lower-middle-class to lower-class family, which are predominant in Bernalda, is generally composed of a wage-earning father, a housewife mother, and children who live at home until they marry, unless they leave the town for higher education or work. Among the middle-class and petit bourgeois, more wives are working, often as teachers or within family-owned shops: upper-class wives of older generations may be well-educated but generally do not work outside the home. The younger generations (under forty-five) of all socioeconomic backgrounds often feature dual wage-earner couples, but many young women have left the job market for lack of attractive prospects and have accepted, by default, the role of “housewife” (Zinn 1998). After having overcome the illiteracy that was a feature of past generations, younger generations of Bernalda maintain fairly high educational levels overall, in part reflecting the use of the educational system as a “parking lot” before acceding employment, a practice that is common in many areas of the Mezzogiorno. Yet there are substantial gaps at both ends of the spectrum: figures from the last census indicated that many youths, primarily sottoproletariato, leave school before completing the terza media [last year of middle school] level (some 18 percent in the 15–42 age group, and 46 percent of Bernaldese overall do not hold the terza media diploma), while at the upper end of the educational scale the number of university graduates remains paltry (2 percent). Those youths—the majority—who continue their studies past the compulsory age may seek a high school diploma in the agricultural and hoteling institutes in a

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nearby town, while Bernalda itself hosts a Science High School and a Commerce Institute. Some students opt for schools in Matera such as the Classics High School or the Pedagogical High School. With programs in Potenza and Matera, the University of Basilicata has attracted some Bernaldese, but many prefer to enroll at the University of Bari. A small number choose other universities throughout Italy, especially in Milan or Rome. Overall, schooling does not strictly correlate with employment prospects, and here as is generally the tendency in the Mezzogiorno, the unemployed population is distinguished by a relatively high level of instruction (Pugliese 1999). The rate of youth unemployment is in fact exceedingly high, averaging over 60 percent, and the overall unemployment rate is still well over double the current national average of approximately 11 percent. In chapter 6, I will devote specific attention to the question of raccomandazione and employment, especially from the perceptions of unemployed youths. Some young people manage to get into training programs sponsored by the European Social Fund, while others, particularly the unemployed over age thirty, work in “Socially Useful Jobs” [Lavori Socialmente Utili], a category that occupies around two hundred Bernaldese at this writing. Under the Minimum Insertion Income program that stays into effect until the end of 2000, approximately 225 Bernaldese families receive special assistance checks, for which the family head must perform public service, such as gardening in public spaces. The last several years have seen the resumption of Bernaldese emigration: many young people leave if they manage to get a coveted job in the armed forces; others who were perhaps born to emigrant parents in Germany, Switzerland, or Milan seek jobs in those settings. The great migrations of the past remain very present, because the hundreds of Bernaldese and their families who migrated North return each summer to their paese [hometown]. Referred to locally as “return migrants,” they are hosted by other family members or else stay in a home they possess, perhaps inherited, and they swell Bernalda’s population for a period extending from mid-July until the end of August, practically doubling the town’s size. Many emigrants parade fine new luxury cars along Bernalda’s corso, displaying how they “made it” abroad, and there is a general atmosphere of gaiety. The highlight of the period is the Festa di San Bernardino, in honor of the town’s patron saint. San Bernardino’s feast day actually occurs on 20 May, and there is a small festa to mark the occasion then, but the Bernaldese moved the major celebration to late August in order to be able to share it with vacationing emigrants. In the last several years the number of emigrants who return

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temporarily is beginning to decline as the second and third generations increasingly tend to lose their ties to the community of their family’s origin. While the memory of emigration is still fresh, the Bernaldese (along with the rest of Italy) have been getting used to the foreign immigrants who have settled in recent years. The notion of “immigrant” generally seems to imply immigrants from developing countries, especially North Africans and Albanians who work in agriculture, but there are also a handful of immigrants who, like myself, come from the United States and EU countries: a few Bernaldese have foreign spouses whom they met during their own emigration experience. As I mentioned above, many unemployed youths in Bernalda are once more immigrating to the Center-North and Northern Europe. From what my interlocutors told me, even in the new emigration, the raccomandazione plays a central role, like an invisible hand: those who emigrate tend to be either the lucky ones who got a spinta [push] to get hired in a branch of the military or the dispossessed who have no access to the raccomandazione in Bernalda but who hope to get a job elsewhere through a friend who is already squared away [sistemato]. With these indications, I close this description of the ethnographic present, a reality that, like the raccomandazione itself studied here, is lived in different ways by members of the community, according to their generation, gender, socioeconomic background, and land of origin. And yet, there are certain points in which their subjectivities converge as participants in a township, a region, a nation, and a European Union. Having resided in the town for over four years, I acquired friends, acquaintances, and relatives in most every social fraction of the community and some of the nearby towns. Consequently, in this study I had little difficulty in reaching people of all backgrounds. A good deal of data come from semistructured interviews, but since raccomandazione permeates the air like the salt of an Ionian breeze, the anthropologist can easily collect its condensation in everyday conversation and participant observation. Indeed, one of the arguments of this work is that the very quotidian character of the ideology of raccomandazione has been downplayed in past research. It is not simply the outstanding event, the spectacular manifestation that we need to offer in “thick description” (Geertz 1973) but those very small-scale social dramas of daily life, each one being the pass of a shuttle in the loom that weaves meaning.

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Notes 1. A good number of these emigrants later returned to the town, but a new transnationalism has emerged among many of their children, who return to the foreign land for employment. 2. The local conception of summer visitors as “return migrants” should not be confused with the phenomenon of return migration as studied in social science, in which those who emigrated return permanently to their home communities after a number of years working away. Bernalda was the site of a study of return migration in Southern Italy (King et al. 1985). 3. Gribaudi (1980: 67–72) stresses the ascent of the figure of the “broker,” who came to substitute the traditional “notable” patron, and the attendant weakening of the relational bonds of the clientelistic dyad. My ethnographic evidence suggests, however, that the break has not been quite so neat: it appears that there are many different degrees of “loyalty,” traditional deference, instrumentality, and symmetry in these relationships. 4. In a personal communication, N. Pepe of the Servizio Tossicodipendenza di Matera (SerT) estimated from the number of heroin addicts who use the SerT facility that there are some eighty addicts in Bernalda. 5. The urban development in the newer areas of Bernalda renders impossible the placement of the little chair decked with produce outside one’s door, so that the practice is associated with the more “backward” inhabitants of the older zones.

Chapter 2

Patronage/Clientelism Some Theoretical Considerations

Having described the research problem and its ethnographic setting, in this chapter I will elucidate the theoretical approaches that have informed this work. In order to situate my own approach, I first offer a critical survey of the literature dealing with clientelism where data on raccomandazione-type phenomena have generally been treated, devoting special attention to Southern Italy. Here I am concerned with how academic discourses on patronage have contributed to a particular image or construction of the South. Subsequent to this review of the literature, I will elaborate a specific framework and theoretical apparatuses for my study of raccomandazione, which aims to offer a renewed look at both patronage and the South. In the previous scholarship, raccomandazione has been dealt with under the heading of patronage and clientelism (I am using the two terms interchangeably). In Anglo-American anthropology, patronage had two boom periods as a popular subject of research: in the mid1960s and again in the late 1970s. The earlier period focused primarily on the description of patronage systems and staked out some definitional debates, while the latter period featured a more concerted attempt to question theoretical approaches and propose new lines of research. In this discussion, I will focus on the Anglo-American anthropological research, though I include some political science works under my purview, since, for reasons I will explain, political science has been the discipline that has given the most attention to patronage in contemporary settings. We may observe that three major concerns emerge from the literature: the definition of clientelism and the description of its structures; the origins and development of clientelism in a given set-

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ting; and to a limited extent, the discussion and critique of theoretical approaches. After the two periods in which patronage enjoyed popularity, academic interest in the subject in the 1980s and 1990s dwindled and became very sporadic. The state of research on patronage seems to have reached an impasse, as if there were nothing more to be said on the issue. Yet I would argue that the research on patronage on the whole has been embedded in a broader “Southern Question” that has by no means disappeared: that is, the rhetorical construction of Southern Italy, but also the “South” more generally as it appears elsewhere. If anthropology since the 1980s has taken on a critically reflexive stance, it is necessary for us to reflect back on how we in the social sciences have constructed patronage as a discourse and how this has contributed to an image of the South that is not unconnected to relations of power between Anglo-American academics and the subjects of their research. The revisionist analytical contributions that anthropology has made to this question have fallen into a void in other fields or in the public consciousness, wherefore the patronage issue continues to be interpreted as one of several metonyms for Southern backwardness (see also Cersosimo and Donzelli 1996), and on a broader level, for Italian “difference” when considered from the Northern European/North American perspective. A number of studies in various sites have documented phenomena that are in many regards quite similar to raccomandazione as it appears in Bernalda and as it is recognized in Italy as a whole, and these phenomena are usually dealt with under the heading of “patronage” or “clientelism” in the literature. In Spain and Mexico, for example, scholars have described enchufe, which bears a resemblance to raccomandazione. “In the authoritarian Franco regime . . . instances of intercession and sponsorship (the well-known enchufe) and the delivery of particularistic favours by holders of power in the administration remained of great importance when approaching bureaucratic loci of decision-making” (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 73; Kenny 1960). In Gilmore’s study of the Andalusian village of Fuenmayor, “classic” patronage relationships (which we will examine in greater detail below) such as those described in Pitt-Rivers (1961) are rare, but there is a use of enchufe (influence) or empeño (pull) to get things done—to obtain a market permit or a driver’s license, for example: “Townsmen agree that in order to get anywhere one must have these things; otherwise, a man is lost, since there is no possibility of advancement through personal effort alone” (1961: 108–9). Similar examples that provide some of the clearest ethnographic analogies in the literature have been noted in works dealing with Malta and Greece, among other areas (Campbell 1964; Boissevain 1977).

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Studies of Italian contexts have made specific reference to the concept of raccomandazione. Galt, for example, writes the following from his research on Pantelleria: Using patronage to accomplish something is referred to as doing it by raccomandazioni (recommendations). In some cases this might actually involve letters of recommendation, but more often a person is just said to have raccomandazioni. An official request form can also be said to have raccomandazioni imbued to it by the raccomandazioni of the person submitting it. Perhaps the word could best be glossed in English as “pull.” (Galt 1974: 187–88)

Galt, moreover, is one of the very few ethnographers to describe what I am calling “autoraccomandazione” in this study: [In offices,] those who are of obviously higher class than peasants, such as doctors, or lawyers, have raccomandazioni implied in their statuses and are not only served first (the sight of which of course emphasizes their high rank), but may be done special favors such as being served coffee, or being given slightly higher interest rates on savings accounts (ibid.: 194).

Boissevain’s analysis of patronage in Sicily also treats raccomandazione: Frequently a client moves vertically and horizontally by using recommendations, raccomandazioni. Where the person seeking a favour must move outside his face-to-face community these recommendations are often the personal calling cards of the last patron warmly recommending his carissimo amico, or dear friend, to a relative or a friend farther along the patronage network in the direction the client wishes to move. The person presenting the raccomandazione is a friend-of-a-friend, and is helped because of that. (Boissevain 1966: 25)

With regard to Colleverde in Umbria, Silverman traces the historic decline of “traditional” patronage relationships; nonetheless, she notes, the raccomandazione is still quite present: There are some persons who have the power to perform important patronage functions. Personal intermediaries are still required in dealing with the national government and other powers outside the community. It is through recommendations that most jobs are obtained, official matters settled, and so on. (1965: 187)

Davis, too, describes the use of raccomandazioni in the town of Pisticci, only about ten kilometers from Bernalda (Davis 1973). While a more thoroughly instrumental clientelism can be used through “several

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patrons for different purposes,” the employer-employee relationship is closer to the traditional image of the patron-client relationship: The relationship between employer and permanent employee is not an impersonal contractual one; rather than an impersonal figure the employer is padrone, a patron, possibly a friend. . . . It is assumed that to get a job at all the prospective employee must have some specific relationship with his employer; certainly other considerations than his specific skills are taken into account. The employer’s influence can be used to secure a job for a son, or an easy passage through his military service, and so on. The relationship is many-stranded, not managerial and single-stranded; the worker is not simply a worker, contracted to supply a certain amount of work, but a client. (Ibid.:16)

In all of these cases, raccomandazione is considered within the overall umbrella of patronage, at times as one aspect of a “traditional” or “classic” patronage relationship, while at other times it seems to form a residual phenomenon in the wake of the transformation of such relations. What I argue here is that the consolidation of the patronage category in the literature has marginalized the indigenous category of raccomandazione, relegating it to a blind spot from which scholars have downplayed its actual significance. For this reason, as “patronage” in general has lost its luster as a research problem in anthropology, raccomandazione and related forms have been ignored despite the fact that all of the scholars in some fashion have recognized its persistence in modernized settings. In order to trace the process by which this has come about, I will give some attention to the construction of patronage as a category and its analysis in the literature.

Descriptions of Patronage Systems Anthropological studies of patronage first began to assume importance in the 1960s with the growth of peasant studies, particularly in Southern Europe and Latin America. Most of the communities studied in this context were nonindustrialized rural villages marked by a great disparity in the resources and social standing of the few large landholders and the masses, composed mainly of peasants and day laborers. The picture of patronage that typically emerged from this first phase of anthropological research was that of a system of dyadic, multistranded relations featuring social inequality between the actors (generally a paternalistic landowner and a peasant), reciprocity in the exchange of goods and services, and durability of the relationship, sanctioned by a sense of moral

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obligation in both of the parties. Boissevain offers one of the broadest definitions of patronage, as he writes that “patronage is the complex of relations between those who use their influence, social position or some other attribute to assist and protect others, and those whom they so help and protect” (1966: 18). The patronage relationships studied ranged from those that were more formalized, sometimes ritualized through institutions like godparenthood (Campbell 1964), to a looser “lopsided friendship” (Pitt-Rivers 1961), and anthropologists often invoked cultural codes like “honor” and “hospitality” as complementary or reinforcing features of patronage systems. In fact, scholars of patronage were influenced by other concepts developed in the context of peasant studies, such as the “dyadic contract” (Foster 1961), “limited good” (Foster 1965), and “amoral familism” (Banfield 1958).1 Scholars tended to place an analytical emphasis on the hierarchical or vertical relationship between patron and client, though functionally similar ties between social equals—what I would call here “cronyism”—often surfaced in the ethnographic material they presented. While the anthropological studies of patronage have focused on such forms of instrumental “friendship,” sociologists and political scientists have instead concentrated on political patronage in more developed settings, especially bossism and the construction of political machines (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 303). Without dealing with bossism per se, anthropologists began to observe the shift from “traditional” patronage relationships to patronage in modernizing settings by employing the concept of the “broker” or mediator, as described by Wolf (1956) from his research in Mexico. Such brokers “stand guard over the critical junctures or synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole” (Wolf 1956: 1075). This theme arises particularly in the discussion of the broker as a link between the local and supralocal levels of society. Some scholars stress the distinction between the “patron” and the “broker.” Boissevain (1974: 147–48), for example, claims that the patron controls first-order resources (such as land, jobs, or specialized knowledge), while the broker controls “strategic contacts” with these patrons or with persons who have access to them. After the first phase of research on patronage, the latter half of the 1970s witnessed a reconsideration of the subject. Many of the scholars writing in this period took stock of the ample body of research and launched what might be called the search for “the patronage trait list”: that is, the preoccupation manifested in a number of works with the question, “What are the essential characteristics of patronage?” As mentioned, most definitions have cited the element of inequality of status

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or power in the patron-client relationship. Davis, for example, writes that “it should now be apparent that the hard core of patronage is a contractual act of submission” (1977: 146). Other definitions generally emphasize patronage as a voluntary association in a dyadic relationship (that may extend into pyramids or chains of dyads), the character of dependency and the quality of reciprocity. As Boissevain (1966: 29) points out, too, the distinctions between patronage, friendship, and kinship may be analytically useful, but they are less important on the operational level. We may see this, for example, in some of the descriptions of patronage systems in which ritual or spiritual kinship (godparenthood) is used to consolidate the patron-client relationship. In any case, there is an inherent fuzziness in such traits; for example, it is quite an arbitrary matter to establish a threshold of inequality, a point beyond which one can say, “Yes, this is patronage.” Waterbury (1977) evidently recognizes this problem of “how much inequality” when he proposes a category of “cronyism” as distinct from patronage in describing links between coequals. But in the end, how much analytical or theoretical purchase is there in such ad hoc solutions? It would appear that the discourse of defining clientelism has amounted to hair-splitting and losing track of the big picture. With these definitional preoccupations, the scholarship on patronage moved away from sensitive ethnographic descriptions, such as that of Campbell for the Sarakatsani of Zagori, Greece (Campbell 1964), from which it is evident that what is common to the various manifestations of such a culture of patronage is the personalization of relationships in contexts that are nominally guided by impersonal, rational-universalistic criteria: To protect himself the Sarakatsanos tries to establish some kind of link which will transform an otherwise impersonal confrontation into a personal relation; that is, he attempts to draw the individual whose goodwill he wishes to influence into an institutionalized relationship which may exist across the frontiers of community and involve the person’s selfesteem and to some extent the sanction of public opinion, so that he must discipline himself in the extent and manner in which he exercises his power. (Campbell 1964: 218)

Campbell’s classic study groups both the Sarakatsanos’ instrumental friendships and those among the elite within the discussion of patronage. He not only includes nepotism, which he describes as “an obligation but not a moral fault” (ibid.: 257), but also the horizontal relations I am terming “cronyism”:

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The network of friendships of the President [of the village council] or of other influential villagers becomes in reality a system of patronage. (Ibid.: 230) As a member of this professional élite he is able to recommend the affairs of his clients to the attention of various friends who may be able to help. They give this help because of their friendship for the lawyer; they are relatively indifferent to the worth of the client and the justice of his case. In return, a lawyer is able during local and national elections to promise the political support of his clients. (Ibid.: 243)

This personalized quality of relationships receives some emphasis in Eisenstadt and Roniger’s large-scale survey and analysis (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984), which highlights patronage as a means of constructing trysts outside of those institutions in which it is most fully articulated, as in kinship, for example. But here, patronage relationships and other forms of interpersonal relations such as ritual or spiritual kinship and friendship are maximally contrasted with kinship proper, which is assumed to be a repository of those “pristine” values to which the former aspire (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 29, 279, passim). Interpersonal relations outside kinship proper are depicted as being fraught with ambivalence and a tension between idealized spiritual values and veins of instrumentality. But rather than place kinship and those other relations in a strict opposition, my own analysis proposes that it would be more fruitful to consider both categories as interpersonal relationships that should instead be counterposed with the impersonality of a rational-universalistic schema. First of all, Eisenstadt and Roniger’s distinction between pristine, noninstrumental kinship relations versus formalized, nonkinship relations is in reality not as clear as they suggest.2 The authors draw upon a body of literature that has emphasized the unity of the family, particularly in the Mediterranean context. As Gilmore notes, however, “Recent work on kinship has shown that the family in the Mediterranean area is no stranger to conflict or tensions. . . . It is time we stopped conceiving of the nuclear family as a unity of solidarity only in Mediterranean studies and begin to study its intrinsic ambiguities and tensions (1982: 190–91). Indeed, Bernaldese often make reference to the saying “parenti, serpenti” [relatives are snakes] to express precisely such intrafamilial tensions, indicating that the family is by no means an unproblematic site of trust despite a prevailing ideal of unity and solidarity. Moreover, the notion of kinship itself that Eisenstadt and Roniger employ does not allow for the ambiguous kinship relations that appear in Bernalda: beyond the nuclear family, as kinship distances increase, the relationship may remain latent, virtually

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unrecognized: kinship remains dormant, but at any point the relationship may be activated or invoked as a way of creating a supplementary binding between persons, and such a reactivation of kinship may indeed serve instrumental aims. Minicuci’s meticulous study of a Calabrian village of Polis (Minicuci 1994) brings to the fore another aspect of the kinship/patronage distinction. She documents the historical transformation of town politics from one of familist domination to a more properly clientelistic system, arguing that the family ties per se did not create patronage until there was a wider mutation in the sociopolitical context. What is interesting here is that the author points to continuities and similarities in the two phenomena, in which the subsequent clientelist system incorporated and made use of horizontal ties and systems of alliance that characterized the older familist system, thus creating a hybridization. While Minicuci hesitates to call Polis’s system one of “patronage” as it is generally defined in the literature, she aptly points out that there is an underlying culture of patronage that is similar. It is precisely this wider culture or ideology of patronage with which we are concerned here, rather than a narrow category of patronage per se.3 With regard to the problem of defining patronage, Herzfeld’s analysis of the “honor and shame” concept in Mediterranean societies is quite instructive (Herzfeld 1980; 1987b). He critiques the overextension of the English gloss, which he claims has led to a stereotypical characterization of “Mediterranean” culture: Since the beginning of systematic anthropological research in the Mediterranean lands, the terms “honour” and “shame” have been used to represent an enormous variety of local social, sexual, economic, and other standards. The significance of these values in each culture should not be minimised. It is, however, reduced and obscured by apriorism, circularity and ethnocentrism inherent in the use of such inefficient Englishlanguage glosses for the purposes of cross-cultural analysis. (1980: 339)

Herzfeld suggests a more cautious approach by considering local categories and by being more sensitive to the “reductionist generalization of glossing” (ibid.: 349), perhaps by employing groups of glosses (1987b). In much the same way as the “Mediterranean honor and shame” discourse has played out, “patronage” has glossed a variety of phenomena and yet has managed to ignore other, closely related forms of interpersonal relations such as cronyism and nepotism. Instead of squeezing the ethnographic data into a narrow category of “patronage,” then, we can gain much more analytically by exploring a local category such as raccomandazione.4

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Like the “honor and shame complex,” the category of patronage has played no small role in the overall representation of Mediterranean societies, and this has had implications for the relationship between the observers and the observed. Initially, various scholars of patronage worked in Southern Europe, Latin America, and some North African and Near Eastern settings, and although there was a good deal of cross-reference, as Davis (1977) points out, there was little comparative study. Davis takes it upon himself to offer an initial comparison of this “near-universal form” (1977: 150). As Mediterranean studies began to take shape as a category, patronage came to be assumed to be a characterizing, unifying trait of “the Mediterranean” along with analytical categories such as “honor and shame,” “amoral familism,” “ocular aggression” (i.e. evil eye), and “fatalism.” Gellner, for example, has noted that Mediterranean societies have “a patronage image” (Gellner 1977: 4). In his review of the anthropological literature of the Mediterranean area, Gilmore includes “patron-client dependencies” among the resemblances that Mediterraneanist scholars have observed, and he writes that “Patronage gives a certain flavor and distinctiveness in Mediterranean politics” (1982: 175, 179). In his case study of a Sardinian village, Weingrod introduces the ethnographic data with the comment that “Sardinia is an especially relevant case since it is part of a classic Mediterranean ‘patron-client’ area” (Weingrod 1977a: 327, my emph.). When authors make reference to Italy, they focus inevitably and almost invariably on the South, which has traditionally been the locus of “othering” scholarship in Italy (Morris 1997, Gribaudi 1997; Petrusewicz 1998). Silverman’s work in Colleverde, Umbria (Silverman 1965, 1977), is exceptional as a study of Central Italian patronage, but she casts patronage in historical terms. She writes, “In contemporary Colleverde there is no longer a patron group” (1965: 103). For a Northern Italian context, Holmes provides a description of traditional patronage in a Friulian town (Holmes 1989), but the attention to patronage is secondary and, once again, historical. Shore’s study of patronage in the Italian university system, with a case study from Central Italy, is one of the very few works to deal with patronage outside of the South in contemporary terms (Shore 1989). Yet fifteen years before Tangentopoli, Zuckerman already injected the discussion with a solitary note of caution, as he observed the following: There existed a scholarly consensus that the North is best seen as another case of an industrialised society, significantly different from the “traditional” or “modernizing” South. There is reason to believe, however, that there exist strong similarities throughout Italy in regard to general norms

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and behaviour, competition and authority, as well as toward social cohesion and division. (Zuckerman 1977: 65–66)

One of the most comprehensive and ambitious studies of patronage to date is that of Eisenstadt and Roniger (1984), which takes into account a vast body of literature dealing with cases on every continent. This authoritative work merits a moment of discussion for its discursive construction of Italy and the South. Here, Italy is represented by studies from Ancient Rome, Western Sicily, Southern Italy, and Central Italy (the latter, again, in historical terms). The authors place Italy among the “Mediterranean areas of Southern Europe,” and together with Ireland (sole representative for Northern Europe); then they group it together with other “Souths”—the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—as societies in which clientelism persists in the cores of their institutional structures. These societies are contrasted to areas in which clientelism appears to be an “addendum” to the institutional order (e.g. the United States, the USSR, Israel, and Japan). Among the “cultural orientations” featured in Eisenstadt and Roniger’s view of clientelist societies, they cite “a particular definition of personal and collective identity” that “emphasizes the relatively passive stance of persons and collectivities with regard to their social, natural and cosmic environments” (1984: 211). Such reasoning has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing the stereotype of the “fatalistic” Southerner that has often been invoked with reference to Southern Italy (and some other Mediterranean areas), not to mention the gender coding of such passivity as feminine, and by extension the Southerner, too, as feminine.5 And once the analytical category of “honor” has been established and linked to patronage by previous authors (e.g. Peristiany 1965), it is invoked by Eisenstadt and Roniger as one of the features that symbolize and legitimize patron-client relations in “Mediterranean areas” (1984: 52, 211–13). Thus we see how such academic discourses work to reinforce one another in a circular fashion. In those countries in which patronage appears to constitute an institutional “addendum,” as they put it, Eisenstadt and Roniger cite the historical case of bossism in the United States, modern Japan, and the USSR; the latter (they assert) manages to keep its tendencies to patronage in check. Although as they concede some cross-cultural similarities, they nonetheless reaffirm their schematization: Countervailing tendencies in [these] societies can never entirely negate the continuous emergence, in all these societies, of some types of patronclient relations at different levels of the social structure. Such relations

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tend to develop repeatedly in all these societies, even if in different social areas and with different scope. But what these counter-attempts succeed, on the whole, in doing is preventing the transformation of such relations from addendum-types into a central mode of institutional integration. (Ibid.: 200)

Of course, Eisenstadt and Roniger could not foresee the events of recent years in the ex-Soviet Union and Japan that have revealed the degree to which cronyism and para-patronage relationships are in fact more than mere institutional appendices, although it is beyond the scope of the present study to determine whether these societies somehow transformed from addendum-types or, instead, the preexisting patronage simply surfaced in full force. In the United States, on the other hand, a preponderance of such relationships remains submerged in universalistic ideologies, and in any case powerful lobbies are a much more visible target in terms of brokerage. Noteworthy is the absence of Northern Europe in Eisenstadt and Roniger’s material (with the except of Ireland, noted above), an area that is presumably free of such phenomena, even though we might ask what “counter-attempts” failed in Germany in the recent CDU kickback scandal or even in the heart of the European Commission itself under Jacques Santer. This leads me to reiterate one of the major concerns of this study, that of the relations of power that encapsulate the entire discourse on patronage, which we may cast very broadly as “North-South” relations: Northern Italy/Southern Italy; Northern Europe/Southern Europe; (North) Developed Countries/(South) Developing Countries. Related to this issue, scholars have hotly debated the suitability of using “the Mediterranean” as a culture area (Herzfeld 1984, 1985, 1987b; Galt 1985; de Pina-Cabral 1989), and Herzfeld in particular has drawn attention to the risk that this concept can lead to the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes and circular reasoning. Without digressing too far into the question, one of the key points that emerges from the critics—a point that has received a great deal of attention in anthropology in the last two decades—is that as scholars we must recognize our own involvement in the relations of power with those whom we are studying.

On the Origins and Development of Clientelism While we have little information on the absolute origins of clientelism, Fustel de Coulange’s landmark volume on Ancient Rome (1864) demonstrates that it was already a highly developed institution, and pace the militants of the Lega Nord party,6 he observes that clientelism existed

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throughout Ancient Italy. While there has been no attempt to trace possible continuities and connections between such historical antecedents and contemporary forms of patronage, and it is beyond our purview here to do so, it is worth noting that many key terms in the present-day discourse date back at least to this period, although today they might be describing quite different manifestations. Take, for example, patronus, clientelae, amicus, and amicitia (Signorelli 1983; Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 52–63).7 In any case, aside from passing references to the “feudal” character of clientelism, most of the literature regarding its development in Southern Italy has focused on a period spanning from the early modern epoch to the moment just prior to Unification. Scholars have treated the origins of clientelistic relations in Southern Italy (and in the rest of Southern Europe) with both cultural and functional explanations, often with elements connecting the two perspectives. The functional explanations have tended to emphasize the adaptive qualities of patronage in this setting: as Foster writes, “By means of a great number of dyadic contracts . . . the villager maximizes his security in the uncertain world in which he lives” (1965: 1293). Many researchers, such as Boissevain (1966), describe clientelism as fulfilling a need for protection not provided by the state. Schneider and Schneider (1976) trace this absence of protection to the legacy of several centuries of Spanish domination, and here one strain of cultural explanation intersects the functional explanation, while others have stressed the historical moment of the Italian Risorgimento and the vulnerability created in the wake of its reforms (for example, Tarrow 1967; Waterbury 1977; White 1980). In this regard, Tarrow responds to the common perception that patronage is a survival of feudalism, though feudal-type relations did exist alongside traditional forms of patronage (Tarrow 1967: 89): he argues that patronage developed around the bourgeois landowners privileged by Italian Unification in the mid-nineteenth century rather than the surviving feudal aristocracy who sold off their lands to them. It seems to me, though, that his point is valid if we consider patronage in a very specific definition, for in an expanded perspective such as the one adopted here, a number of continuities emerge between older feudal-patrimonialist cultural genres of sociopolitical control under the Kingdom of Naples and the newer forms of patronage in the context of the nascent Kingdom of Italy. Again in terms of the problematic presence of the state, many scholars have held the patron-client relationship to be an adaptation of an uneasy state–civil society relationship by its mitigation of the harsh impersonality and inflexibility of the government apparatus, and by connecting the isolated local level to extralocal levels through the mediation of the

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patron (Wolf 1956; Kenny 1966; Silverman 1965; Pitt-Rivers 1954; Campbell 1964; Chubb 1982). As Campbell notes, “The system of patronage introduces a flexibility into administrative machinery whose workings are very often directed by persons remote form the people whose fortunes they are affecting” (1964: 247). Gribaudi (1980) provides a more sophisticated treatment of this notion by demonstrating how the Christian Democrats in postwar Italy attempted to alter this popular view of the distant state to one in which the state is perceived as necessary: a paternalistic, benevolent agent for Southern development. As I mentioned earlier, the figure of the broker appears in much of the literature as marking the transition from an older patronage of “notables” to more modern forms of clientelism. Thus as the rural setting that anthropologists studied gradually modernized and was increasingly integrated into the nation-state, traditional patronage appeared to have transformed itself into modern brokerage. For example, Gribaudi (1980) traces a shift from the traditional notable patron of prewar Southern Italy to the modern broker. The dyadic bond is thought to no longer be between the paternalistic, traditional notable and his client—a durable tie based on respect and prestige—but between the party boss or secretary and the voter (cf. Chubb 1982). With regard to Southern Italy, previous researchers have depicted a transition in the postwar period from “traditional” patron-client relationships to a “new corporate clientelism” based on the mass political party (Tarrow 1967; Weingrod 1977a; Chubb 1982). This interpretation cites the expanding role of the state in the South, agrarian reform, and the allocation of massive special assistance funds to the Mezzogiorno as primary factors in this change. According to a number of scholars, the contrast between the two forms of clientelism includes a suggested movement from a strictly vertical, “segmentary” system—in which the traditional patron links the local and supralocal levels—to a system in which these levels are integrated through the mass political party, which has connections to horizontal associations such as labor unions. In relation to this shift, Weingrod notes the following: “Patronage in the anthropologists’ sense appears increasingly to be a historical phenomenon, while patronage in the political science sense becomes more relevant to contemporary issues” (Weingrod 1977a: 325). Despite some objective changes in the postwar period, Weingrod’s characterization seems more to reflect a certain antiquated analytical division of labor between anthropologists and political scientists than any bona fide qualitative shift in the ideology of clientelism. In part, this is due to a problem of definition between the disciplines, discussed by Weingrod (ibid.): anthropologists have viewed clientelism in terms of

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interpersonal relationships primarily in “traditional” settings, while political scientists have looked more at the functioning of political machines in “modern” or “modernizing” societies. With the transformation of Basilicata and other rural areas of Southern Italy into a democratic system of mass political parties, it might indeed have appeared that anthropology’s object had vanished. Additionally, by focusing their studies on isolated, rural villages, previous anthropologists tended to depict patronage as a phenomenon of local-supralocal mediation, in which a sophisticated notable mediated between his country “bumpkin” client and the outside community. As television, education, modern transportation infrastructures, and political parties altered the necessity for this type of mediation, again it would appear that our object has disappeared. Silverman, for example, states in her Umbrian case that current elites are only “simulating the role of the traditional patron” (1965: 187), and yet she later remarks in a footnote that “the importance of [the raccomandazione] has diminished only slightly though the channels have changed” (ibid.: 189). Having documented the demise of more spectacular patronage forms in Colleverde, then, she leaves the persistence of raccomandazione unaccounted for. In a similar fashion, Boissevain recounts the passing of traditional patronage in Malta, which has increasingly been substituted by “organizational brokerage,” and yet he remarks as follows: The local patron can provide even fewer important services personally. But he can use his influence with people he knows well in the increasingly complex government who, in turn, dispense those prizes. There is still a personal relationship with some moral overtones between the client and his patron/broker. But the relationship is no longer exclusive. (1977: 89)

Elsewhere he notes, “It will be obvious that in a country as small as Malta the personal element in social relations will continue to remain strong” (ibid.: 90). How to account for these relics of patronage? They seem unworthy of specific regard in the literature. And where political patronage seems to have taken the place of old-style patronage, it has usually been shrugged off by the anthropologists and left for the political scientists to deal with (see Shore 1989). For example, in two popular ethnographies of Naples—Belmonte’s The Broken Fountain (Belmonte 1979) and Goddard’s Gender, Family and Work in Naples (Goddard 1996)—the authors make no mention whatsoever of patronage phenomena or raccomandazioni. Goddard includes some discussion of clientelism in her general description of Naples but provides no ethnographic data on it from her own research, which is all the more surprising since the central focus of her work is the labor market, one of the most notorious sites of contemporary clientelism.

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Additionally, the tendency of many scholars to reify the figures of “the patron” and “the client” acts to obscure a number of important manifestations of clientelism.8 The reification of the roles of patron and client occurs despite the fact that numerous scholars have pointed out that virtually everyone, potentially, can both recommend or be recommended in some sphere or another (Kenny 1960; Boissevain 1966; Galt 1974). The purported patron/client distinction also replicates the division of labor problem that Weingrod (1977b) has raised: the anthropologist studies the perspective of the client, the political scientist that of the elite patron. Apart from the fact that we find the anthropologist—as has most commonly been the case in the history of the discipline— studying the “weak,” this manner of pigeonholing these people as the dependent “clients” creates a blindness to their possible capabilities as actors with power, no matter how modest, and to situations—as in cronyism or nepotism—in which elites are using the same mechanisms traditionally relegated to those labeled as “clients.” Many of these mechanisms can be seen in what Italians refer to as raccomandazione, but less so in a narrower category of “patronage.” Relatedly, the patron/client dichotomy is often underpinned by a form of class reductionism in which it is assumed that actors conduct themselves in a stereotypical way because of their class positionality. In this sense, we note the observation in Gilmore’s literature survey: “Patronage, then, is viewed in much recent work as an elite strategy in class struggle” (Gilmore 1982: 194). While patronage may certainly work to the benefit of those in positions of power—and indeed, the present study confirms how this has occurred in the Southern Italian context—nonetheless, if we examine it in terms of its ideology and poetics, we must necessarily go beyond a mechanical assignation of classes and a supposed class-based intentionality. In fact, my study explores the local or emic term of raccomandazione precisely as a way of recuperating categories such as daily-life raccomandazioni, cronyism, and nepotism, all of which have been pushed to the margins in the literature in the process of devoting exclusive attention to defining classic patronage phenomena. Explanations that privilege the cultural origins of clientelism have tended to receive less emphasis than functionalist ones. Some scholars have discussed the role of popular perceptions of the state as alien, hostile, and/or threatening; these works cite such perceptions, yet for the most part they leave them unexplored. For instance, Chubb (1982: 45) presents the example of the construction industry in Palermo, which she codes as a display of a “logic of paternalism and personalism,” but this “logic” is not itself taken as an object of scientific interest. Functionalist and cultural explanations again blend in the observation of a number

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of researchers on the self-perpetuating quality of clientelism: that is, the system itself continues to create the need for its mechanisms, primarily because people are convinced of its necessity. On the other hand, the notion of a clientelistic “logic” or “mentality” appears with the treatment of patronage in terms of ideology in Boissevain (1965, 1966, 1974) and in Li Causi (1976), and in this regard they are exceptional among the various scholars. Subsequently, they both influenced the work of Signorelli (1983) on patronage in Southern Italy. Boissevain suggests that the ideology of mediation in Catholicism has been influential in the development of patronage, and his later work (1974, 1977) develops the concept of a secular-religious analogy still further. Earlier, though, Kenny (1960) mentions an analogy between secular and religious patronage in Spain. While I was at first skeptical of Boissevain’s early presentations of this argument, perhaps because his first formulation seems to strongly suggest a causal relationship, I later came to appreciate the ideological role of Catholicism as practiced in Southern Italy. Because my study emphasizes ideology even more centrally than in Boissevain’s work, I dedicate further attention to his hypothesis in the next chapter. Like Boissevain, Signorelli (1983) raises the issue of religious ideology in clientelist ideology and its cultural grounding, and her work also has the merit of not confining the ideological analysis to the sphere of religion. Some analysts have viewed Southern Italian clientelism as a product of an incomplete capitalistic rationalization of the area’s economy (for example, Graziano 1977 or Chubb 1982). Davis (1977: 150) has justly critiqued this claim: he points out that patronage existed long before the penetration of the state or capitalism, but such factors may have helped shape the particular forms that it has assumed. Relatedly, the incomplete rationalization argument dovetails into an “evolutionary” perspective proposed in Chubb (1982), probably drawing from related ideas in Tarrow (1967), whom she cites elsewhere, and from analogous analyses of the mafia (see the contributions in Fiandaca and Cosentino 1994). Chubb theorizes that the party of mass patronage is an intermediate step between a patron-client system and an ideological or interest-based system: “Under these circumstances, the politics of mass patronage may well be merely a transitional phase, but the stimuli required to produce the transformation are nowhere to be seen” (Chubb 1982: 77). Tarrow also implicitly equates patronage with a certain evolutionary backwardness: “Where the traditional ordering of social roles has broken down and no modern system of hierarchy has arisen to take its place, status groups are still too fragmented to coalesce into modern social classes” (Tarrow 1967: 48, my emph.).

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First, the current consensus argues against the notion that clientelism is somehow a “stage” in political development, and especially that it will disappear with further development (cf. Eisenstadt and Roniger: 28, 203). Again, it is essential to place these analyses within the framework of North/South power relations: such evolutionary perspectives, in my view, seem to draw from stereotypical North American/North European depictions of patronage as a feature of a backward society in Southern Italy (and Southern Europe, more generally), in which “modern” forms are taken for granted as a point of reference and assumed to be thoroughly achieved at the apex of the evolutionary scale. Rather than consider patronage in a stagnant or reifying manner, which would indeed make it appear a relic in a modern society, I consider how personalistic sociocultural genres such as raccomandazione have, on the contrary, dynamically intersected with so-called modern, rational epistemologies, thereby yielding hybrid forms. Indeed, we may ask whether or not the most “modern” forms have in fact been definitively achieved in what have been known to be nonclientelistic societies.

Theoretical Critiques in the Literature Theoretical critiques in the work on clientelism have remained enmeshed in the debates that were contemporary with the two boom periods in this literature (see Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 27). Thus, the work in the 1970s reacted to the structuralist-functionalist perspective of the 1960s, and it argued in favor of performance analysis and attention to process (Boissevain 1974; Weingrod 1977b). Weingrod’s critique also calls for a treatment of the issue of power, but the emphasis is contained within the local level. I do think the literature has provided some excellent descriptive work on patronage and power relations on the local level; the point regarding power is well taken, however, when applied to the supralocal level, which I seek to address here. It would seem ironic that Weingrod insists so much on the issue of power and yet be so oblivious to the role of academicians in the overall scheme of power relations, but it has really only been since the 1980s that anthropology, with more reflexive approaches, has brought such considerations to the fore of its concerns. In this regard, the Schneiders’ landmark work (Schneider and Schneider 1976) is unusual in its sensitivity to wider spheres of power, although their perspective differs from my own. With the popularity of Wallerstein’s ideas in the period in which they wrote, the Schneiders draw from world systems theory to counter cultural determinism in the explanation of conditions in Western Sicily, including clientelism and mafia.

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Despite the touch-ups here and there in the attempt to keep pace with current debates in anthropological theory, we must note that previous researchers have generally operated from a fundamentally etic, positivistic paradigm. Yet such a positivistic paradigm—no matter how much “process” or “performance” you add into it—is incapable of grasping many of the ideological and stylistic qualities that constitute significant continuities in the various phenomena defined as patronage. For this reason, the political scientist’s electoral machine and the anthropologist’s patron-client dyad appeared to be apples and oranges. Davis, for example, declares the following: Friendship, kinship, spiritual kinship are secondary characteristics of patronage, which is fundamentally no more than subordination and superordination by contract. [. . .] Just as the essence of patronage is not caught by the terms nepotist and blackleg, so neither is it caught by kinship, friendship, godparenthood. (1977: 148)

And yet, the very forms that Davis characterizes as “secondary” to patronage are extremely relevant in the local category of raccomandazione.9 By placing the indigenous concept of raccomandazione squarely center stage, I examine not only clientelism in the context of electoral politics, as political scientists have tended to do, but also the multifarious forms and practices in Southern Italy that share a similar ideological framework, thus assuming a broader anthropological context as a holistic backdrop. A preliminary step in this direction was Silverman’s (1977) critique and call for the distinction and exploration of emic perspectives in addition to the etic ones that have dominated investigation. Silverman notes that “students of patronage do not always specify whether they are depicting folk concepts or social structure, and they often argue from one to the other” (1977: 18). If anthropologists’ notion of traditional patronage no longer seems applicable to many areas, then, by considering the emic perspective, we must realize that it would be wrong to limit our purview of modern patronage as mere vote-gathering, though this is certainly an important and pervasive manifestation. As Silverman writes, [The emic study of patronage] is concerned with the ways people conceptualise, talk about, or rationalize behaviour—perhaps the behaviour that the social scientist identifies as patronage, but more particularly, behaviour that is defined as patronage (or something like it) in the native idiom. (Ibid.: 11)

Rather than try to fit the ethnographic data into the mold of “patronage,” the study of an indigenous concept such as raccomandazione can allow us

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to appreciate the subtleties in some earlier works, like that of Campbell (1964) cited earlier, that recognize the affinities between more formal patron-client relations and phenomena like cronyism and nepotism. My perspective also recuperates the category of organized crime, which is one of the numerous forms linked to the raccomandazione. In this light, the discussion here relates to what authors have referred to as “culturalist” treatments of mafia as a “mentality” and as “behavior” alongside those analyses that have dealt with mafia as a cohesive, secret criminal organization (cf. Hess 1986; Chubb 1989; Hobsbawm 1965). Some previous scholarship (such as Chubb 1982, 1989; Walston 1986) has dealt with objective ties between organized crime and clientelism, either as cases of direct involvement in government by mafiosi (Sicily), or in terms of the complicity of crime syndicates in obtaining clientelistic votes (as with the Neapolitan camorra). Graziano (1977) discusses the functional similarities of clientelism and organized crime as strategies for the subordinate and as a means of organizing private interests. Going beyond stereotypical portrayals of violent criminals, some scholars have described the role of the mafioso as a broker or middleman, similar to the clientelistic patron, while Galt has pointed out that the patron-client tie is the basic structure of mafia (1974: 85). The anthropological literature on organized crime and clientelism has treated cultural codes such as notions of friendship, respect, and furbizia [slyness]. Overall, research on organized crime has produced a vast quantity of excellent historical and descriptive material. However, as Silverman (1977) noted for clientelism, the emic perspective is still wanting in its development: Siebert (1994, 1995, 1996) and Dino (1999) are two of the pioneer researchers in this direction, and it is clear that anthropology has yet to realize the full potential of its contribution. Bernaldese, as well as many Italians, often refer to clientelistc circles as “mafia,” but what do they really mean by this linkage? Discourses of raccomandazione, I believe, are one possible key to understanding the connections between these categories. By exploring the ideology of raccomandazione, I will examine in chapter 4 connections between clientelism and organized crime, not as two separate but interpenetrating phenomena, but rather as two cultural genres that share an ideological and stylistic basis. This analysis also extends its reach to the genre of tangente [bribe, kickback], a key feature of current clientelistic practices in Southern Italy and in Italy more generally, which has received almost no attention in the literature. To sum it up, I will seek to pick up from where the previous studies of patronage have left off, widening the scope through the exploration of the indigenous term raccomandazione. If, as I noted earlier, classic patronage is a thing of the

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past, and yet we are still left with diffuse, manifold forms of raccomandazione, how are we to explain this?

A Renewed Approach: The Poetics and Ideology of Raccomandazione Since the two boom periods in the patronage literature described earlier, the field of inquiry in anthropology has grown: there are new paradigms from which to look at old problems and new questions emerging from old concerns. After the 1970s, the topic of patronage was left aside like an old bone that had been chewed on for too long and no longer had any visible meat. But even if patronage was no longer a trendy topic for anthropological investigation, it certainly did not go away as a reality in the communities studied. In Bernalda, the town that I have studied since 1989, I was first drawn to the issue of raccomandazione as a central feature of the discourse on chronic youth unemployment, a problem that involves over 60 percent of the town’s young people. Over the last decade, I have observed the expansion of heroin dealing and consumption, petty and organized crime, and the arrest of two ex-mayors (among others) for their alleged role in a scam to receive reconstruction funds following the 1980 earthquake (the charges against them were later dropped). With reference to national events, I shared the Italians’ grief over the assassinations of mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, and together with every other Italian household, my family and I followed the high-profile arrests and trials in the wake of the Tangentopoli scandal, whose most recent manifestations have been cases regarding earthquake reconstruction in Naples and high-speed trains. Raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia are very present topics for the people of Bernalda, as well as for many other Italian communities, and the fact that the academic discussion has lost interest in them does not make these issues any less pressing. Thus I attempt here to rethink patronage in the context of a small Southern town, but many of the points I make have ramifications well beyond that setting; by addressing patronage via the emic notion of raccomandazione, I aim to cast my analysis in terms of a poetics of cultural life and pay closer attention to the ideological aspects of this cultural category. In this way, some of the critiques that others and I have raised with regard to the previous studies might find some redress. And as a product of my own era in anthropology, I want to consider patronage not simply as a phenomenon in and of itself, but place it alongside the issues I find quite relevant: identity, community, and power.

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In recent years, a number of anthropologists have been influenced by developments in several disciplines—including linguistics, semiotics, folklore, the new historicism, and film and literary criticism—in creating approaches that may be encompassed within the rubric of cultural or social poetics. Herzfeld, who prefers the term “social poetics,” writes that poetics is “a term derived from the Greek verb for action [. . .], an analytic approach to the uses of rhetorical form” (1997: 142). Not to be confused with poetry per se, or “the poetic” as an aesthetic category, the field of poetics draws impetus from Jakobson’s discussion of the poetic function of language, which is “the set toward the message as such” (1960: 356). Taken as a whole, these orientations have eclectically blended and reinvigorated theoretical elements that variously include strains of poststructuralism, performance theory, symbolic interaction, discourse analysis, and notions of practice, to name a few. Here, I cannot devote full attention to the historical background of cultural poetics or explore all of this arena’s implications for the overall development of the discipline.10 Rather, I will limit myself to indicating how this bundle of theoretical perspectives has influenced my approach to the study of patronage in Southern Italy, and I will outline some of the concepts central to the analysis; I will also, in the remaining chapters, introduce further clarification as specific points arise. First of all, many poetics analysts have critiqued the presumed distinction between the “poetic” and the “everyday,” according to which the study of everyday forms is considered irrelevant to “high” or poetic genres (Stewart 1983; Caton 190). Drawing from linguistic models, a cultural poetics perspective considers the textedness of daily life itself, a quality that has hitherto been the exclusive reserve of privileged art genres, and in this manner it has not only valorized everyday genres as an object of attention but also pointed out the interconnections between such quotidian genres and proper “art” genres. Applied to the study of patronage, if past research has focused almost exclusively on high genres—that is, those forms that have been consolidated into striking genres like traditional patron/client relations, political patronage, and organized crime—in seeking to outline a “poetics of patronage,” I will connect these high genres of patronage to an analysis of everyday life and its social relations in the ethnographic setting. In my analysis, the indigenous concept of raccomandazione is a privileged site for bringing these high and low genres together. With raccomandazione as a starting point, we can begin to address the issue of why so many scholars have described the disappearance of patronage but nonetheless recognize the continued influence of raccomandazione-type phenomena.

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My approach also draws eclectically from semiotic theory, from which it is apparent that the social intercourse of everyday life creates and is created by the medium of language in all of its numerous manifestations. For this reason, the sign can allow us special insight into the contact of consciousness, of subjectivities (Volosinov 1973). The semiotic material of the sign is multiaccentual and mutable; since the same sign is used by individuals of different social postionalities, it is imbued with their differences and becomes a crucial locus of struggle. Relatedly, words incorporate an evaluative accent, thereby embedding social value judgement in language. It is important to look at how the sign is inflected with both unity and struggle, for as Silverman notes in her critique (1977), we cannot assume that the emic perspective is monolithic, in patronage or in anything else. I therefore give primacy to raccomandazione as a sign, examining how people employ this sign in different, often contrasting ways, and how it is also a shared cultural genre, indeed a shared language (those who refuse the raccomandazione in some of its forms are nonetheless fully conversant in its grammar). In the previous Anglophone literature, the translation of raccomandazione as “recommendation” and its insertion under the umbrella of patronage simply did not do justice to the cultural importance of this concept. The ideology of raccomandazione is broader than the local-extralocal mediation of anthropologists or the vote machines of the political scientists: it is an ideology of power, but it is also a deeply rooted expressive style of approaching interpersonal relations and, instrumentally, of achieving ends. Although raccomandazione has some shared meaning in all of its various usages, a semiotic least common denominator—otherwise, communication about it would not be possible—a closer look reveals how people accent the usages in different ways and how these usages situate and enunciate diverse subject positions. Of particular interest here is the relationship between such accents in raccomandazione discourses and social positionalities of class and gender, positionalities that are, moreover, hierarchical. Thus, the research data suggest that while everyone has a certain common-sense notion about what raccomandazione is, in point of fact people of different class backgrounds tend to view it differently, and such variations are sedimented in discourse. Moreover, whereas the previous literature in many respects reified the figures of the patron and the client, the approach advocated here considers how discourses create the positions of raccomandato and raccomandante [the persons who, respectively, receive and give raccomadazioni], positions that are by no means fixed. Just as the single concepts of “patron” and “client” are subject to reevaluation, their interrelationship, which has typically been character-

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ized in the literature as the “patron-client dyad” (Foster 1961), must also be viewed in a critical light, despite the fact that the model has been corrected with the notion of the “triad” or patronage “chains” (Boissevain 1966). Previous studies have depicted the patron as a mediator on behalf of the client or even an entire locale. Yet an anthropological attempt to get beyond our ethnocentrism, rooted as it is in a common-sense Western conception of subjects as atomized, individual actors, opens the field to recent philosophical historicizing and questioning of our subjectivity. Applying this to patronage, rather than looking at the phenomenon simply as mediation between two “finalized” individuals, we might momentarily suspend our notion of subjectivity and instead consider how patronage practices combine different voices toward an end, a “will to the event,” as Bakhtin puts it (Bakhtin 1984). In this sense, the Bakhtinian conception of voice offers a suggestive analytical instrument, particularly the conventions that combine voice in polyphony or suppress it monologically, and how voice casts glances at the speech of others in double-voicedness. Hence, instead of casting the patron-client relation in terms of a dyadic relationship, a poetics of patronage as proposed here would view the relation as a dialogic one: the raccomandato makes use of the raccomandazione (that is, the voice of the raccomandante) in his or her self-construction and self-presentation in order, to, say, obtain a job, to take the most banal example. The raccomandante, on the other hand, might seek to control the political voice of the raccomandato, as it takes on a concrete form in the vote. One advantage of this paradigm is that we may begin to see relationships with other social practices that might configure voice in a similar manner or feature parallelisms, which in linguistics refers to the repetition of elements on different levels (Jakobson 1960). One such parallelism is that of patron saint cults, examined in chapter 3, in which the application of a poetics paradigm gives us an opening for exploring Boissevain’s hypothesis of the connection between Catholicism and patronage. And just as the study of conventions of voice could bring to the fore similarities in social practices that are superficially different, it should be borne in mind that such conventions could differentiate manifestations that might seem to be very similar, precisely as in the case of traditional magic. An examination of the uses of voice can serve as a means to distinguish different genres of patronage, a way of getting at what is at the heart of the differences between, say, an autoraccomandazione [self-raccomandazione] and a raccomandazione pagata [purchased raccomandazione]: the sedimentation of genres offers a means for tracking different orientations to a social reality and relatively stabilized forms of behavioral interchange (Volosinov 1973 and Bakhtin 1981, 1984). It is important

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to examine who may appropriately deploy particular genres and how: as chapter 5 will emphasize, the differential use of genres is related to personal competence, but also to social positionality, especially in terms of class belonging. By studying the actors’ repertoires of genres, we can reveal who is capable of manipulating a wide range of genres and why actors are more or less capable of such manipulation. Not surprisingly, it turns out that people of higher socioeconomic class standing tend to have wider repertoires of raccomandazione genres. For this reason, we arrive head-on at key issues of power and hierarchy in the ethnographic setting, giving weight to cultural forms of dominance in addition to those that have commonly received attention in the social sciences, such as economic or political dominance. It would be a mistake to consider genres as static forms: like all social creations they are conventional, and as such they change through time, simultaneously bearing traces of their past. Here, I am interested in examining some of the continuities in patronage phenomena, in contrast to the depiction of a rupture between an old patronage of notables and a new patronage of mass political parties—discussed earlier—and, in a parallel fashion, the continuity and change from the old-style raccomandazione and the purchased raccomandazione. Along with this diachronic focus, the synchronic relationship among the various genres begs analysis; an intertextuality carries over cultural associations among them (cf. Caton 1990; Greenblatt 1989). In this direction, I will consider the relationship between the genres of raccomandazione, organized crime and corruption (the tangente), and the ways in which they share significations. Past scholarship on patronage has overwhelmingly neglected what we may refer to as the metacultural aspects of the category. This is partly because analysts have devoted attention to patronage as a phenomenon within a positivist framework, but the way in which patronage is “culture commenting on culture” is actually one of its most interesting features. Thus, the poetics perspective adopted here gives a new priority to local interpretive practice. Some scholars (for example, Herzfeld 1985 and Briggs 1988) have analyzed how indigenous notions of meaning in expressive practices embody concepts of social value; these expressive systems also comment upon the relations of the community to other social groups. The focus on interpretive practice tries to get at how the plurality of meaning is deployed within an interpretive community and its effects on the constitution of the group itself (Limón 1989). Thus, on the one hand, differences in the interpretive practice of raccomandazione within the community yield some indication as to the relations of power, while on the other hand, commonalities in the interpretation

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of raccomandazione can be seen in the construction of an overarching “Southern” identity, which in turn has ramifications in terms of the South’s relationship to other geographic entities (particularly Northern Italy, Northern Europe, and North America). By attending here to interpretive practice, I attempt to counterbalance an unfortunate overemphasis on etic interpretations in the Italian patronage literature, as cited above in Silverman’s critique. Academic discourses have privileged their own position, generally ignoring the metacultural discourses in which people narrate and comment upon raccomandazione in a highly conscious and hybrid manner. Finally, the present study includes reflection on raccomandazione as a discursive code or system, by which I mean a complex that features systems of meaning inscribed not only in language but in other semiotic material, such as clothing, music, or food. With this notion of discursive systems, I mean to encompass something of what we describe when we speak of a language and yet not limit the field to verbal communication. Through struggle over the sign, discourse comes to articulate social relations, particularly relations of power; here, one might think of Hebdige’s classic study of youth subcultures (Hebdige 1979). Terdiman (1985) has posited “counter-discourse” as a subversion inherent to any dominant code, and while it is indeed necessary to consider dominant and subordinate discourses, there are nonetheless several points in which the opposing discursive codes or systems condense into hybrid forms. I focus on two such systems, counterposing raccomandazione with rational-universalism. The two might appear similar to Weberian ideal types and could to some extent even be condensed into them, but with the notion of discursive systems we move away from the realm of analytical, heuristic constructs and closer to the level of lived experience. On the local level, raccomandazione is a dominant discourse, while on a supralocal level it becomes a subordinate, alternative code where the discourse of rational-universalism is dominant. Sites of hybridization between the discursive systems can be important instances that subversively recodify power relations: the crucial point here is how raccomandazione succeeds in “vampirizing” the universalistic-bureaucratic state and the impersonality of capitalistic market relations. Once again, this is all deeply imbricated in the relations of power both within Italy and without.

Raccomandazione as Ideology The discussion earlier proposes that the poetics of patronage in this setting is intimately connected with the emic concept of raccomandazione,

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which I consider not only as a phenomenon per se but also as an ideology. In this regard, given the theoretical vagaries that have long surrounded the notion of ideology, it is appropriate to make brief mention of how I am using it. Certainly, a substantial influence in this analysis has been the critical thought of Gramsci (1971; 1988), who himself dealt with the Southern Question in Italy. Gramsci’s thought and subsequent work by Althusser (1971) have made an important theoretical contribution by breaking with a number of aspects of vulgar Marxism, rejecting the view of “ideology as false consciousness”; their stress on the materiality of ideology counters the economistic interpretation that relegates ideology to “mere superstructure.”11 In Gramsci’s conception, ideology is a terrain of struggle as well as the cement that holds together the collective will, as articulated by the hegemonic class. With reference to the general Gramscian perspective on ideology, I am indebted to the work of Stuart Hall (1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1986d), who attempts to enhance Gramsci’s framework by incorporating the writings of Bakhtin and Volosinov, who themselves provide a sort of microphysics of ideology in their theories of language, as we saw above in the discussion of their treatment of ideological struggle inherent in the sign and ideological production in genre. Although Althusser and Gramsci have faced critiques for lingering traces of economism and class essentialism in their work (Hirst 1976, Laclau and Mouffe 1985, respectively), they have gained a good deal of currency in contemporary anthropological thought for the attention they place, on the one hand, on the ideological constitution of the individual subject through social institutions (Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses), and on the other hand, the role of ideology in the struggle of different social forces (Gramsci’s hegemony concept). Gramsci has further nuanced the notion of ideology with his discussion of “common sense” and “philosophy,” in which common sense—the taken-forgranted, fragmentary palimpsest of past philosophical systems—is a crucial stake in struggle. In addition to the concept of ideology, that of hegemony is an important concern in Gramsci’s work. From its early use in reference to a class alliance between proletarians and other exploited groups, the hegemony concept has expanded to deal with the stability of bourgeois rule in capitalist society (Anderson 1977). Very schematically, hegemony is leadership of political and intellectual-moral unity, in contradistinction to rule by domination; hegemonic struggle is a process in which ideology forges collective will (Mouffe 1981). Gramsci himself was greatly concerned with ideology and hegemony in his specific analyses of Italy, so these concepts appear especially apro-

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pos for this discussion of Southern Italy. In Gramscian terms, the hegemonic bloc of large Southern landowners [latifondisti] and the Northern bourgeoisie of industrial capital has, in the postwar period, given way to the hegemonic alliance of the Southern bourgeoisie, through the mass-patronage party, and the Northern bourgeoisie. On the local level in the South, I suggest that there has been an ideological continuity that has allowed the new political bourgeoisie to become the group that articulates the hegemonic principle formerly articulated by the landed gentry: the hegemonic principle that is centrally formed by the ideology of raccomandazione, which in its broadest meaning refers to the local sense of a personalistic modality. A central aspect of the ideology of raccomandazione is the Southerners’ common sense of “the way things are” in the South, especially in their conceptions of power. In chapter 5 I will more thoroughly explore how raccomandazione shapes the configuration of class relationships and power in the South. In addition to the basic notion of ideology as described here, some theorists have employed the concept of “articulation” to explain the formation of ideologies and the changes they undergo through time (Laclau 1977 and Hall 1986a, 1986b). This latter sense of articulation offers another means by which Marxian thinkers have sought to get away from economistic reduction, for articulation presupposes that ideology has no inherent class belonging, and that quite different ideological elements may in fact be articulated together—hence, ideology has no pre-given unity, and moreover, seemingly contradictory elements can coexist within an articulation. This view of articulation helps us to understand how an ideology can interpellate different groups into a hegemonic unity; the form of articulation that the ideology assumes can bear historical relation to preexisting ones, while at the same time differing vastly in content. The concept of ideological articulation, then, has a direct bearing on this study of raccomandazione as an ideology: by rearticulating the preexisting ideology of raccomandazione, the emerging postwar political elite in the South was able to consolidate its hegemony in a remarkably resilient fashion. In this sense, too, we see that the oft-proposed distinction in the literature between an old patronage of nobles and the new patronage of mass political parties is, basically, a case of old wine in new skins. Discourse positions us as social actors defining a social identity, but individuals make sense of their position through ideology without reducing subjectivity to being a reflex of class position (Hall 1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1986d). This “making sense” through ideology, as Hall argues, permits social groups to become social forces. In this light, we can see how ideological discourse with reference to the South consti-

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tutes a meridionale [Southern Italian] identity. Within this discourse, Southern identity is bound up with the articulation of raccomandazione ideology and practices, as well as common sense about “the way things are in the South.” To date, few scholars of patronage have sought to link the metacultural discourses relating patronage and identity. White (1980) is among these, presenting an example of a town in the Abruzzi that distinguishes itself from a neighboring community through its explicit rejection of clientelism. The treatment of identity is a secondary concern in her study, however, which concentrates on the social and historical reasons for this differential in the towns’ political development. By considering only this negative construction of identity—“we are not clientelists”— she neglects the question of how the other (clientelist) community defines its own identity. Herzfeld, on the other hand, has been centrally concerned with questions of identity, and although his corpus has not dealt centrally with patronage, where he has treated the issue, his analysis has been quite insightful.12 Chapter 7 will discuss the connection between the ideology of raccomandazione and Southern identity and the replication of this relationship on the national level; moreover, it indicates how subjectivity as Southerners has helped to ground hegemony (see Hall 1986a). It should be emphasized that while many excellent studies have provided us with good descriptions of how patronage is related to the use of power on a local level, there has generally been a blindness to wider relations of power on the national and international levels (Schneider and Schneider 1976 and Gribaudi 1980 are somewhat exceptional in this regard, as is Herzfeld 1992, 1997). By examining the constructions of authority that underlie the paradigms of raccomandazione and rational-universalism, the work concludes by returning to reflections on the issue of power at all levels, considering the potential for progressive change.

Notes 1. From his work in Mexico, Foster describes the patronage relationship as a “dyadic contract” that establishes a vertical relationship between the patron and client (Foster 1961). His concept of “limited good” attempts to describe a “classic” peasant worldview in which “the broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such a fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic and natural universes . . . as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity, and are always in short supply . . .” (Foster 1965: 296–97, orig. emph.). Banfield, whose work influenced Foster, coined the

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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concept of an ethnos of “amoral familism” that can be capsulized as follows: “. . . maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise” (Banfield 1958: 85). Though widely debated, Banfield’s notion of amoral familism continues to influence scholars and public opinion, as in Putnam’s more recent work on “civicness” (Putnam 1993) and Fukuyama’s study of “trust” (Fukuyama 1995). The family/patron-client distinction appears even more tenuous if we take into account Fustel de Coulanges’s observation that in Ancient Rome, clients existed within the family: they took the family name and were considered an adopted member, even closer in relationship than a cognate (1864 [1972]: 130). Eisenstadt and Roniger’s family/patronage distinction is further undermined by Allum’s discussion of the use of family in building clienteles (Allum 1973). See also Li Causi (1976) on the problem of translating the English terms “patronage” and “patron” in Italian. On the description of Southerners as a “feminine” people, see Gribaudi 1997: 95. The ethnocentrism of the assessment of patronage as a reflection of “passivity” is even clearer when we consider the “passivity” of following official procedures and faith in meritocracy: waiting one’s turn, trusting the bureaucracy to get things done without personal solicitation (see Galt 1974). The Lega Nord [Northern League] political party developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, bringing together several autonomist and separatist movements from various regions of Northern Italy. Party ideologues cast the South of Italy (which appears to include Rome) as parasitic and embodying the evils of corruption, in contrast to a pure, hardworking North. One cannot help but note, however, the historical irony that the ancient Roman popularii were “the patrons of urban plebs” (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 56), while the modern Popularii (that is, the Partito Popolare, which later became the Christian Democrats) came to be known in the postwar period as patrons par excellence. Galt (1974) is an exception in this regard. Although for many settings scholars have remarked on the use of godparenthood (or compadrazgo) to consolidate vertical patronage ties, this practice does not seem to have been widespread in Bernalda, where evidence gathered in the course of fieldwork indicates that people have generally preferred to seek their compari from the same social stratum. See Herzfeld (1997) for a good summary. Laclau and Mouffe (1985) note, however, that ideology is still superstructure in the work of Gramsci and Althusser, even if it is something more than that. See, for example, the discussion in Herzfeld 1992, which examines patronage in light of kinship idioms and nationalism.

Chapter 3

Toward a Poetics of Patronage

Not an analysis of consciousness in the form of a sole and single I, but precisely an analysis of the interactions of many consciousness. . . . Nonself-sufficiency, the impossibility of the existence of a single consciousness. I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, and with the help of another. —Mikhail Michajlovič Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Power is not just occupying a position, an armchair. I have never thought that. . . . Power is having a dialogue with people, influencing. —Giulio Andreotti, former Italian prime minister1

It should be fairly clear from the preceding discussion that the phenomenon of raccomandazione, in one modality or another, permeates virtually all aspects of life in Bernalda, and with the necessary precaution, we may consider this to be the situation of many other Southern communities. It is, in Maussian terms, a total social fact, with ramifications not only in the political and economic spheres but also in those of kinship and religion, as this chapter will elaborate. The past literature has treated raccomandazione and the general category of patronage in terms of conduct or relations between the “patron” and the “client.” I remarked in the last chapter how such studies have certainly produced an excellent body of descriptive literature. However, this perspective needs to be complemented in order to explain the continued presence of raccomandazione despite the disappearance of “traditional” patronage. The present analysis instead will look to language-based models in the attempt to understand raccomandazione as a true communicative form. Indeed, one of the interlocutors in the study intuited this analogy between raccomandazione and language:

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It’s automatic. In any sector. You speak with a friend, “I’m doing this and that,” and she says, “Let me know when you are doing it . . .” It’s an idiomatic phrase. Like in England, when you get to know someone and say [switches to English], “Hello, would you like a cup of tea?”

Thus it is not so much the ethnographic context that changes (i.e., the supposed disappearance of patronage) as our perspective, which allows us to draw new connections between cultural categories that have hitherto been treated separately or even ignored (cronyism, nepotism, tangente, and mafia). Furthermore, we find many forms of interpersonal interaction that people would likely not consider raccomandazione, though they actually draw upon precisely the same communicative framework: here I am thinking of the person who is allowed to cut in line, or the shopper who gets the unofficial discount of an occhio di riguardo [special treatment] in virtually any situation. For this reason, too, despite a burst of local optimism about change and cleaning up the system during the demise of the First Republic, we may scientifically grasp how deeply rooted raccomandazione really is, and we are compelled to conclude, contrary to what that optimism would hold, that you can root it out simply by cracking down on its most conspicuous forms, like the tangente. The highly visible modalities of raccomandazione are usually those that deal with government institutions—at all levels and in diverse sectors—at the heart of the modern Italian democratic state. But it is not only in the context of the state that the raccomandazione leaves its mark: we note the concomitant presence of raccomandazione where the penetration of market activities should be the strongest—in commercial activities. To understand why this is so, I adopt the perspicacious insight of de Certeau that even where universalizing models such as the state apparatus or the “logic of the market” seem most eminently enthroned— what he terms “the jungle of functionalist rationality”—we find an art of practice, of “making do” (de Certeau 1984: xvii). These arts of “making do,” “bricolage,” or “know-how” are illegitimate (if not illicit) from the vantage point of rationalist productivity, and de Certeau allies them with a notion of tactics, as differentiated from universalistic strategies. In sum, strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are redistributed. . . . Tactics are procedures that gain vitality in relation to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments

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in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogeneous rhythms, etc. (Ibid.: 38)

Such tactics are the moves of Neapolitan and Roman drivers described by de Certeau in the quotation heading the introduction to this work. It is not an accident that he cites these groups: Romans figure as a metonym for Italians as a whole, while Neapolitans in particular are legendary throughout Italy, in Italian literature and cinema for their perfection of the arte dell’arrangiarsi. De Certeau would have enjoyed the following anecdote, which makes us laugh: when the mandatory seat-belt law was introduced in Italy, the streets of Naples on the following day were flooded with vendors who sold oversized t-shirts bearing a black diagonal stripe across the chest. Why do the Neapolitans make us laugh here? We cannot help but note how the narrativity of the anecdote, as with other narrative forms, articulates the poetic quality of the arte dell’arrangiarsi in its dialogic relationship to a law requiring the use of seat belts in automobiles. Thus what is comic is not so much the action per se but how it expresses both a response to the law and a reiteration of a classical stereotype of Neapolitans. Recalling Herzfeld’s point that poetics has to do with the rhetoric of action, we see that a certain poesis is directly implied by this art of arrangiarsi. In fact, the name itself does not seem the result of happenstance; it elevates l’arrangiarsi for a moment to the higher status shared by those other arts upon which Italy prides itself (painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music), but also shared by the occult arts: “magic, divination, spell” reads one of the many definitions of arte in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. But what exactly does this have to do with raccomandazione? Raccomandazione is not necessarily parodic, but like l’arrangiarsi it is a reappropriation of the language of rationality, always inserting itself in interstices of the rational-universal ideal. As we begin to develop a poetics of raccomandazione, we shall see that it is part of the same galaxy of tactics as arrangiarsi and magic, too; in fact, we might consider l’arrangiarsi to be a poor relation in the family of raccomandazione. The idea that arrangiarsi is a lower-status, “poor” relation actually bears important implications in terms of class relations internal to Southern Italy, and in terms of Southern Italian identity vis-à-vis Northern Italy and Northern Europe, but this will be examined in subsequent chapters. Aside from its instantiation in daily life, the arte dell’arrangiarsi is also a classic theme of Neapolitan comedy, in theater as in cinema: the arte dell’arrangiarsi lends itself well to narrativization and has a particular appeal precisely due to the way it taps into a total social fact like raccomandazione. For example, Nanni Loy’s Mi manda Picone (1983) is a film

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that displays a connection between raccomandazione and l’arrangiarsi— the type of connection I am calling an intertextuality of genres—to the point that the title of the film itself has in many respects become synonymous with the former despite the fact that its real focus is the latter. Giancarlo Giannini’s character in the film, Salvatore, appears to be a consummate artist of l’arrangiarsi, directing an “office” for bureaucratic facilitation in the public area of a hospital and “managing” a condemned apartment building in which he houses illicit tenants. Salvatore had met Picone in the attempt to use the latter’s influence to get a coveted job at the Italsider plant—a typical raccomandazione with a tangente component. In the attempt to track down Picone, who has disappeared and is presumed dead, he uncovers a universe of machinations peopled with all sorts of traffickers in which his own arrangiarsi pales in comparison and is made to look extremely petty. Armed with Picone’s appointment book, he introduces himself to the various contacts with the phrase “Mi manda Picone” [Picone sent me], which becomes his talisman. This ritual phrase is, like raccomandazione, the presentation of the self that is vested in the name of another. Indeed, in some scenes in which he is asked his name, Salvatore obstinately uses “Mi manda Picone,” refusing to divulge his own. Both in Mi manda Picone and in raccomandazione, the element of names takes on the quality of a gift, and in fact names appear to have some qualities of Frazerian contagious magic: magical power held to be transmitted through contact, contiguity. The very euphemism for raccomandazione reveals this principle of contiguity: one has useful contatti [contacts] or agganci [hooks] who can offer a spinta [push], zeppa [wedge], or calcio nel sedere [kick in the rear end]. Being touched by this power as represented through the raccomandazione is therefore supposed to bolster one’s cause. Raccomandazione, like other types of tactics, turns order to its own ends, as de Certeau notes: Here, order is tricked by an art. Into the institution to be served are thus insinuated styles of social exchange, technical invention, and moral resistance, that is, an economy of the “gift” (generosities for which one expects a return), an esthetics of “tricks” (artists’ operations) and an ethics of tenacity (countless ways of refusing to accord the established order the status of a law, a meaning or a fatality). (Ibid.: 26)

Indeed, the raccomandazione features all of these qualities: where a meritocratic, rational-universal order would establish the criteria for procedure (such as “who goes first” or “who wins the job selection”) or the marketplace establishes its rules of order, the raccomandazione offers instead the

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mediation of gift relations for “tricks” (the “doing” of qualcuno che sa fare [someone who knows how to get things done]; fare tredici [hit the jackpot]) and tenacity (“See what you can do about it”). Where the forces of the state and market define the “individual” as a discreet entity—as in the “citizen” of a nation or the “impersonal, anonymous agent” of the market—Bernaldese often counterpose the mediation of raccomandazione: as Bakhtin put it, “Not . . . in the form of a sole and single I, but precisely an analysis of the interactions of many conciousnesses . . .”

Raccomandazione and Ideologies of the Gift Ideologies of the gift and reciprocity are central to the raccomandazione, and indeed one of the key means through which raccomandazione appropriates rational-universalism is by installing a gift relation in a marketdominated or meritocratic context. In past scholarship there was a tendency to polarize traditional and modern societies by attributing the gift economy to the former and the market economy to the latter. Revisionists reaffirming the analysis in Mauss’s pioneering treatise Essai sur le don have instead sought to temper the conviction that the gift is absent from the modern market-based society (Douglas 1990). As I have already noted, the element of the gift is often a crucial component of raccomandazione phenomena. In Bernalda, gifts—particularly food items—may be given in gratitude for a successful small-scale raccomandazione; or, before the fact, they may be given with the intention of propitiating the favor of a person bearing the power to recommend.2 The gift as riconoscimento [acknowledgment] is almost universally morally approved, and in some cases even viewed as obligatory; the petitionary gift is viewed ambivalently, even by the same people who wholeheartedly endorsed the acknowledging gift, according to the specific context. The term “gift” begins to reach its semantic limits as the exchange is morally and/or legally prohibited: here we see the gift being offered for a “right” (such as a legitimate pension, a license, or admission into a public health facility) and for something to which one is not entitled (the classic “kickback”). Generally speaking, the closer the relationship between the would-be raccomandato and the person who recommends [the raccomandante], the less need there is to offer an overt gift, meant to serve as a material expression of gratitude or ingratiation. A young person looking for work can call upon a well-connected relation, for example, without presenting any gift whatsoever. Conversely, due to conventions of family obligations, were such a kinsman not to spontaneously offer a raccomandazione, this would be read as a potential sign of hostility or a souring

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of the relationship—a threat that often hangs over people like the sword of Damocles, recognized in the saying “parenti, serpenti” [relatives are snakes]. In the case of what I am calling autoraccomandazione—where, for example, one is already recommended by virtue of his parents’ position—there may be neither an overt gift to potentially helpful outsiders nor an explicit request for a raccomandazione from them. Good friends might simply perform favors out of simpatia [fondness], knowing that by way of reciprocity they will be able to count on a return favor when the moment arises. In such cases, however, the absence of an overt gift should not be mistaken for a lack of obligation to reciprocate at another point in time. As Domenico put it, Let’s say it’s a matter of friendship. Today I helped you, so if I need something tomorrow, I know that I can turn to the person I helped. It’s like a chain.

The reciprocity of gifts is, of course, an important social feature even in those societies that are most market oriented, like that of the United States. Yet the Bernaldese on the whole practice a much more attentive and detailed accounting of gifts given and received than I have ever witnessed in the States, and this record serves as the principal guide to the future gift-giving. Let us consider various gift-giving practices associated with marriage, an institution itself deemed by Lévi-Strauss as “the archetype of exchange” (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1949]). Wedding gifts, for example, are very expensive compared to those usually given in the United States and are generally calibrated according to the intimacy of the relationship and reciprocity of a past gift. One Northern Italian woman who moved to the town when she married a local man complained to me, “For weddings, there’s an obligation to give expensive gifts. [Here] there are obligations for things that you don’t want to do.” Bernaldese make an elaborate calculation in just such a way as to at least offset the price of a seat at the wedding reception, with a small surplus to boot. The banquet itself is very costly in the ethnographic setting and even by Italian standards more generally, with an average expense per person starting around £150,000. On numerous occasions I have seen families in modest economic circumstances forgo a kinsman’s wedding celebration because they felt compelled to spend this sort of figure for each member of the family, children included; such a renouncement would be quite unusual in the United States. The circle of wedding reciprocity makes another round in the practice of the bomboniere, a small object used as a favor, usually silver, ceramic, or crystal, presented with a tulle sachet of Jordan almonds (in an odd number, in observance of superstition). The average cost of the bomboniere alone is equivalent to

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what might be normally spent per person for the reception meal in the United States.3 The practice of giving the bomboniere arose with regard to my own wedding. Since I was getting married in the United States, I really had not thought of giving bomboniere until a Bernaldese aunt accosted me: “So you don’t use the bomboniere in America, but what are you going to do here? What are you going to give D. and M. when they give you a gift, eh?” It turns out that many Italian American families use the bomboniere, particularly in the larger ethnic communities of the Northeast, and there are indeed bomboniere companies in the United States to serve this market. In the end, an American aunt of Southern Italian extraction prepared the Jordan almond confetti for my wedding, but we decided to forgo the trinket. Almost all of the American wedding guests left the confetti on the tables at the reception, probably assuming that they were part of the decor.4 In any case, having observed a number of Bernaldese in the grip of wedding preparations, it would appear that many would just as soon do without the bomboniere, or at least leave off at the confetti sachet, but in the end the social pressure of reciprocity and (perhaps even more important in Bernalda) the desire to avoid appearing stingy compel them to carry out the practice in full. And if perchance someone is overlooked in the distribution of the bomboniere, if the mistake is “read” as a slight, it may even become a source of longterm resentment, as occurred in some situations I learned of. The category of gift has long been a favorite in anthropology’s analytical repertoire. Marcel Mauss’s classic analysis points out the embedded, interpersonal qualities of gift-giving in archaic societies (Mauss 1925). Recent readings of Mauss have tended to stress his distinction between gifts and commodities, through as Carrier points out, there is a good deal of ambiguity in the work with regard to extant gift relations in modern society (Carrier 1992). Some scholars have stressed the gift/commodity distinction, as in the work of Gregory (1982), where the gift is associated with clan-based societies and the commodity with class-based societies; participants in gift transactions are held to desire the personal relationship established by gift exchange, not the things themselves, in contrast to commodity exchange. But such a distinction as it has been formulated appears of limited usefulness for the analysis of raccomandazione, for the mix of personal relationship and instrumental aims in raccomandazione gift-giving makes a clear separation of the two terms problematic. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s insistence upon the temporal dimension of gift-giving is quite suggestive for this analysis (Bourdieu 1977: 5).5 The countergift must be “deferred and different,” he writes, thereby creating symbolic capital that disguises the work-product relation (ibid.:

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5–7; 176). The rational contract, however, “telescopes” the gift and countergift exchange, laying bare what they work to “socially repress”; thus we see that commodities and gifts differ in their handling of the temporal dimension. The difference is also important for distinguishing raccomandazione from the genre of tangente, as we shall see in the following chapter. The temporal dimension of gift-giving creates a history of relations between the transactors, for as Godbout (1993) points out, the gift is a palimpsest of past relations; it bears the narrative of the entire preceding relationship between the donor and recipient unfolding through time. In contrast, the commodity merely refers to its own price, to its relationship with other objects. The other point I would like to make in regard to the gift in raccomandazione has to do with the various exchange relationships among different actors. Many scholars have commented on the importance of resource exchanges in patronage relationships (Boissevain 1966; Blok 1969; Galt 1974; Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984). In a more recent work, Linger (1993) writes of patronage that “unequal exchange and uncertainty are hallmarks of this structure,” and that “patron and client trade dissimilar things” (Linger 1993: 6). It seems that gift exchange has been somewhat taken for granted in the patronage literature, and for this reason this scholarship has downplayed other, less spectacular or visible phenomena that are generally not marked as “patronage”—such as raccomandazione among friends and relatives (the raccomandazione di simpatia) or what I have termed autoraccomandazione—and that are part and parcel of the same cultural esprit. Just why is an overt gift necessary in some cases and not in others? In order to answer this, we extend the model offered by language by viewing raccomandazione as a dialogue on all levels. A first step is to recast raccomandazione, no longer viewed simply as a dyadic or multiple-dyad encounter between individuals as much literature has maintained, but as a dialogic encounter. The ethnographic data provided countless examples of how actors do not “move” alone: when one looks for a job, makes a purchase in a shop, or deals with the bureaucracy, a raccomandazione is sought as an accompaniment.6 As intuited in the notion of the clientelist chain, this ideology of mediation in double-faced: in order to achieve some particular aim, the raccomandazione is necessary, and in order to obtain this raccomandazione, a subsidiary raccomandazione might be necessary. For seeking a raccomandazione, one does not present oneself alone, just as one does not present oneself alone as an individual citizen before the state or as an individual consumer in the impersonal marketplace. The gift (a “present”) re-presents or voices the individual and impels a response, whereas the self, alone, might not. The gift also already

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implies a response to the anticipated response, that is, a riconoscimento [acknowledgment] of the recommending person. Because gifts compel a response, there is a tendency in this setting to view gifts as always being “interested,” and recipients second-guess the intentions of the gift-giver, even where a raccomandazione is not involved. The perception of the interested gift might seem rather normal or obvious to some readers, but it contrasts with the myth of the “free gift” widely held in many Anglo-Saxon cultural contexts, which in turn has influenced scholars from these areas who have formulated the polarization between “pure” uninterested gift and market relations (see the discussion in Godbout 1993; Douglas 1990). Thus, as recognized by the people in Bernalda, gift-giving does not end up in a dead-end street: rather, it initiates, reactivates, or continues a dialogue and creates a chain of responses. For example, one Bernaldese couple happened to receive a wedding gift from a colleague of the groom, a young man with whom they were on good terms, but certainly not intimate. An attempt was made to “read” the gift, which did not seem to respond to local gift-giving norms: it was a fairly pricey gift from someone who did not actually attend the wedding, which was held out of town (attendance would have justified “reciprocating” the cost of the wedding dinner, according to local thought) and who was not very close affectively. The mystery was resolved a few months later when the couple found out that the colleague was himself getting married and they were invited to the reception (and thus obliged to offer a substantial gift in order to cover the cost of the reception dinner). The factor of timing again is important here, for had the colleague already been married, he probably would have merely sent a congratulatory telegram (the proper response to a wedding announcement when one does not attend the event); likewise, if his own wedding had not been in the foreseeable future, he might have ignored that of the couple. Yet the colleague’s unexpected giving of the wedding gift probably had resonance above and beyond simply anticipating his own wedding, for some four years later the two men consolidated a closer professional relationship. This chain of responses contrasts with those genres such as tangente or the “purchased” raccomandazione, in which the gift-giving does not stimulate further dialogue. One pays, and the other grants the “favor” (or even the “right”), and that is that. In such cases, in which the figure of power expects to exact a price for his services, the gift is not given spontaneously or even with the semblance of spontaneity, but is itself a response to a request. Here, self-interest is not cloaked under Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, and in this manner the service is commodified. On the other hand, people assert that the gift of tangente [bribe, kickback] produces surer results than a spontaneously given gift to solicit a fig-

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ure of discretionary power. In fact, many Bernaldese claimed that the raccomandazione per se is no longer enough; an extra “something” is essential. Such an offering appears to employ the language of “gift,” but again, in dialogic terms, it merely concludes a transaction and we cannot consider it within the construction of social relationship implied by the deployment of gifts. Further evidence of the power of the rhetoric of gifts comes from some variations of tangente, in which the raccomandato gives a nonmonetary gift at the behest of the raccomandante. Interlocutors related a number of such situations, for example, a raccomandato who purchased a car for the raccomandante who helped him obtain a job. In other cases I learned of, the raccomandato ceded part of his or her salary to the raccomandante for a period of time. In this scenario, the gift would appear to be superfluous from a semiotic point of view—why wouldn’t someone simply receive a monetary payment for his services? Certainly both parties find an advantage in the adoption of the rhetoric of gift: both participants can hide behind the gift to imply a personal relationship that is actually tenuous, if nonexistent. On some level, the donor can convince himself that his “gift” is not a tangente, precisely because of the semiotically gratuitous quality of its material form, and due to the fact that a gift always contains something of the person who gives, in quasi-animistic fashion (Godbout 1993: 218, 269). The recipient, on the other hand, gains the same material advantage as he would from money, but he also accrues nonmaterial advantages, such as prestige and personal dominance in the relationship, with the semiotic charge of the gift. One interlocutor, Saverio, joked about his own “gift” experiences at work. There was another worker with the same surname as his own who managed to get a promotion. While relating this, Saverio quipped, “Hey, I want my lamb back”; with this comment, he was implying that he had given a propitiatory gift of a lamb in a botched attempt at obtaining a promotion, conceived of as a goal to be reached through a discretionary use of power and not through meritocratic criteria (good job performance, waiting one’s turn). Anyway, Saverio said, after a raccomandazione has been performed, people often do give a gift at Christmas. He cited the example of Lorenzo, who gave someone £300,000 worth of fish as a gift for receiving job contracts. As Saverio told it, the recipient of the gift had asked Lorenzo in advance, “Instead of lamb, bring me fish.” Lorenzo, incidentally, was credited with a particularly artful technique of proposing tangenti: he would leave his interlocutor an envelope with his business card inside of it, and he would use the latter’s reaction as a litmus test for a possible tangente. If the recipient accepted the envelope without hesitation, it was taken to be a sign that

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he was “game”; otherwise, if he protested or seemed offended, Lorenzo would point out that he was simply leaving him his card. Like the story of the Neapolitan drivers, Saverio’s tangente narrative demonstrates a certain “artfulness,” and, indeed, this is one of the features it shares with raccomandazione. The tangente has still other connotations, namely those related to extortion and mafia, and I will deal with it at greater length in the next chapter. For the moment, it is sufficient to observe how the tangente and the related purchased raccomandazione differ from the “traditional” raccomandazione, founded on the basis of the deployment of gifts. Let us now turn to those cases in which there is no apparent gift or tangente. For someone who seeks a raccomandazione from a relative—to the extent that we may call it a raccomandazione from our etic point of view, for many people in the community would actually not label it so— it is a given that the two actors are already in a dialogue, and according to familist ideologies in the setting, a positive response is compelled. In some contexts, this situation may be described as nepotism. In an intrafamilial raccomandazione, then, there appears to be neither an overt raccomandazione nor a gift, at least not a present timed in such a way that it is in “dialogue” with the raccomandazione rendered. This built-in or concealed raccomandazione was described by some interviewees, like Mino: Mino: There are people who recommend for money. Giovanni: The son of a lawyer or a judge is automatically raccomandato. Mino: Well, I thought that was obvious. You know, [actor Ugo] Tognazzi’s son is an actor. It’s taken for granted.

One unemployed friend, Cristina, had had several disappointments with political raccomandazioni and was in a training program with computers. “I have to begin working for my cousin,” she said to me as an explanation for her enrollment in the course. “That way, I won’t have to ask anyone for raccomandazioni anymore. He’s promised to help me.” Note how she distinguishes the promise of assistance from within the family from asking for help from outsiders, help that would be channeled through the raccomandazione. In the arena of work—the most conspicuous field in which the raccomandazione is used—the family has a particular role. There is, of course, the well-documented family character of many Italian enterprises, but without digressing too extensively on this issue, there are two situations in the Italian labor market in which family ties blatantly outweigh meritocratic criteria. Most people would agree that these situations do not constitute raccomandazione, yet in a sense they operate as a form of au-

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toraccomandazione, for an implicit family privilege exerted in a public, and ostensibly meritocratic, domain prevails, unlike the case of one who merely joins or takes over an existing family enterprise. First, until only a few years ago, it was possible in many work settings to “inherit” the job of a family member. Saverio, for example, acceded the job that had belonged to his sister, who moved out of the area when she married. Typically, though, a worker would place himself in early retirement and let his son take his place. Even today this practice occurs, for example in banking, but it has become much rarer in recent years; and yet, people still expect the “inheritance” of a job to take place between family members. For example, an unemployed young woman named Marianna was getting temporary work from the post office to deliver telegrams. Her father had been a lower-level postal employee for years. Marianna’s position delivering telegrams was grossly underpaid and precarious—in fact she made me a rough breakdown, calculating of her per-telegram earnings and the cost of gasoline for the delivery, and in economic terms it was almost counterproductive for her to do the job. More than anything else, she accepted the job to gain points for her position on the ranklist. She complained that everyone presumed that she already had an “in” at the post office, and some already thought she was a full-fledged postal employee. People assumed that she would shortly take over her father’s job, as he was close to retirement, but only she knew the bitter truth. Despite her efforts and family advantage, she remains unemployed today. The second situation of family privilege is that of the closed job categories of notary and pharmacist. The legal limit on the number of pharmacies and notaries per population greatly restricts the chances for degree-holders who do not come from families already in the business. When a pharmacy or notary office slot becomes available, the competition is technically open to any qualified party. De facto, the jobs tend to be passed from parents to children or to children of colleagues, thus constituting a virtual caste. While there have been some recent attempts to restrict the passage of pharmacy positions within families, these provisions seem to get circumvented without great difficulty. One narrative about pharmacies was related to me by Nicoletta. There had recently been a competitive call for the designation of two new pharmacies in the province, and before the winners were announced, a man went to a notary and deposited the names of the people whom he was sure would win, in order to demonstrate that the competition had been rigged. Nicoletta commented, “In fact, everyone knew who was going to win. . . . We knew that the competition had been created just to give these two people their pharmacies.”

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Returning to the autoraccomandazione, for a person who is in a situation of privilege by virtue of his family’s status—the son of the mayor or the daughter of a professor—it is not necessary to present the self with an overt gift. Rather, the self is vested in the semiotic material of name and position. As Bakhtin writes, “I receive my name from others, and it exists for others (self-nomination is imposture)” (1984: 288). And in Italy, a name is to a large extent a destiny, since the Italian legal system is extremely restrictive with the regard to the possibility of changing one’s name.7 This is in stark contrast with the United States, for example, where people change their names with great ease and at little expense, and where the vast majority of married women legally adopt their husband’s surname. Again, having the symbolic capital of “name” can be consequential for the possibility of success in the labor market. One young woman commented that a mutual friend, a recent law graduate, wanted to set up her own law office: “But you need a name—it’s the name that counts. It’s tough to get yourself recognized.” A name, like the talisman of “Picone” in Mi manda Picone, may even be offered in place of a gift in order to compel a response, as seen in the following observation made by the owner of a boutique in town: Women come into the shop and say that they are friends of your mother, friends of your neighbor. It’s a way of asking for a discount or for special treatment.

This use of names recalls the DaMatta’s cogent analysis of the Brazilian “Você sabe con quem está falando?!” [Do you know who you’re talking to?!]. DaMatta analyzes this expression, which is also present in the Italian context, as a mode of social identification, particularly as a means of creating an identification with a hierarchical superior (DaMatta 1992): “Do you know who you are talking to? I’m the chauffeur of Minister X (or General Y)!!!” or “Do you know who you are talking to? I’m the son (or daughter) of so-and-so!” In such situations, identification through name is sufficient to recommend someone. Another category of persons who do not obtain an overt raccomandazione are those considered veramente in gamba [“really sharp” or “really on the ball”]. There seems to be some disaccord on this point: while many interlocutors, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status, claimed in a blank statement that “they’re all recommended,” those of higher educational level and socioeconomic position often suggested that if someone is truly in gamba, they can “make it” without a raccomandazione. Lorenzo, the philosopher of raccomandazione described above, claimed that those who entered into an informal quota system would win a competition, but there was still a possibility that someone

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could win on the basis of merit. He said, “The positions are already assigned. And maybe someone who is too good [wins]. Paradoxically, someone who is truly good wins.” Turning again to an example from Italian popular culture, if Mi manda Picone was the definitive cinematic expression of l’arte dell’arrangiarsi, then we may consider Guglielmo il Dentone as its counterpart for meritocracy. The film features comic actor Alberto Sordi, whose special make-up for the role is a set of massively oversized, protruding teeth. His character, the “Dentone” [big teeth], participates in a job competition to become a television news anchorman. Convinced that his looks are not telegenic, the network executives do everything they can to find some grounds to exclude him from the competition. But the Dentone confounds them; highly intelligent and with impeccable diction, he makes it through successive (and hilarious) phases of the competition to become, in the end, a noted anchorman. The Dentone is an extreme example of someone who is on the ball, for in reality many talented people nonetheless hedge their bets by obtaining a raccomandazione. Moreover, even when someone does achieve a goal through his or her own merits, others tend all the same to assume that a raccomandazione was involved. For example, one woman in Matera told me about her brother who had a degree in economics, who had just been hired by a bank: Everyone was saying that he was recommended, but he got the job with a normal application. The other candidates, all raccomandati, had their degrees in other fields—engineering, literature—while my brother had studied something closer to work in a bank.

If people tend to suspect a raccomandazione even when the person in question presents excellent credentials, raccomandazione is all the more commonsensical as an explanation where merit is indeed lacking. For example, at a meal with family and friends, when the television news gave a report announcing the latest winner of the Miss Italia contest, everyone at the table disparaged her as unattractive. The immediate consensus was that she had been recommended. “That’s how these things work,” asserted one women confidently, despite her own lack of direct experience in this sector.

Raccomandazione as Utterance The gift, as other scholars have noted, has an important role in the interpersonal relationship between the exchange partners. Yet, as the exam-

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ples of implicit or gift-free raccomandazione demonstrate, the gift also has much to do with the presentation of self, a languaging of self in dialogue with others. In his study of religious practices in a Spanish valley, which feature many analogies with those of Bernalda, Christian (1972) recognizes the force of this linguistic aspect of patronage: Judges have a special kind of language, as does the bureaucracy that leads to Franco . . . it is therefore necessary to use intermediaries when negotiating . . . (1972: 173)

Similarly, Campbell describes the difficulty of Greek Sarakatsani shepherds in communicating with the bureaucracy: But in affairs of great importance, which must reach the desk of senior officials, the shepherd leader generally feels unable to conduct his own affairs. It is difficult, in any case for a humble shepherd to penetrate to the offices of senior officials. If he does reach this point, his rough clothes and awkward manners, alternating between obsequiousness and effrontery, make progress difficult. . . . And they have little confidence in their own forensic abilities in this kind of situation. (Campbell 1964: 243)

In such cases, Campbell tells us, the Sarakatsani turn to their patrons or to the patron of a more powerful kinsman. The Sarakatsani example is quite stark; in the description, the difference in language between the bureaucrats and the shepherds is verbal, but it also has a basis in the language of clothing and the body. In present-day Bernalda, such differences (fundamentally connected to class difference) are still quite present, though greatly attenuated with respect to past decades. The use of intermediaries, whether in “traditional” patronage or in raccomandazione more generally, is a way of languaging the self in order to be able to communicate with those bureaucrats or whomever else is viewed to be essential to a goal. Patronage is not merely composed of a series of dyadic relationships between individuals, as many analysts have described it, singly or in chains, but rather it features a series of dialogic relationships. Again, drawing from a language analogy, the raccomandazione is an utterance, a concretization within the speech act, and we can see how it is composed of various dialogic unities. Five such unities are of particular interest for this analysis. First, there is the individual—let us shorthand him A—who combines his own voice with a gift. As Bakhtin notes, “Dialogic relationships in the broad sense are also possible among different intelligent phenomena, provided that these phenomena are expressed in some semiotic material” (Bakhtin

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1984: 184–85). We have already considered one semiotic aspect of the gift: its semiotic surplus when compared with a straightforward monetary payment. That surplus is a double-voiced utterance in that it has twofold direction: it represents its own object (the scamorza cheese or whatever it happens to be), and at the same time it is directed toward the voice of the gift-giver, A. A, as author of the action of gift-giving, invests his semantic intention into the voice of the gift, which bears an element of his personhood. By contrast, in the case of the tangente, in which the so-called gift is given as a bribe or at the request of the mediator, the gift-giving is merely single-voiced: a direct, unmediated discourse that does not dialogue further. Commodified, it refers solely to its own object rather than to the personal tie to be created or sustained. The second dialogic unity is that of the would-be raccomandato A and the mediator B, who is the figure that issues the raccomandazione or in turn recommends A to the person who will do so. A plus the gift assure a representation of A’s self to B, and at the same time compel B’s response by creating the obligation to reciprocate and by implying an anticipated acknowledgment. A third dialogic unity is that of the mediator B and the powerful figure, P. B’s voice represents A, recommends A, stylizing A by speaking the language of the powerful figure P. Not being self-sufficient to dialogue directly with P, A’s discourse is subordinated and incorporated into that of B. In some cases, this third unity is replicated with submediators until P can be “reached.” The fourth dialogic unity to consider is that of A and P. to the extent that A uses P’s discourse (the raccomandazione) to represent and compel a response (in the fifth dialogic unity considered), P’s raccomandazione acts in the same way as the gift does in the first unity. A’s discourse may in turn be harnessed to serve P’s interest; if A is a voting citizen and P is a politician, for example, A’s vote may serve P’s electoral interests. In the fifth dialogic unity, A plus the raccomandazione (which is P’s discourse on A) are in dialogue with S—another party (or parties) that is necessary to obtain the goal, if P himself does not provide a solution directly. The raccomandazione functions as the “gift,” representing A and compelling a response from S. An example of this unity came up in an interview with Lorenzo. A side conversation with another participant mentioned how one man telephoned the mayor and griped that “they” [the water company, the Ente Autonomo dell’Acquedotto Pugliese] had cut off his water: P: A. [the mayor] said to him, “Well, did you pay the bill? And this guy said, “Hmm, well, this and that.” Then A. said to him, “So, what do you want from me?”

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Lorenzo: The guy was wrong to call A. He should have called N. [the exmayor who was Christian Democrat], who would have called so-and-so from the Acquedotto. Who would have said, “Well, this guy didn’t pay,” but then N. would have said, “Don’t break my balls.” If he had called N., tonight he would already have had water.

Or there is the most classic situation outlined by an unemployed youth in his definition of raccomandazione: When you want to work and don’t have possibilities, you ask someone to find you a job. If I want to work in a tobacconist’s [points across the street to the tobacco shop], I ask someone to speak with the tobacconist. He says [to the tobacconist], “This young man wants to work.”

Not all of the five dialogic unities described are always present in each case, particularly that between A and S which may be unnecessary if P is capable of dealing with the situation directly. As one is increasingly powerful, the ability to present oneself unmediated increases. The powerful figure’s voice is adequate to compel a response, whereas A’s voice must be subordinated to those of B and P. In the autoraccomandazione, A’s name acts as the gift, sufficient to compel a response because his or her voice is implicitly merged with the semiotic import of the family name, the family’s member’s power. As mentioned above, as the intimacy of relation increases between A and B, the need for an overt gift to be read in connection with the raccomandazione diminishes. Let us now examine in greater detail how raccomandazione functions as a form of communicative interaction in terms of enunciation and response. In this way, we may better understand just why gift-giving figures into some raccomandazioni but not in others, and how the various actors know what type or genre of raccomandazione must be deployed.8 If we view raccomandazione as an utterance, we note that it gets framed by the change of subjects, much like moves in a chess game that pass back and forth from one player to the other: one activates or reactivates the dialogue by presenting a gift, receives a response from the raccomandante, and then makes yet another move. Serious chess players use a clock to signal the end of a turn, and in raccomandazione, too, like other forms of utterance, there must be a means of finalization that signals the change in turn or speaking subject, otherwise it would be hard to communicate effectively. In speech, the finalization of a turn is a quality related to our sense of when one subject has momentarily finished speaking; it creates the possibility of responding to the utterance. As Bakhtin notes:

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Some kind of finalization is necessary to be able to react to an utterance. It is not enough for the utterance to be understood in terms of language. An absolutely understood and completed sentence, if it is a sentence and not an utterance comprised of one sentence, cannot evoke a responsive reaction: it is comprehensible, but it is still not all. This all—the indicator of the wholeness of utterance—is subject neither to grammatical nor to abstract semantic definition. (1986: 76)

The various genres of raccomandazione go about establishing this finalization—and hence, invoking a response—in different ways. To a large extent finalization seems to have to do with the adequacy of the self-presentation as part of the utterance. As we have seen, in many cases the presentation of self alone may or may not compel a response, hence one may give a gift: the gift manages to impose greater finalization to the self by making reference to the giver, by re-presenting him, and can thus increase the likelihood of response. Some people are able to impel a response solely through their self-presentation—what I have called here the autoraccomandati and raccomandati di simpatia. Here, the self alone seems capable to a greater extent of imposing a degree of finalization, though even in such instances the self is actually invested in the semiotic material of power or name, which acts as a covert gift. Such a system of gifts, whether implicit or explicit, defines the very concept of self through the ties created by gift relations, as Godbout observes: “The system of the gift holds that the more a person has ties, the more he becomes ‘individualized,’ in contrast to a market and a state that need a ‘depersonalized individual’” (Godbout 1983: 98). A second point regarding finalization involves the speech plan or will of the speaker, which helps to guarantee that the utterance is read appropriately. Here, the choice and timing of a gift are crucial, for if two subjects are in a general dialogue, the aspiring raccomandato has to be sure that his gift is understood in relation to the raccomandazione he is seeking, and thus can participate a response. The speech will of the speaker is crucial in choosing the proper genre of raccomandazione, genres that differ according to “the situation, social position and personal interrelations of the participants in the communication” (Bakhtin 1986: 79). Viewed in this light, the various subgenres of raccomandazione are a function of such factors of social positionality. In a raccomandazione context in which one offers a gift, the gift-giver generally establishes his position as an inferior, propitiating the power of the recipient.9 In the raccomandazione di simpatia, no overt gift is offered, but the favor is performed on the basis of friendship or kinship: social distance is decreased either through the kinship tie or because the subjects are in effect more

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socially equal, as in cronyism. In the autoraccomandazione, where the actor offers no gift, he is able to present the self as highly positioned if not actually superior. If the persons in the various social positionalities were to select a different raccomandazione subgenre, this would constitute inappropriate—and most likely ineffective—communicative action. Those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder might view the raccomandazione as something completely beyond their reach; this was the case of Pepe, an unemployed youth from a very modest family. When I asked him if he had ever sought a raccomandazione for work, he looked at me as if I were out of my senses and responded emphatically, “No! A raccomandazione?!” His friend Marco softened the response by explaining to me what was obvious to them: “You need to know [someone], you need to know the person very well.” Of course, it is important to bear in mind that social positionality is context dependent; someone with a high position in one sphere may well be inferior to another, and vice versa, but on the whole those at the highest levels—those whom DaMatta (1991) terms “superpersons”—and those at the lowest have more consistent positions. The tangente, a genre of raccomandazione in which the “gift” is usually given at the mediator’s request, is particularly offensive because it requires a gift from someone who is not necessarily socially inferior and who in any case should be equal as a citizen in a universalistic system. In fact, in situations in which a tangent is exacted for a “right,” the ideology of social hierarchy should not be applicable; where democratic rights are involved, all individuals are supposed to be equally entitled. The tangente is thus highly morally illegitimate because it forces the actor to employ a subgenre associated with social inferiority—propitiatory gift-giving—where such hierarchy should be suspended. The choice of a raccomandazione subgenre is therefore quite consequential for the possibility of obtaining the sought response. Yet there are some people who are not capable of utilizing or manipulating raccomandazione at all, just as there are people who cannot use other types of speech genres. Raccomandazione must thus be viewed not only in its political or social meaning but as a form of communicative competence, as a language. I asked one friend, whose sister is quite proficient in raccomandazione, why she herself hadn’t been recommended: L: You can’t say that I didn’t need a raccomandazione. I wouldn’t know how to get one. DLZ: As a matter of principle? L: No. [laughs] If I could get recommended for something, I’d do it.

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DLZ: What’s stopping you? L: Maybe I don’t have the right friendships, or maybe I don’t have the guts to ask for a raccomandazione. Maybe there’s even an opportunity, but I don’t ask because I’m ashamed. Perhaps I say to myself, “If I had a raccomandazione, I’d be happy”—I don’t deny it—but deep down, I don’t put what I’m saying into practice.

The problem of who cannot or does not deploy the raccomandazione actually bears close ties to questions of socioeconomic class, and chapter 5 will delve into these dynamics more deeply. Significantly, however, there is another genre of raccomandazione that is in theory accessible to all, but which is certainly not practiced by everyone: the raccomandazione with saints.

The Raccomandazione with Saints Our God is not the god of Plato—he’s a God who dialogues. The God of the Bible is different from other divinities; he’s not an arrogant God. When you speak to children, you use a child’s language. When God speaks to us, he uses our language. [Pointing to an image of Saints Cosma and Damiano, the Holy Doctors]. This is our language. —Don Mimì D’Elia, parish priest in Bernalda

The phenomenon of saint cults, characteristic of Roman Catholicism in several areas of the world, has been the subject of innumerable studies, most prominently within folkloristics. In the present discussion, the aim is not so much to develop an exhaustive investigation of saint devotions in the ethnographic setting as it is to draw a few salient points related to our central theme. That is, I will outline how saint devotions, and in particular patron saint cults, constitute another genre of raccomandazione. Southern Italy, like many other areas, has become increasingly secularized in the modern era. In recent decades, the Church has lost a good deal of its former temporal power; some Christian evangelical sects and the Jehovah’s Witnesses have made some inroads in Southern Italy; there is a good deal of laxity in Catholic religious observance, which is now mostly the realm of older women. Despite all this, saints remain a deeply rooted part of the landscape, and a walk through the streets of Bernalda, as in many other Southern Italian towns, can document this devotion. Particularly in the historic town center, illuminated votive niches feature various incarnations of the Madonna, but there are also niches devoted to San Rocco, Santa Lucia, and San Leonardo: the latter, as patron of prisoners, keeps vigil across the street from the site of the

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ancient town jail. In many Southern urban areas, entire quarters can be named for the santo protettore [protecting saint] who resides locally, but this practice is less prevalent in Bernalda. Even so, the ancient church of San Donato lends its name to one of the newest quarters, built in the area of the Roman settlement of Camarda for which San Donato was the patron. A number of public street murals in Bernalda demonstrate how a modern art form has given expression to saint devotions, with the supplemental task of “answering” leftist murals (most notably, the one by the “Pablo Neruda Brigade”). Patron saint festivals are still quite widespread throughout the South, and Bernalda is no exception: its principal festivals are those of San Bernardino of Siena (in two separate moments), Sant’Antonio, the Madonna del Carmine (for the quarter of the Centro Storico), and San Rocco. One of the most important festivals from an affective point of view is that of the Santi Medici, the holy physician brothers Cosma and Damiano, to whom the newest church (1979) is dedicated, serving the more populous of the two town parishes. In all of these festivals, one of the most solemn moments is the procession of the saint’s image accompanied by his devotees, who often bear candles [la fiaccolata]. Such processions used to feature more people who walked barefoot as part of a vow [voto] or an expression of servility to the saint, but over the years the post–Vatican II church has managed to discourage such practices. The festival of San Giuseppe is celebrated in Bernalda with bonfires and a feast of homemade pasta and chickpeas, and it has been the locus of an active revival of tradition in recent years. In Bernalda there are few statues of holy figures located outside of churches, but the recent erection of a statue to Padre Pio outside the Chiesa del Convento testifies to the renewal of traditional devotional practices with the emergence of a popular modern religious cult around the figure of this beatified Capuchin monk. Padre Pio already enjoyed a substantial following when, in 1994, a Bernaldese teenager found that a sketch she had drawn of him was shedding tears of blood. This apparent miracle drew considerable attention (though also a good deal of skepticism), and the sketch is now housed inside the Santi Medici church, the girl’s parish church. Communication with the saints is displayed throughout daily life, often in ways well adapted to the trappings and trepidations of modernity. For example, car window stickers of saints enjoy great popularity: they feature a representation of a saint with a text plea, “Saint So-and-So [or Madonna of . . .], protect me.” Most businesses feature one or more saint images dressing their walls. One bank in Bernalda has an image of Padre Pio that is quite visible from the entrance; at first this struck me as odd, given my preconceptions as to the lay capitalist rationality of

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banking. On one occasion, I was discussing such saint images with the owners of a shoe shop. They kept an image of the Santi Medici on the wall, together with the Madonna of Picciano (whose sanctuary is a popular pilgrimage site throughout the province of Matera). I mentioned to them that in my country, people usually hang a dollar on the wall of their business instead of a saint, although one should not forget that it bears the divine reference “In God we trust.” The saints are literally quotidian—there is at least one saint associated with every day of the year, and often more than one, and calendars that include notations of the saint days are extremely common in homes and in offices. Bernaldese with popular saint names (such as Giovanni, Giuseppe, Antonio, or Immacolata [for the immaculate Virgin]) often celebrate their name day [onomastico] on par with a birthday, and again— as we have already seen with raccomandazione—names can take on the quality of a gift. An infant might receive a saint’s name as part of a vow; for example, many women who counted on Santa Anna or Santa Rita to protect their pregnancy and childbirth honor a newborn girl with these names. One may also receive a saint’s name for being born on that saint’s day, particularly if the saint is one who stands out, such as Sant’Antonio (June 13) or Maria Immacolata (December 8). Yet naming is not simply a matter of honoring a saint: on the one hand, it creates a personal tie with him or her (cf. Campbell 1964), and on the other hand, it creates a tie to the grandparent who bears the same name, for the traditional custom—still predominant in naming practices—is to name children after their grandparents. The ancestral tie is passed down through the generations, simultaneously and cyclically renewing the tie with the saint. The quotidian character of the saints also receives particular emphasis in domestic displays. Many older homes feature altar-niches built into the walls, but even today one often finds a saint or Madonna image illuminated or honored with flowers in addition to other sacred images that might adorn domestic walls. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precious statuettes of Madonnas and saints in bell jars held an important role in the spiritual life of many Bernaldese families (Armento 1988). Another expression of devotion is the circulating household altar, a portable, wooden structure that is passed among the women of a group of homes. As a number of scholars have noted, saints in Southern Italy—and in many other areas where popular Roman Catholicism is deeply rooted— are not some abstract entity but extremely humanized figures in a highly personalized relationship with the faithful. Though distant in terms of power, the saint is as affectively close to the believer as a member of the family (Galasso 1982; cf. Christian 1972; Armento 1988). Boissevain

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(1966, 1977) has been among those scholars who have emphasized an analogy between patron saints and secular patrons. He writes the following of Sicily: I suggest that in such a society there is a strong ideological basis for a political system based on patronage. There is a striking functional similarity between the role of saints as intermediaries between God and man, and the mortal patron who intercedes with an important person on behalf of his client. (1966: 30)

Boissevain cites additional evidence for this analysis by noting a correlation between Catholic societies with strong patron saint cults and the weighty presence of political patronage (ibid).10 While hesitating to claim a strict causality between the two phenomena, he implies that they are mutually reinforcing social models. Christian (1972) similarly draws an analogy between divine and secular mediation in his study of religion in a Spanish valley, as does Signorelli, who notes a terrestrial/ celestial “isomorphism” in Southern Italy (Signorelli 1983: 58). Signorelli explains, “In the cult of the saints, then, the acceptance of a hierarchical relationship is unequivocally expressed in behaviors of submission, propitiation, and devotion” (ibid: 59). Yet I think that we need to be cautious in moving from an analogy between religious and terrestrial patronage to a strict identification of the two. Borrowing from Weber’s well-known distinction between charismatic and patrimonial authority, patron saints and traditional secular patrons both feature a blend of these forms of authority, but among saints the charismatic aspect seems to predominate, whereas the traditional secular patron features a mostly patrimonial form of authority. It is also interesting to note that the relationship between secular and religious patronage preceded the consolidation of Roman Catholic religious ideology. The ancient Roman patron was also a religious intercessor (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984); Fustel de Coulanges points out that he functioned as the family priest and was obliged to pray for his client as part of the umbrella of protection he offered (1864). The case of Bernalda’s town patron saint, San Bernardino da Siena, provides another example of the intersection of the secular and religious domains of patronage. From its origins in Roman times, the patron saint of the settlement (at that time known as Camarda) was San Donato. Then, at the beginning of the sixteenth century when Camarda became the feudal possession of the Neapolitan-Aragonese nobleman Bernardino de Bernaudo, the patron saint of the town became San Bernardino da Siena, even if the saint had nothing to do with the town, historically speaking. As an anonymous historic chronicle of Bernalda writes the following,

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It was due to the gratitude and affection that its inhabitants professed for their Duke that they adopted as the protector of their new town San Bernardino da Siena, the Christian name of their Duke, in place of San Donato. (Cited in Armento 1982)

While the choice of a patron saint in most Lucanian centers was most often a function of the saint’s thaumaturgical attributes (Digiorgio 1986), San Bernardino had no notoriety in the field of miracles. On the contrary, if anything, he was a “precursor of Christocentrism” (D’Elia 1980). Ex post facto, however, according to local tradition San Bernardino did save Bernalda from plague and famine in the seventeenth century (D’Angella 1983: 325). Again, the concept of name reappears here as a gift, for not only did the town of Camarda adopt San Bernardino as its protector but it also changed its name to Bernalda, a derivate of Bernardino, and the names “Berardino” and “Bernardo” are common given names in the town to this day. One local critic claims that the “falsity” of his fellow townspeople dates back to these events: “How can you change your patron saint?” he asked me bitingly and rhetorically. In his interpretation, this was the greatest possible sellout that the people could make in order to integrate themselves with their new feudal lord, who actually only came to Bernalda on a handful of occasions during his lifetime. The statue of San Bernardino was placed inside the church of San Donato where it still stands today, physically emphasizing the substitution. But—if it is any consolation to poor, betrayed San Donato—actual devotion to San Bernardino is not nearly as heartfelt among the Bernaldese as compared to their attachments to Sant’Antonio, Padre Pio, and the Santi Medici, even though its festival provides an important point of reference for community identity. In this regard, a local scholar observes the following: There is a noticeable, telltale absence of the Patron Saint [San Bernardino] from the devotions to saints “in a bell jar,” unlike what we find occurring among other populations in the vicinity. San Bernardino neither appears “in a bell jar,” nor in the votive niches, and the only images of him are the statues present in the churches, and thus those that were wanted by “official religion.” (Armento 1988: 39)

Thus, unlike other saints who were able to impress their charismatic authority on Bernaldese, San Bernardino has exercised from the beginning an authority more closely linked to the patrimonial authority of the feudal lord. Some of the saint cults that can claim more heartfelt devotion among the Bernaldese—such as those of Sant’Antonio and San Rocco—devel-

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oped in previous centuries out of the need to protect themselves from the numerous menaces to survival in an agrarian society: the most dramatic of these include earthquakes, malaria, drought, and plague. With the transformations brought about through modernization, literacy, and science, as well as the decreased importance of the agricultural sector overall both as an economic reality and as a drumbeat regulating social-cultural rhythms, the relationship with some of these protectors has waned. Nonetheless, certain cults have maintained if not increased their following, particularly those related to questions of health, such as the devotions to Padre Pio and the Santi Medici, and Marian cults are still very widespread. Reading the religious-secular patronage analogy, Boissevain also points out the linguistic parallel of calling a secular patron a santo [saint], as in the proverb “Without a saint, you can’t get into paradise,” which refers to the necessity of a patron in order to achieve a goal (Boissevain 1966: 30; cf. Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984: 66; Signorelli 1983; analogous expressions have been recorded for Spain and Malta). Certainly, over thirty years since Boissevain’s original work, this double meaning of santo is still in common use in Bernalda. As one interlocutor commented on the secular raccomandazione, We all know that it is a practice that is natural in a certain sense, because it becomes difficult to get squared away without having “saints.” [. . .] Nowadays, finding a job is like winning the lottery [. . .], if you don’t have saints, protectors. By now, everyone knows it [lo sanno anche le pietre].

Even more striking for the present discussion is the expression raccomandarsi ai santi—that is, to recommend oneself to the saints for intervention with the Lord in order to obtain, in the popular conception, a miracle [una grazia: literally, divine grace].11 I asked Cristina to explain how this works: C: You have to make a certain promise. For example, in the month of the Madonna, May, my sister recommended herself to the Madonna with the promise not to have cigarettes or sweets, which she likes a lot. DLZ: Was there a particular grazia that she wanted? C: Her last exam before graduating from university. [. . .] C: To recommend—it means promising a sacrifice or giving up something, like my sister. It’s not the saint who performs the grazia. It’s the Lord who does it. He [the saint] is the intercessor, he recommends

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that person for the grazia. The saints are intermediaries to God, to the Madonna.

With respect to official theological definitions of grazia [grace]— which have to do with God’s gratuitous love for mankind and a complex eschatology of the gift—the popular notion of the term is much less subtle: it makes reference to assistance from God, often to the extent of acting as a synonym for miracle. Passing from theology to popular ideology, the grazia undergoes a semantic slippage from favor in general to a specific favor. What the popular meaning of grazia does have in common with the theological sense is the idea that God grants us his favor in a gratuitous manner. Popular usage, however, often tends to flatten the grazia into a pact: one can curry God’s favor through the offer of devotion or sacrifice, and there is a thin line between ingratiating divine favor and trying to oblige it through a do ut des with the Lord’s intermediaries. Not only is there an analogy between the saint’s raccomandazione and the secular raccomandazione in the sense of asking a favor of a powerful figure through a mediator in order to obtain a goal, but there is also an analogy in the use of gifts. Christian notes in his study that forms of divine exchange correspond to those of secular exchange (1972: 168, 172, passim). Galasso (1982) has also commented on the “contractual element” in Southern Italian saint devotions. The raccomandarsi ai santi in this context is connected to Christian’s description of the voto (or promesa) as instrumental prayer in a Spanish village: [The voto] is the most common form of petition prayer, it is a conditional pledge that specifies what reciprocal action the pledger will take in the event of a favorable outcome . . . this is the prototypical prayer of the valley and of Mediterranean Roman Catholicism. It is the prayer that is behind the establishment and use of the chapels, and it is the prayer that best defines many persons’ relation to the divine. (Galasso 1982: 119)

In Bernalda, the voto is typically a pilgrimage or a gift to the church of money or gold. Until recent decades, a common voto was to walk barefoot in a procession during the saint’s festival, but the local priests have managed to discourage such manifestations because they believe them to be inappropriate according to a new, more somber, post–Vatican II ethos. An even more extreme form reportedly performed in the past was that of entering a chapel and approaching the altar by crawling, simultaneously licking the floor. I never witnessed anything that striking, but the gift can be made in countless ways. Carmela, for example, told of how she made a voto to the Madonna that she would organize a group of pilgrims to visit a sanctuary at Crosia, in Calabria:

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The first time I went to Crosia, I was doing the procession. It was cold, and I got chilblains on my feet. I couldn’t walk—mamma mia!!—L. and another friend had to take my arms and lead me. I said, “My Madonna, help me make it.” And ten minutes later, you know, I no longer had anything!! You know, that last bit climbing up before you arrive [at the church]—well, I led L. and my friend by the arms! Who could have done such a miracle? So I said, “Madonna, you did something wonderful for me. Now I’ll do something for you.” So I did a voto to organize the trip [to Crosia] for five months in a row. I did it for three months, but then I couldn’t [her aged father was in the hospital]. But I found a girl who could organize it for the other two months.

Along with the voto, another form of instrumental prayer is that of the petitionary devotion, which bears more resemblance to the use of gifts in raccomandazione. The petitionary devotion entails “the initial commitment of resources to the divine in the hope that the divine will respond favorably” (Christian 1972: 128). In the raccomandazione with the saints, we again see the tactics described by de Certeau: the economy of gift (the voto), “tricks” (the grazia), and the tenacious faith that the saint can alter the situation (“if he wants”). Whereas in the secular raccomandazione one gets recommended to and/or by a powerful figure for a favor, in the religious raccomandazione one can recommend oneself to the saint, who in turn mediates with the Lord. This is not the same as what I have been calling autoraccomandazione on the secular level, for since the human is always inferior in power to the saint, no one can presume to be autoraccomandato with the sacred. To recommend oneself to the saint is to vest oneself in the voto.12 Intimacy guarantees dialogue with the saint but not necessarily fulfillment of the grazia: thus the voto propitiates by offering an acknowledgment of the saint’s intervention. In forms of the secular raccomandazione where the raccomandazione is overt, the relationship between the raccomandato and the mediator is probably not as intimate as that between the devotee and the saint, who as we have seen is virtually family. It is necessary, then, for the secular raccomandato to re-present the self with a gift, not just the promise of a gift, in order to gain the attention of the mediator, to engage in dialogue. Where there is greater intimacy in the relationship, the probability that the favor will be performed increases, and an actual gift is less necessary.

Raccomandazione and Magic in the South The discussion of saint devotions in Southern Italy often becomes entangled in the problematic distinction between religion and magic,

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which has long been discussed in anthropology, from Durkheim (1915) and Malinowski (1925) on. This occurs not only in scholarly inquiry, as we see in a comment made in an interview with Don Mimì D’Elia, a parish priest of Bernalda: All of us benefit from Christ. The saint can be a mediator to obtain a grazia, a gift, protection. When this thing degenerates, it moves in the direction of magic, putting in divine power. Lately there’s been a boom in magic.13

While in the past, magic attracted a great deal of attention from folklorists and scholars of popular religion, traditional magic is presently declining as a cultural genre in Southern Italy (see Galt 1992). People still turn to magic—indeed, in large numbers—but they increasingly look to “esoteric operators” who mix traditional magic discourses, which feature various strains of astrology, card- and palm-reading, and elements from New Age practices. The traditional figure of the masciar’ [a magical practitioner] is being replaced by maghi “with bank accounts and cellular phones,” as a prominent maga of Matera (who has several clients from Bernalda) put it in an interview. In any case, in the ethnographic present we are in a transitional phase. Though the traditional magic that for so long characterized Southern Italy in the eyes of academics (and many laymen) is losing ground, it does demonstrate many affinities with the secular and religious genres of raccomandazione discussed above. For example, I have already described how raccomandazione functions as a form of “contagious magic.” But what precisely is the relationship between the two cultural phenomena? Is it possible to speak of magic as another genre of raccomandazione, or vice versa? “Low ceremonial magic,” as Ernesto de Martino called it, is used for practical ends to obtain some goal, and in this way it is similar to the raccomandazione. Certainly, the spells employed in this traditional magic feature references to the saints themselves as an important component (De Spirito 1976). Although de Martino himself did not conduct research in Bernalda, he offers many examples of such spells from neighboring towns that were analogous to those employed in Bernalda (de Martino 1959, 1995). De Martino’s fieldnotes, for example, provide us the following spell from Pisticci, used in the treatment of poison animal bites: Sante Paule mio benigno Di sta grazia non so degno Juna grazia vogghio da te

My goodly Saint Paul I am not worthy of this grazia I want a grazia from you

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Stu veleno l’ho ‘ncantà. I’ve enchanted this poison. [the recitation is followed by three Our Fathers, Ave Marias, and Glorias, looking at the wounded area without touching it] (from de Martino 1995: 117)

Just as people often activate saint devotions in moments of physical need (cf. Rivera 1988), similarly, in the past, they commonly used spells to cure illnesses and to remove fascino, a recognized form of enchantment. Like the patron or saint, too, the mago has an important role as mediator: [The mago] bestows magic with the character of a great collective sosteriological drama. His individual “crisis” masters those of others; he has the power to affirm his presence and make himself present to others, reading each existential drama and influencing its development. (De Spirito 1976: 63)

Yet unlike the mediation of a priest or saints, the mago does not mediate between man and God but rather between man and natural forces. Nor does he mediate between people, as the raccomandante does. Traditional magic bears a resemblance to secular and religious raccomandazione in its promise of protection. We see this, for example, in the numerous practices designed to ward off evil eye or to protect newlyweds; other rites have been noted that dispel storms threatening to destroy crops (see de Martino 1959, 1995). Though many of these practices have gone by the wayside in recent times, it is still common in Bernalda to give newborn infants gold charms with a protective function against evil eye or hang a horseshoe in a house. As noted earlier, devotion may be exchanged for comfort and protection in patron saint cults, and not just for fulfillment of a particular aim; this generalized assurance is reflected in the notion of the santo protettore [protecting saint]. A number of interlocutors pointed out similar benefits from secular raccomandazione, as exemplified by the following statement: With the raccomandazione, you start to make plans, you feel great. [. . .] It gives you a certain psychological tranquility, because you know that someone is going to help you.

Thus, the secular raccomandazione, saint devotions, and traditional magic in Southern Italy all look to sources of power beyond the individual, a power reached through mediation. In this way, these genres contrast to an ideal post-Enlightenment Western notion of the subject and the individual. This is a Western subject that has imposed its mastery of

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the elements through science—a mastery that objectifies and dominates the individual’s environment rather than interrelates with it—and has sought to define its self-sufficiency through increasing social atomization and the demand for recognition of each person as a universal, equal citizen. Instead, traditional magical discourse in particular focuses an almost morbid attention to interpersonal relations thought to influence the self: hence, the power in such a magical world14 of a mere glance, which can provoke evil eye or “steal” a mother’s milk. Despite this commonality in the conception of self-linking in raccomandazione, saint devotions, and magic, however, a closer look at their poetic reveals an important distinction precisely in terms of the type of communication set out in each. In his study of magic in the province of Benevento, De Spirito (1976) suggests a distinction between magic and religion that, in my view, helps to clarify the issue. After an extensive overview of the literature, De Spirito draws upon Malinowski’s work in proposing religion as “communication” with superior beings, while magic is associated with the “manipulation” of forces and powers; however, he cautions that these are tendential, not absolute terms (De Spirito 1976: 31). Malinowski’s own analysis of the role of saints in the Church as magical in function is disputed by De Spirito: In a magical phenomenon, it is undoubtedly correct to reveal and underline the great place that the idea occupies of “using it”; but we may point out, equally correctly, that prayers made to implore for rain in the midst of a serious drought are certainly different from ceremonies and formulas to produce rain, which are based on the conviction that suitable spells and words can produce the desired and demanded effect. (Ibid.: 32, orig. emph.)

From the perspective expressed by De Spirito’s analysis, we can arrive at the heart of the difference in the poetics of magic and that of raccomandazione. When one recommends oneself to a saint for a grazie, the dialogue is predicated upon the fact that the saint is a sentient, superior being with a will that must be cultivated in the supplicant’s favor (see Lupo 1995; Galasso 1982: 71–72; De Spirito 1976: 33). In magic, however, the agent uses spells and formulas intended to manipulate forces that he can dominate. The citation of saints in such spells is formulaic— instead of a dialogue with the saints, there is a command to a given force, such as for a headache to be cured, mother’s milk to flow, and so forth. Lupo observes in his study of prayer that such magical forms “often feature meager communicative value and tend instead to privilege

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an illocutory or performative aspect of the enunciation” (1995: 86). In contrast, he writes the following of prayers: Prayers [. . .] are enunciations whose communicative function is preeminent, in particular when the praying person aims at obtaining concrete and immediate benefits. [. . .] But even in the less frequent case in which they are pronounced “disinterestedly,” as a pure attestation of adoration, their inevitable premise is the faith of the praying person in the existence of extrahuman addressees to whom the prayers are sent and in the possibility that these addressees hear and understand his words [. . .] (Ibid.)

Magical discourse is an authoritative discourse: an inherited, prior discourse imbued with an authority that is received as already recognized (Bakhtin 1981: 342). It is not retold or recast in one’s own words; it is recited, “permitting no play with the context framing it” (ibid). Such discourse stands or falls with its authority; as Bakhtin puts it, “If completely deprived of its authority it becomes simply an object, a relic, a thing” (ibid, orig. emph.). Indeed, this is the case of traditional magic, which has lost the authority it once held in many areas of Southern Italy and which is increasingly relegated to the category of the folkloric. Moreover, traditional magic differs from the genres of raccomandazione I have discussed in that it is single-voiced, making reference only to itself, and is incapable of entering into dialogue. Whereas raccomandazione—both secular and religious—creates a polyphonic encounter of voices that represent the self, traditional magical discourse is a recitation that in no way stylizes the self as mediated by the mago. We can see, then, that although there are doubtless many elements of authoritative discourse—if not downright “magic”—in Roman Catholic ritual (see de Martino 1962), the specific genre of saint devotions is quite a different thing from traditional magic. In contrast to the single-voiced discourse of magic, the polyphonic encounter of raccomandazione constitutes a sense of belonging, for the self does not appear as self-contained, and is instead defined by multifarious ties created through participation in the gift economy. Traditional magic shares with secular and religious raccomandazione their emphasis on practicality, but there is no element of cohesion or belonging implicated in magical discourse. Even so, these three genres stand together as tactics in the social fabric; like raccomandazione, magic refuses inevitability, seeking to operate on the outcome through its “tricks.” Galasso (1982) draws these three phenomena together with the linchpin of Southern “fatalism,” though the picture he presents is anything but a stereotypical passive resignation:

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What we have here is [. . .] a fatalism that is tightly bound, on the one hand, to faith in a “miracle” that is possible from one moment to the next; in the “grace” that one can obtain through a protector or mediator who is influential enough; in a favorable interruption in the logical and natural order of things; in the opening of such an order to a logic that is exclusively tied to the personal and specific case for which it has been invoked. On the other hand, however, we have a fatalism that, for this very reason, postulates an unpredictable causality of reality as a whole and therefore contradicts itself, when it asks someone to “make do,” that is, to do one’s best to determine and seize the chance, the open window through which the unpresentable, the unexpected presents itself. (1982: 283)

While the newer, hybrid forms of magic do have some following in Bernalda, traditional magic—de Martino’s low ceremonial magic—is no longer ideologically marked as important and has not been for well over two decades; it has been relegated to the categories of the “folkloric” and the “irrational.” In de Martino’s terminology, magic has become increasingly inorganic with respect to the sociocultural fabric. The saint devotions are still strong, but they continually navigate a route somewhere between the official discourses of the Church and “magic” (or, in some people’s view, even “paganism”) in an increasingly secular context. Additionally, some hybrid forms that still maintain authority locally are those which, again, prioritize the aspect of communication. Popular mediums like Natuzza Evolo in Calabria who vest their discourse in Catholic rhetoric enjoy a certain following in Bernalda, and “going to see Natuzza” can be as meaningful an event as a pilgrimage to a sanctuary. Precisely because of their dialogic quality, the saint cults have consolidated and transmitted a sense of belonging—personal, familiar and community-centered—which surpasses their merely utilitarian qualities. The widespread, deeply felt devotion to Padre Pio demonstrates the viability of the cultural genre of saint cults and its power to renew itself even in the wake of modernization. Cristina spoke of her own devotion to Padre Pio, to whom she attributed her cure from an illness: For me, I’m very attached to the figure of Padre Pio. When I was very sick, I recommended myself to him. I was sick, and I woke up during the night with a strong scent of flowers—there were no flowers around!— and for no reason at all, I woke up and said, “Padre Pio.” I was cured, either because I was supposed to get better, or thanks to the intervention of Padre Pio.

Cristina expressed great faith in Padre Pio, but at the same time she seemed to leave some room for an alternative explanation of her recovery.

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Like saint devotions, the secular raccomandazione, too, has all but faded from the sociocultural landscape and has even assumed greater importance. Perhaps this enduring success is a comment on its successful colonization of the rational-universalistic paradigm, as I will discuss in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, despite the differences between traditional magic, saint devotions, and raccomandazione, all of these categories feature an emphasis on relational subjectivity that contrasts with the rationalist Western construction of the subject as a self-contained and “finalized” individual. In fact, with the disenchanting onslaught of rationality, traditional magic—and also saint cults, but to a much lesser extent—has been increasingly stigmatized, associated with “ignorance,” “backwardness,” and lower-class “peasant” positionality. De Martino (1959) provides a scintillating analysis of the ambivalence of the Southern bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment period with regard to magic and religion, as they attempted to align themselves more closely with contemporary discourses of rationality. In present-day Bernalda, many people of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie are often reluctant to admit their participation in these genres for fear of embarrassment. Lower-class interlocutors, instead, were more willing to discuss it, wholeheartedly subscribing, for example, to the existence of the munachicchie spirit15 or the efficacy of traditional magic cures for a headache. Don Mimì commented on the tendency of some people to distance themselves from the saints for the sake of appearance: [In the South] there’s a connection between being cultured and being agnostic. It’s a cultural air that some people give themselves. Someone might be religious, but pretends not to be.

While we must avoid reducing single situations to functions of class positionality—an action that would be too mechanical and deterministic, for there is in fact a good deal of variation—many members of the lower and lower-middle classes no longer participate in the genres. In fact, some actively attempt to distance themselves in order to be “modern,” or at least they participate in them with ambivalence. This is most true of the younger generations. The form that participation in or rejection of traditional magic and saint devotions assumes is also a way in which tensions over class-related aspects of subjectivity get negotiated, as in cases of recent social mobility. The position one assumes in relation to the genres is also a manner in which some people set themselves apart from others in the same overall class grouping. Here, I am limiting my discussion, but the subtleties of how this all gets played out deserve

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further attention. As we will see in chapter 5, an analogous tendency in the secular raccomandazione operates among members of the higher socioeconomic classes to distance oneself (at least overtly) from raccomandazione ideology in favor of a meritocratic discourse.

The Parental or Emphatic Raccomandazione There is another form of raccomandazione, a cognate of the patronagetype raccomandazione that has been the main focus of study here: the form that might be termed the parental or emphatic raccomandazione. The parental raccomandazione deserves attention if for no other reason than the fact that several scholars have pointed to an analogy, between patron-client and parent-child relations, and thus one should not discard a priori the possibility that this analogy is also present in ethnographic setting under investigation. The fusion of patronage and the family spheres appears in the Ancient Roman clientela, where clients took the family name and were even considered adopted members who passed it on hereditarily (Fustel de Coulanges 1864). The patron, head of the family, had potestas over the client, just as the parent has over his child in contemporary Italy. In modern settings, the patron-client/parent-child analogy appears, for example, in Christian’s study of Santander in Spain: The relationships within the family among father, mother and children somewhat correspond to those among government patron and villagers and those among God, Mary and believers. The mother, the patron and Mary are essential mediating elements between the other two parties in their respective units. (Christian 1972: xii)

Similarly, Linger (1993) argues that in Brazil, the family is a social domain that shares metaphors of patronage with the domains of religion and work. According to Linger, the parent—like the saint or boss—is a Janus-faced, personalized embodiment of power. In contemporary Southern Italy, it would be difficult to compare parent-child relations with those described in the studies of Christian and Linger. The distant, domineering father reached through a mediating mother (Christian’s model) is neither standard nor ideal in this setting, though it appears to have been so, historically.16 Oral histories and recollections of interlocutors indicate the presence of such a paternal figure until recent decades. But family life in contemporary Bernalda,

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as throughout the Mezzogiorno, does not display the dramatic schema of the good/bad parent with its counterpart in the good/bad patron (Linger’s model). Nonetheless, the fact of a linguistic coincidence with patronage—that parents make raccomandazioni to their children—begs some attention. In the parent-child dialogue, the raccomandazione plays an important role; in fact, the majority of schoolchildren, not yet interested in the world of work and the machinations of raccomandazione employed there, consider the raccomandazione precisely in these terms, outlined in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana: Raccomandazione, noun, feminine 8. exhortation or pressing advice addressed by someone who has greater experience or authority; admonition, sometimes excessively moralistic or tiresome; indication on how one should behave, a talking-to. (Battaglia et al., 1990: 223)

One seventeen-year-old girl gave a concrete description of the parental raccomandazione: The raccomandazione is an aid from my parents. They recommend a ton of things, “Mi raccomando [I recommend myself ].” It’s underlined. In Italy, a lot of [bad] things happen. At [age] sixteen, a lot of [kids] are on the wrong path. My parents say, “Mi raccomando, who you’re going out with, where you’re going.” If maybe there’s a girl in Bernalda who’s not so good, they tell you not to go out with her. So that’s the raccomandazione. [. . .] When you leave the house, you say “ciao” to your parents, and “mi raccomando” follows right afterward.

While such exhortations are a key feature of parent-child relations, this mi raccomando form of raccomandazione can also be used among friends or associates as a means of giving advice or underlining an instruction. We should observe, however, that people themselves in this setting do not consider this sort of parental or advisory raccomandazione to be related to being recommended to or by a powerful figure in order to achieve some aim. In the emphatic raccomandazione, instead, the powerful figure of the parent draws something to the attention of the child. Overall, then, this parental raccomandazione has little to do with patronage. But to the extent that family relations may be important contacts, there is indeed a connection between ideologies of family relation that postulate an intimacy compelling one member to help another when the latter is in need of a spinta [push]. And, finally, there is the

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autoraccomandazione, in which that parent’s name and/or position is read as an important semiotic vestment of the self. To conclude this chapter on the poetics of raccomandazione, I would like to address the notion of “exteriority” that has often been described as characterizing Southern Italian society, even by Southerns themselves. What people mean by this exteriority is, basically, a focus on display in Southern stylistics. One interlocutor, for example, called the extravagant gift-giving practices in the area a matter of “exteriority,” linking these practices to “superficiality.” Barbara, the Northern woman who moved to the town where she married a local man, described this “exteriority” with the following example: My mother-in-law, for example, has some health problems and goes for a check-up every six months. She pays for her check-up and brings something extra along, some foods. It’s for the sake of appearance. I say to her, “You’re paying, why do you need to give [something more]?” In the North people prefer to go to a private medical appointment and not with the public system. So you always pay. Here, I think it’s a matter of exhibitionism. [It’s like saying . . .] “When I need you, you have to be available.”

As de Martino has noted, a distinctively Southern brand of Catholicism—with patron saints, pilgrimages, festivals, and all—has frequently been cited in the literature in terms of “exteriority,” “paganism,” and “magic” (de Martino 1959, 1962). The Bernaldese in particular are known throughout the surrounding area as people who focus on display; in some of the neighboring centers, they are known as pagliacciunn [clowns] or pagliuse [made of straw: that is, all show and no substance]. Like the critic of big gifts cited earlier, many locals express ambivalence—if not outright embarrassment—about practices that fall into this category. Few people will readily admit that they know someone who cures headaches by removing the evil eye, and yet there are still such figures in town, even if they cannot qualify as masciar’ [magic practitioners] in the traditional sense. It is my sincere hope that this sketch of a poetics of patronage can help us go beyond the superficial label of exteriority to work toward a more complete understanding of these forms as communicative acts in a certain Weltanschauung of human relations, not to simply be relegated to the categories of “backward,” folkloric,” or “irrational.” That popular discourses—and not a few academic ones—have positioned them as such has to do with the space that Southern Italians have inhabited in wider relations of power and authority.

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Notes 1. Giulio Andreotti, senator-for-life and former prime minister, quoted in La Repubblica, August 19, 1992, p. 10. 2. A raccomandazione is, of course, not the only occasion for making such gifts, and raccomandazione gifts may well take a nonfood form. Even so, the proverbial “scamorza cheese” or “prosciutto” used for raccomandazioni still have a counterpart in reality, particularly in a setting like Bernalda, where the agro-pastoral economy has retained a good deal of importance. 3. The bomboniere seems to enjoy widespread use as a practice in many other areas of Southern Europe and even in Turkey and Jordan. This might suggest a new basis for a concept of “Mediterranean unity,” hotly debated among Mediterraneanist anthropologists, and one that is perhaps more fruitful than the older paradigm of “honor and shame” (Peristiany 1965; Gilmore 1987). 4. Subsequently, we purchased mint-condition silver dollars to give in Italy as bombonieri together with the confetti, and this seemed to be successful among the recipients. On the whole, however, the bomboniere appears to belong to a special category of gifts that many recipients do not really appreciate and sometimes even recycle, a category that also includes Christmas fruitcake in the United States, or the New Year’s zampone [pig’s foot] in Italy. Indeed, the fruitcake might constitute an example of a modern Western kula ring gift item, as it is often circulated from year to year but never consumed. 5. I would like to acknowledge James Brow for his insightful comments in this regard. 6. As I will detail in the subsequent chapters, while the raccomandazione is extremely pervasive, some people do not engage in this “accompaniment.” They may do so on the basis of a personal choice—the attempt to maintain an ideal of meritocracy and “making it on one’s own”—or due to being incapable of obtaining a raccomandazione, owing to a disadvantaged socioeconomic position or to what amounts to an actual communicative incompetence. 7. The essentializing quality of a name was intuited by Alessandra Mussolini, Italian politician and granddaughter of the Duce. She was quoted in the New York Times during her first parliamentary campaign: “It’s racism not to vote someone because their last name is Mussolini.” It is also worth mentioning that, in the Southern Italian context, nicknames are “a prominent and critical feature of social interaction” (Jacquemet 1992); like legal surnames, nicknames may be passed down through the family. 8. Here, as throughout the discussion, I am indebted to Bakhtin’s analysis (Bakhtin 1986). 9. I am referring specifically to raccomandazione, for in other arenas, gift-giving may have the opposite effect of establishing one’s social superiority, if only symbolically (see Herzfeld 1987b for data and analysis from Greece). 10. One should not forget, too, the traditional role of the priest as a dispenser of patronage, though this has diminished in recent decades. One priest from Bernalda related that people do ask him for raccomandazioni on a daily basis: “All sorts of people come to ask for a raccomandazione, for things ranging from the banal to the most incredible. They imagine that the priest has who-knows-what influence. They ask him to intervene with another person. [. . .] Now I only have a few cards to play, so I keep them.”

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11. In fact, a stock comic scene from the Neapolitan tradition (Totò, Massimo Troisi) features a play on this double meaning of raccomandazione: in the scene, the Neapolitan asks the patron saint San Gennaro for a raccomandazione to enter heaven. 12. Voto, incidentally, derives from the Latin votum [vow, wish]. In Italian, it also refers to an electoral vote. Once again, there is a coincidence between religious and secular patronage: a devotee may promise a voto to the saint, just as a raccomandato may promise his vote to a politician to obtain a favor. 13. Don Mimì is an enemy of what he terms “fanatical cults,” meaning some of the more extreme devotions within the Catholic context. One Sunday evening, attendance at his church was quite low because people had swarmed to a shrine in Calabria on the anniversary of an apparition of the Madonna. One person who did attend mass that evening reported that “Don Mimì was pissed off because everyone had gone to Crosia. He said, ‘Why are these people going there? They stare at the sun to get visions of the Madonna, but the Madonna and Jesus are here inside [pointing to his heart].’” While Don Mimì continues to discourage excessive manifestations of devotion, he was, to the surprise of many, genuinely moved by the discovery of a miraculous drawing of Padre Pio that shed tears of blood. The event occurred in his parish, and the drawing is hanging in the Santi Medici church. 14. The expression “magical world” is a nod to Ernesto de Martino’s classic work, Il mondo magico (de Martino 1948). 15. The monacello (in dialect, munachicchie) is a trickster figure, thought to be the spirit of a dead child who had not been baptized. 16. As a form of social organization, we cannot speak of “patriarchy” in Bernalda, but this does not imply that patriarchal ideologies in general—understood as oppressing females and younger males—do not exist in the family and in the wider society.

Chapter 4

Raccomandazione, Tangente, and Mafia An “Amoral” Family of Genres

Modern bureaucracy in the interest of integrity has developed a high sense of status honor: without this sense the danger of an awful corruption and a vulgar Philistinism threatens fatally. And without such integrity, even the purely technical functions of the state apparatus would be endangered. —Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. —Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” If you don’t steal, you don’t get ahead. —Proverb related by a Bernaldese youth

Any discussion of raccomandazione would be deficient if it neglected to address the categories of tangente and mafia, to which I have already alluded in the preceding portions of this work.1 In the present chapter, I will consider more directly the qualities of these three cultural genres and the profound interrelations among them at the ideological level, with points of convergence and divergence. Yet in many respects, we may also view tangente and mafia as rationalized versions of traditional forms of raccomandazione, and, as the ethnographic study reveals, their

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interconnections create significant ambiguities in the categories in addition to a sense of ambivalence on the part of people who experience them. As a consequence, precisely these ambiguous qualities of raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia problematize the supposedly rational functioning of market and state institutions. In a reductive sense, one could say that raccomandazione functions through connections (social capital), the tangente through money (capital, pure and simple), and mafia through the use or threat of violence (a private management of “capital” punishment). But, as will become evident, the lines of distinction are by no means so clear. The study of a town like Bernalda, where the ideology of raccomandazione is widespread and deeply rooted, is interesting precisely because it suggests a reassessment of what we already know about clientelism, tangente, and mafia. These cultural genres are part of the same family; their evolution moves in the same direction—that is, toward a rationalization that preserves some of their traditional features. Therefore, even if Weber mourned the omnipresent, disenchanting exercise of rationality and capitalism in the modern era, the genres of tangente and mafia provide an interesting exemplification of the hybridization of “the most sublime values” with the rationality of those institutions lying at the heart of the Western modernity: the capitalist marketplace and the state apparatus. In Bernalda, discourses on raccomandazione frequently mention tangente or mafia. Such references emerge in the course of the speech event as separate but related topics, or else they crop up as metaphors in raccomandazione narratives for certain acts or protagonists. In the context of a dialogue, it the multiaccentual character of the word “raccomandazione” itself that validates the metaphoric exchange between raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia. Here it is essential to recognize how every meaning is subject to negotiation in the intersubjective use of language; if it were not so, words would become reified. In raccomandazione discourses, the fabric of multiaccentuality is woven by a mutual play between the word, which multiply reflects its own object, and the word that reflects multiple objects. Bakhtin offers an expressive description of the former: But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape. [. . .] If we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its direc-

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tionality toward the object, in the form of a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within the object itself [. . .], but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgments and accents through which the ray passes on its way toward the object; the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object, makes the facets of the image sparkle. (Bakhtin 1981: 276–77, orig. emph.)

By examining a context of social and intersubjective living, the present study aims precisely at the identification of some of the “facets” of the terms in question: raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia. The dispersive relationship between the word and its object is complemented by the multiplicity of the word’s objects, the fact that a “multiplicity of meanings is the constitutive feature of word” (Volosinov 1973: 101). Volosinov posits the existence of a combination of theme and meaning, interdependent and not rigidly separable: theme is “the upper, actual limit of linguistic significance,” that which “attempts to be adequate to a given instant of generative process.” Meaning, instead, is “the lower limit of linguistic significance,” “all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self-identical in all instances of repetition” (ibid.: 101– 2). Here I want to demonstrate that this meaning common to the three genres is what lies at the base of their metaphoric interchangeability. Thus we may consider the common raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia as different but nonetheless related genres within an overall discursive code or system of raccomandazione, a language shared by the various manifestations. As a discursive system, raccomandazione includes the substance that is common to the three genres, and that, in Volosinov’s terms, is what defines their meaning or “lower limit”: the genres themselves are themes, the “upper limit.” This way of grouping the categories under a discursive system of raccomandazione might better reveal their position (or contraposition) with respect to the dominant discourse— the ideal-type of rationality in the modern state and capitalist system. Having laid out this theoretical scheme, I analyze the discursive system itself, which concretely reveals the interconnections between raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia. When asked specifically to explain the difference between raccomandazione and tangente or their use of the term “mafia,” interviewees presented contrasting views: sometimes they emphasized equivalencies between the terms, while in other cases they offered a criterion permitting a distinction. There seems to be a general consensus that raccomandazione is somehow a lower-level phenomenon than tangente or mafia, one that is spicciola [petty] or “child’s play.” Some

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people suggested that raccomandazione is not a crime, inasmuch as it is “only” a matter of “knowing people.” To the extent that “simple” raccomandazione of this sort is subject to criticism by many because it runs contrary to principles of meritocracy and universalism, important moral obligations of reciprocity and family ties counterbalance such a negative evaluation. Raccomandazione therefore features a certain moral ambiguity: it is once both “normal”—as in commonplace—and “abnormal,” that is, recognized as being in conflict with rational-universal ideals which are the bedrock of the modern nation-state and capitalist economy. Since the genres of tangente and mafia are in a close, even contiguous relation with raccomandazione, their analysis offers further heuristic utility in the attempt to understand the contrasting evaluations and moral ambiguities surrounding the latter. These genres are in dialogue with each other in just the sort of intertextuality described in the work of Caton (1990). Caton’s study of Yemeni poetry demonstrates how different poetic and nonpoetic genres are related through the cultural associations they mutually project and assume. Such intertextuality permits discursive mixing, as one genre seeps into the discourse of another; but, as we will see in chapter 7, it also gives shape to a metacultural discourse about Southern Italy.

Raccomandazione and Tangente Let us now turn specifically to the genre of tangente in order to have a better sense of the phenomenon itself and its relationship to raccomandazione, objectively and as viewed in the local community, with the aim of identifying the meanings common to the two genres and the points in which they differ. The emergence of the notion of tangente in discussions of raccomandazione undoubtedly gained added impetus from the Operazione Mani Pulite investigation—the basis of the explosion of the Tangentopoli scandal in February 1992, only three months before I began fieldwork. In the years subsequent to the scandal, the Italian media spoke daily of tangenti: from the investigation’s original site of Milan, it exploded (all of a sudden!) into hundreds of mini-Tangentopoli excavated by the judiciary. In Bernalda a vast number of people have had personal experiences with the tangente (understood as a bribe or kickback), at least at the level of a request, even if—from what interlocutors told me—the act itself was not always carried out. The direct experience of tangente among the townsmen has been more significant than that of mafia, if we understand the latter in the narrow sense of contact with a criminal organization.

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Like the raccomandazione, the term “tangente” also features multiaccentuality: on the one hand it denotes a payment, and its numerous synonyms—like la bustarella [the little envelope] or la mazzetta [the little wad of money], for example—make reference to this aspect. Nevertheless, the nuance that tangente assumes varies widely according to the context in which it occurs. The tangente can therefore range from the payment made in case of an extortion to a bribe or payoff made in order to favor a transaction. This latter form is exemplified in some of the cases in the Mani Pulite investigation, in which entrepreneurs allegedly gave money to public officials or political parties in order to obtain contracts for public works. If we consider the gamut of meanings of tangente, we can see definite points of contact with raccomandazione, but there are also several aspects with which we may delineate a maximum line of contrast between the two phenomena, in terms of their themes. Despite the wide-ranging views and readings, a few elements emerge—though all but unequivocal—that permit generalization, and the analysis of the discourses will allow us to get at precisely these meanings and themes. The widest contrast between tangente and raccomandazione was suggested by the mayor of Bernalda at the time, an exponent of the Partito Democratico di Sinistra: he used the term tangente with strict reference to the entrepreneurial tangente (in Tangentopoli style, that is): AT: [Tangenti and raccomandazione] are phenomena that have different origins. Tangenti arise from an intensified market system. It’s capital that wins. The people with the most economic power are above the rules. I see it as the height of capitalism. DLZ: Do you mean, a bit like the monopolies of the robber barons in the United States of the nineteenth century? AT: Precisely—they establish the rules for the others, the exceptions for themselves. The tangente follows another logic: it’s quantifiable, in a wild market. There are no scruples about what’s done.

In this interpretation, the tangente is wholly associated with market logic. All things considered, this perspective is not surprising coming from a person who has long been active in a political party founded on the critique of the capitalist system; he is also, due to the institutional role he serves, a figure of power who grasps the less harmful aspects of raccomandazione in terms of solidarity or assistance to the needy. Yet this is only one of the many nuances of the tangente, though compared to others a rather less ambiguous one in its relationship with raccomandazione. In some contexts, people may use the raccomandazione to obtain something guaranteed to an individual by Italian law, perhaps with the

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justification that it acts as a corrective to bureaucratic slow-footedness and inefficiency.2 On the other hand, the tangente might be used to obtain what one is not legally due. With a payment (or “commission”) to public officials, it might be possible to favor an unentitled individual for some application or job selection, or one might acquire a “false” pension, recognition of a disability, or government financing. A wellknown example to consider would be the funds distributed through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (see Gribaudi 1980) or—as recent investigations in Naples have underlined—the vast sums of money available for reconstruction in the South after the earthquake of 1980. Still, the raccomandazione/tangente distinction is not cut-and-dry, since the tangente might be required in order for someone to get his just due, as we note in the comment of one Bernaldese who returned from years abroad as an immigrant worker in Germany to open a café-gelateria: It’s been more than a year that I’ve been waiting for [the special funding foreseen by law for return migrants]. While someone might get it right away, they pay a tangente: in two days, you get it.

Thus some people propose that the distinction between raccomandazione and tangente lies in the difference between the mere acceleration of the state machine to safeguard a right, on the one hand, and the quest to acquire an unjust or illegal advantage on the other. Even when the raccomandazione is perceived as a necessity in order to obtain a right, this right might itself conflict with other rational-universal principles such as waiting one’s turn. In this sense, people may well hold the acceleration of bureaucratic action through raccomandazione to be illegitimate. The multiaccentuality of the terms “raccomandazione” and “tangente” also reveals its gradations in the moral evaluations of the two. As indicated above, people commonly believe that the tangente is “more illegal” than the raccomandazione, and it appears to be a direct form of corruption. My father-in-law, a retired lawyer, delineated this subtlety: drawing a comparison between what he depicted as a “mere” raccomandazione and a tangente, he explained why the former is not in and of itself a crime3: PP: In order for there to be a crime, you have to demonstrate that the public official favored someone for another reason, such as family ties, electoral factors, a payment. DLZ: But those factors intersect with raccomandazione, don’t they? PP: I was speaking about the raccomandazione per se. Together with the raccomandazione, there’s something more—quid pluris—and it is that something more that makes for an illegality. [. . .] Anyway, the racco-

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mandazione is inflated. It no longer is useful. It’s not the raccomandazione itself that counts: what counts is the something extra. [. . .] If there’s not a concurrence of interests, the raccomandazione doesn’t work.

The possibility of drawing a legal boundary between the two genres, however, does not absolve the raccomandazione of its moral ambiguity. Another interlocutor presented an interpretation quite different from the preceding one: The damned raccomandazione. It’s not legal! If we’re all equal, we all have the same rights.

Yet, as mentioned above, a person in a position of power—that is, a potential raccomandante—will easily argue that the raccomandazione has positive moral aspects. Don Mariano, a local priest, described the raccomandazione as follows: It’s immoral, if you will. Unfortunately, there are situations in which you have to do this [raccomandazione] or the person chokes. [. . .] As priests, we have some power with the raccomandazione. But certain structures crush you right away. A priest does not recommend only to favor someone, but also to defend him. It might be someone who has a right.

One interpretation of the raccomandazione is therefore that of an act of solidarity or defense, of aid to a person in need. Nonetheless, there is no definitive consensus on the moral meaning of the two genres. I asked one interlocutor what he thought to be the difference between raccomandazione and tangente: The raccomandazione is for someone who has never worked. With the tangente, the person already works—he pays a “tax,” you might say. They’re not connected as phenomena. The tangente involves more serious crimes.

Other townspeople commented as follows: Gilda: The raccomandazione can come from a friend, a political figure, or it can be paid for. Franca: The tangente is [instead] actually the bustarella [little envelope]. Gilda: It’s different, that pizzo [an extorted payment], when they blackmail you.

In this dialogue, it is striking how the interlocutors employed two synonyms of tangente—bustarella and pizzo—that refer to the payment it-

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self in order to express how it differs from the raccomandazione, which in any case can be “paid for” (but more on the paid raccomandazione below). A married couple, on the other hand, did not completely agree on the distinction: Domenico: It’s always worked like this. There’s also the raccomandazione that gets paid for. It’s not a tangente. You say, “Listen, get me in here.” Assunta: For me it’s a tangente. DLZ: What’s the difference? Assunta: Where there’s a tangente, there’s dishonesty. Domenico: The tangente is a form of immorality; it’s a matter of corruption.

Both genres, raccomandazione and tangente, presuppose an exchange, a reciprocity. In the case of a close friendship or kinship (and thus in cases in which the raccomandazione is probably implicit), the relationship per se and a sense of obligation dictate a reciprocity that might even evolve in a long-term period. Someone might instead seek a raccomandazione from a more distant subject through a spontaneous “friendly gesture,” as interlocutors put it—for example a crate of fruit or the proverbial scamorza cheese.4 Or even something more. At this point, the boundary with the tangente is labile. Often, the supplicant gives the tangente at the request of its recipient, and it might consist of money but often appears in the form of “gifts”: automobiles, household appliances, jewelry. The request for the tangente itself might be implicit, as one friend described: A tangente is more something that’s been requested, while [the raccomandazione] is something to get treated better; the situation is hidden. In the tangente, they ask for something in exchange for the favor. With the tangente, you give something, for example, to get [admitted] into a hospital, maybe if it’s full. To be able to get in, you go to the head and ask, “How much do you want?”

In such circumstances, without an explicit request on the part of the figure of power, the offer of the gift might be an initiative of the actor in search of the “favor.” The ambiguity of the concept of “gift” in this case presents a point in common with the raccomandazione. The requested quality of the tangente is an element that connects its denotation as payment-to-obtain-a-favor with some of its other themes, namely extortion and blackmail. Another important line of contrast is that of temporality, a key factor in the exchange of gifts, as we know from anthropologists and sociologists who have analyzed the ritual of gift exchange (Mauss 1925;

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Bourdieu 1977; Herzfeld 1992). The raccomandazione depends on a relationship, and often it produces durable ties between the various actors. Especially when there has not been a prior long-term relationship, there is a moral obligation to demonstrate gratitude, while a “favor,” on the material level, can be repaid più in là [farther down the road]. With the tangente, however, the payment is thought to take place all at once (even if it can be paid in installments); in effect, it is a commercial transaction that depersonalizes the act of “favor.” In his study of Pantelleria, Galt (1974) does not use the actual term “tangente,” but he still expresses the same idea, contrasting “bribes” to the type of relationship implicit in raccomandazione: There is some distinction made among Pantescans between actually giving and accepting monetary bribes, and participating in gift-based personal networks. The former is clearly only a once-and-for-all transaction; the bribe for an immediate service does not produce any kind of ongoing link. . . . The simple bribe is single-stranded and involves no façade of sentiment or loyalty (1974: 194).

The “paid” raccomandazione, in this sense, cuts off the long-standing relationship, as one interlocutor suggested: If someone helps you to get a job in City Hall, you help him to get a document, or maybe he says to you, “Let me know when there are job selections,” etc. It becomes a chain—in the end, someone remains obliged for life. It depends on the person. Maybe he pays [for the raccomandazione], and that’s it, it’s finished.

Together with the gift, the raccomandazione pagata [paid or purchased raccomandazione] is precisely one of the points of conjunction in the heart of the ambiguity of trying to characterize the two genres, raccomandazione and tangente. In the light of the abundance of references to the paid raccomandazione, this subgenre merits specific attention. The paid raccomandazione emerges continually in the great majority of discourses on raccomandazione that serves a particular end: DLZ: How do you get a raccomandazione? Grazia: Here, nowadays, with a bustarella [little envelope].

Note the qualification “here, nowadays.” In fact, a number of interlocutors contrasted the use of money for the present-day raccomandazione to a past (the prewar and immediate postwar period) in which, they maintained, the aspect of “friendship” in the relationship was dominant,

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no matter how instrumental it was. One elderly man commented as follows: After the war, there was emigration. Someone would get a raccomandazione to join the Carabinieri [the militarized police force]. To get in, you had to have generations of your family that were clean. Maybe if there was someone who was not so good, the raccomandazione helped. Maybe the person had a friend who was working at the City Hall. Today, it functions with money. Before, it was on the basis of friendship. Today, money is the most important thing.5

Many narratives I gathered told of raccomandazioni paid for with money or “gifts” in order to obtain work. The following statements are exemplary of such situations: I know a woman who won a job selection for nurses. She worked for years in order to buy a car for the guy who recommended her. Once, I wanted to recommend my son. They asked me for twenty million [lira].

In the research data, the findings regarding the raccomandazione pagata contrast with the Schneiders’ research, in which they assert that money is rarely used in the raccomandazione (Schneider and Schneider 1976: 218). Other interlocutors in Bernalda were more vague in distinguishing the paid raccomandazione from the tangente: DLZ: How do you get a raccomandazione? Dina: If you know someone, especially a politician, who is a friend, he’ll do a raccomandazione for you. Or you pay a tangente. The raccomandazione is done on the basis of friendship, or there can be some sort of exchange.

In another conversation, I posed the question of the difference between raccomandazione and tangente to Lorenzo, an eminent local “philosopher” of raccomandazione: The raccomandazione. . . . It depends on what kind of raccomandazione we’re talking about. The raccomandazione for an expropriation [for example] costs [that is, it is necessary to pay in order to receive compensation following an expropriation of private property].

People can employ expressions like “tangente” or “bustarella” with strict reference to a payment, a means of obtaining a raccomandazione; or else, as some interlocutors suggested, the tangente itself can be seen

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as a subcategory of raccomandazione, or it can mean the transaction as a whole: Rosa: [The raccomandazione and the tangente] could seem to be the same thing at first glance. The tangente is a form of raccomandazione, but it’s a grander form, it’s premised on a greater illegality. The raccomandazione, on the other hand, could be the request of a favor—one person presents me another—without doing anything illegal. While with the tangente, you’re getting into a matter of illegality. In my opinion, the raccomandazione embraces the whole problem. The tangente is a particular example of raccomandazione.

Another person commented, The raccomandazione in looking for a job represents the majority of cases. The minority consists of raccomandazione in order to get a higher position compared to what one should have. In Milan, there’s the tangente—a raccomandazione for businesses.

Still another interlocutor expressed her view of the two genres: Vittoria: For me, it’s all connected. DLZ: Why is that? Vittoria: Because of the political system. If you do me a favor, there’s something in return. I give you a vote. The mazzetta is the same thing on the economic level. It’s all one thing.

The nuance of tangente that has the connotation of “extortion” creates another connection with raccomandazione: The raccomandazione is a compromise. You offer . . . you trust someone important who can do a certain favor, but there’s always a payback. [. . .] You can pay in kind or with money. The first, for women, is horrible, degrading. It’s a kind of blackmail. They play on a person’s weakness.

Another person spoke of “blackmail” on the part of a gynecologist: If you don’t pay, you have to wait for several months [to get an appointment]. Blackmail, raccomandazione, tangente: it’s a logical thread, with everything connected to get what you want.

The fact that the tangente generally has a monetary form should not in itself necessarily lead to a critical evaluation of the category on the basis of money’s negative associations in the Western ethical tradition—

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that is, money understood to be the “root of all evil” (see Parry and Bloch 1989). With the raccomandazione, too, we find forms of nonmonetary exchange that in effect feature the same characteristics of depersonalization and obligation as the tangente: one might take the example of the voto di scambio, an electoral “exchange vote” used to pay for a favor. There is therefore yet another point of contact between the two genres: the raccomandazione can be based on a relationship (family, friends, friends of friends), or it can take on the connotations of tangente, and sometimes in a given case both nuances may be present. The tangente appears as a technology of raccomandazione, a rationalization that maximizes the efficacy and efficiency of the raccomandazione and which, simultaneously, reduces the component of reciprocal relationship of trust. This quality of tangente emerged incisively in the course of a roundtable discussion in March 1999, in which a journalist jokingly termed a Lucanian politician an “industrialist of raccomandazione”: a suggestive image of raccomandazioni cranked out in a rationalized production, as if we were dealing with the output of a Fordist factory. While speaking of raccomandazione produced on an “industrial” scale, we should note that it would appear the raccomandazione has undergone a substantial inflation in the last decades; many persons, like my father-in-law above, maintain that old-fashioned “simple” raccomandazione is no longer effective, and therefore a payment is necessary: Nowadays, more than the raccomandazione, there’s an actual payment: the tangente, the bustarella. Today, everyone has a raccomandazione.

He subsequently softened the notion of “everyone” by referring to the need to pay: What I don’t think is right [is that] you should take work away from a poor schmo who studied [and give it to] one who doesn’t know anything. It’s not fair. Maybe the poor guy couldn’t even get a raccomandazione. If everyone could get a raccomandazione, they’d all do it. But it’s not like everyone has money or power. I don’t know if there’s a real difference [between raccomandazione and tangente]. In both cases, you have to give in order to receive, there’s a price.

Additionally, it emerged from the study that the raccomandazione is not a surefire method for reaching a goal, whereas many people expressed the perception that the tangente is more effective than the raccomandazione for obtaining “guaranteed” results, as in the following: With money, there’s more of an obligation to do it [carry out the favor], you have to do it perforce. Instead, with the raccomandazione a parola [on one’s word], if you feel like it, you do it.

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To sum up, then, the raccomandazione represents the “lower limit,” that is, the meaning of tangente, while the tangente is a “theme” or “upper limit” of raccomandazione, which is distinguished from a mere generic sense of raccomandazione for its nuances of depersonalization, extortion, illegality—even its “grandeur.” In any case, the two genres share reciprocity in their meaning, whether spontaneous or commodified, and their “abnormality,” that is, the manner in which they place themselves in opposition to the dominant discourse of a rational-universal ideal. In the previous chapter, I spoke of de Certeau’s distinction between tactics—the art of arrangiarsi—and strategy; raccomandazione can be associated with the former and tangente with the latter. In the tangente, the customer of the public office is no longer bricoleur of his relations, one who associates his voice with that of the raccomandante and utilizes the central element of temporality for an exchange of gifts. Instead, he is a subject who reacts to the request for money (or its equivalent), which will allow him to reach an objective, or else he himself is the instigator of such a gift. The equivocal character or the “paid” raccomandazione and the “gift” help us to understand the tangente as a hybrid category between the patrimonialism of raccomandazione and the depersonalization and rationality of the market and state. The “paid raccomandazione” incorporates this crossover: the “classic” notion of raccomandazione—a personal intervention activated by moral obligations of kinship, friendship, and reciprocity—is connected to the market, where it becomes an object of purchase. In the tangente, the “gift” is emptied of its original meaning and the relationship between actors is reduced to an action that is finished in a single gesture. Paradoxically the raccomandazione, which is a subversive personalization of the ideal and universal bureaucracy, is itself in turn depersonalized in the genre of tangente.

Raccomandazione and Mafia The second genre that I examine here in relation to the raccomandazione is that of mafia. This discussion does not intend to give the umpteenth definition or definitive description of the mafia phenomenon, but instead to rethink some of our already-existing knowledge of mafia in a cultural analysis that focuses on its relationship to raccomandazione. This exercise is of particular interest because the research site is a place where there is not yet organized crime comparable to that of neighboring regions, although there is now a consensus as to the inexactness of the image of Basilicata long described as a safe haven [isola felice], immune to criminal phenomena. In fact, the first signs of alarm from the general prosecutors’ offices appeared as far back as 1982, and since then

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there has been increasing awareness of the infiltration of Apulian and Calabrian clans in the region (Caserta 1992). Moreover, the region is a transit zone for Neapolitan contraband activities. In the last two years, there has been talk of a bona fide homegrown criminal organization called the “Basilischi,” although not much information is available yet on the structure of this group. Notwithstanding the development of this fifth mafia, crime in terms of an actual organization involved relatively few actors at the time of fieldwork in the town if Bernalda. For the most part, crime has taken the form of illegal activities whose collateral effects have affected the whole community: the diffusion of heroin and other narcotics, robbery, extortion. The town has been experiencing crime for a relatively short time, since the 1980s, and the milestone in its evolution was the presence in town of the heads of Taranto’s Modeo clan, who were sent there in compulsory residence. Evidently, these figures were able to appreciate the strategic location of the town that, together with its fraction of Metaponto, lies near the crossroads of traffic between Calabria and Puglia. Indeed, a good part of the zone of the Metapontino has come under the purview of the Scarcia clan, of Calabrian origin, which has its base in the nearby town of Policoro. More than a few interlocutors used the term “mafia” with the reference to clientelism, but, far from connoting organized crime as a concrete group, they cited mafia in this case in a metaphoric manner in discourses about the government or political institutions. Some unemployed youth, for example, said that the Employment Office “is a mafia.” In an interview, Vittoria explained the metaphor from her point of view: A large part of the South has mafia as crime, someone who’s willing to kill people. But in a more generic sense, it’s the politicians, because it’s all connected. A Sicilian mafioso is connected to Andreotti [for example]. The one who gets his hands dirty is in the street, but the politicians keep their hands clean.

The use of the mafia metaphor is actually very widespread, and for an Italian reader of this study probably rather obvious. What I want to highlight here is how, indeed, such equivalencies are so common, and more important, how they belong to common sense. Here, then, the analysis must take on an ideological character, giving attention to those discourses that construct the term “mafia” in local life, more than given to the concrete phenomenon of organized crime—even if the reality of mafia as an entity has contributed to the shaping of such discourses, together naturally with literary and mass-media discourses on mafia. At

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the level of phenomenon, it is necessary to go beyond what Santino calls the analytical “polarization” between mafia as an organization and mafia as something that exceeds the boundaries of such an organization and has connections to the state and society (Santino 1994). If some works (for example, Massari 1998) have underlined the serious dangers of underestimating the organizational aspect of mafia, others, instead, run the risk that “everything gets reduced to organization” (Santino 1994). Baratta (1994) suggests a means of getting through the impasse with a definition of mafia in terms of relations (or a system of relations) instead of entity, in such way as to be able to include both aspects. For the aims of the present analysis, such a notion of relations seems quite appropriate, because it suggests the basis of an interchange that creates a metaphorical relation between raccomandazione and mafia in the discourses of the Bernaldese. For example, back in 1989 when the town was under a DC administration, one unemployed woman complained when I asked her if she was involved with any of the region’s initiatives designed to combat unemployment: They said they’d open a course for the over-thirties, but I don’t believe it. Especially here, because of the politics in this town. It’s a mafia. They take the ones they prefer, the ones who can offer the most.

Mafia also appears as a metaphor, for example, in Piero’s comment: “The Pisticcesi are all mafiosi.” Certainly, speaking badly of the inhabitants of the neighboring town is a common pastime among Bernaldese, but this new and drastic criticism caught my attention. Another person present in the conversation added that, in effect, there seem to be many “highly placed” Pisticcesi here and there. But Piero insisted with a concrete case: outraged, he told us the story of a judge from Pisticci who had been able to get his brother-in-law who had been charged with homicide absolved. The anthropological acuity of antimafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone’s writing seems to me to be invaluable in attempting to grasp the bases of the metaphoric exchange. Falcone observed an “extraordinary economic, ideological and moral proximity between mafia and nonmafia and the inevitable intermingling between Sicilian values and mafia values, between people belonging to the organization and common citizens” (Falcone 1991: 89). Indeed, various mafiologists have underlined the cultural features of the social fabric in which mafia operates, features held to have favored the development of mafia-type criminality in the South and created a social consensus to support such phenomena or at least reduced resistance to them. On the one hand, the research has moved beyond the so-called “Sicilianist” theses and their essentializing conception of culture (not unlike the revision that Banfield’s “amoral

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familism” concept has undergone); on the other hand, the recognition of the importance of culture remains vital (Balistreri 1993). The Schneiders (1976), for example, analyze Sicilian cultural codes of furbizia [cunning], amicizia [friendship], and onore [honor], codes that are strongly rooted in the ideology of raccomandazione.6 Moreover, the concrete cultural practice of gift-giving—of paramount importance in the raccomandazione and tangente but also rather ambiguous—reappears in mafia “culture.” In this regard, Falcone states the following: Another Sicilian custom: gifts. It is incredible how many gifts are given in Sicily. Because the gift is a tangible sign of respect: the more someone receives, the more certain you are that this is an important, admired, worshipped figure. [. . .] Above and beyond its munificent aspect, the gift reflects precise economic and power relations. [. . .] It is one way, like others, to create lasting friendships. Inside and outside the mafia. (1991: 87–88).

We should also bear in mind the fact that the tangente reappears within mafia, but unlike the tangente of the bribe, here it takes on the nuance of extortion. The cultural codes and practices common to raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia reinforce the interconnection between the genres, permitting their metaphoric exchange. Even if the phenomenon of mafia in a narrow sense (juridically defined in Italy as criminalità di stampo mafioso [mafia-type criminality]) is relatively limited in Bernalda, mafia nonetheless represents in the townspeople’s discourses a category utilized for classifying certain types of relations. For example, one day I happened to find the owner of boutique in a rage. She told me the story of a young woman who had come to the shop to purchase a rather costly item. The owner offered the young woman a 15 percent discount on the article, even creating a plan for her to pay for it in installments. The young woman left the shop, on her way out assuring the owner that she would return to purchase the item; first, however, she wanted her friend Carla to see it. That very afternoon Carla came into the shop and told the owner that the item was fine, but that she would have to give a 30 percent discount to the young woman. The owner disagreed, and in the end, the article remained unpurchased. To add insult to injury, a short time later the owner learned that the young woman had bought a similar item in a rival shop. The shop owner commented on the episode in this way: That Carla is a mafiosa. A downright mafiosa. Put this in your book, Dorothy. She comes here and tells me what discount I have to put on my merchandise. Who is she? And if I don’t put the discount that she

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says, she sends my client away. But what she really wants is a tangente, yes, a tangente, because she thinks she’s doing you a favor by bringing you clients. And I’m supposed to give her a discount? [She followed this outburst with a long litany of complaints about Carla and a series of expletives.]

This case presents a good example of daily relations in which people invoke the genre of mafia in order to reference a perception of overbearing behavior used to control normal market processes in addition to maximizing the gain of the “mafioso.” As Falcone noted, “It is perfectly possible to have a mafioso way of thinking without being a criminal” (1991: 81). Innumerable studies have established and examined the organic relationships between mafia and the state and between mafia and the capitalist market, and it is not necessary here to recapitulate them. Instead, in terms of the present analysis it is sufficient that we sum up some of the well-known observations made in the research in order to reconsider them in the perspective of a discursive and ideological interconnection among mafia, tangente, and raccomandazione. Let us first consider the mafia-state relationship, where we note that the mafia’s relationship with the public sector has been the most important factor in its durability and expansion (cf. Chubb 1989). The mafia’s ties with the state are multiple: clientelism, in the form of votes offered by a mafia group in exchange for a favor; the corruption or intimidation of law enforcement and the judiciary; and the direct penetration of mafia representatives or their relatives in public offices. Just as there is a clientelism of the state, Blok (1974) notes, so too exists a parallel system of mafioso brokers. Graziano (1977) even considers mafia a form of clientelism, evidently borrowing the socioeconomic class distinction in Turiello’s work when the latter associates mafia forms with lower-class strata and clientelism with the more privileged ones. The very term “boss” in Italian, taken from English, can refer either to a mafia head or to a political leader who employs clientelistic practices. In English, “boss” has a much wider range of meanings, above all its daily use to mean a superior in the workplace. In more academic or historical discussions, the term refers to a leader in general or to clientelist politicians (as in “Boss Hogg” or “bossism” as a clientelistic system). In making reference to mafia, while “boss” does have some currency, Americans often prefer the Italian capo or don (i.e. “the Dapper Don,” John Gotti) if not the English words “head” or “leader.”7 Besides having organic connections with the state, the mafia has been described by several authors as an “alternative state” or “mafia-state”

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[Stato-mafia] (Falcone 1991), taking on many functions of the legitimated state and in parallel to it. Many of the Bernaldese interviewees indicated such an equivalence. Silvio, for example, commented as follows: In Calabria, in Sicily, there’s mafia. It’s as if there were another state—the mafia, the camorra. If you have to get admitted into a hospital, if you need work, you don’t go to the authorities—you go to the mafia. Instead of paying the state, you pay these guys, or you guarantee votes for their man.

Bernardo introduced the discourse of mafia during a discussion of unemployment and entrepreneurial activity in the South: Here people won’t risk [for business]. In the North it’s different—the state helps a lot more. There are entrepreneurs because people will risk. And the state doesn’t do anything here. So there you have the mafia, because the mafia gives work: you have someone who commands and gives people work. I think that if there were factories [here in the South], the situation would be different.

Strikingly, even in a community in which organized crime has not yet taken hold, the idea is widespread that mafia acts as a substitute for functions belonging to the state, where the state is perceived to be inefficient or absent. The scholars’ analysis placing a parallel mafia state alongside a weak legitimate state has become part of people’s common sense. Organic connections between mafia and state, mafia as a substitute for the state, mafia and state as actors in raccomandazione, mafia as a form of behavior: these are the principal bases of a metaphoric exchange between the terms. This metaphor is critical of the legitimate state, permeated as it is with raccomandazione, and it is a desperate recognition that the state does not meet its rational-universalistic ideal. As Weber observed, the expansion of the capitalist economy, together with the state and its bureaucracy, is one of the characteristic signs of modern Western society. Above and beyond its “special” relations with the state, the mafia—several scholars have noted—has its own particular style of capitalism. For example, scholars have mentioned agrarian capitalism as one of the elements that gave rise to the mafia phenomenon in Sicily (Tilly 1974; Schneider and Schneider 1976). The Schneiders present a picture of the first mafiosi who operated with investments of a speculative, short-term character, just as the associations that were forming were short-term (1976: 11). Their description of these early mafiosi brings to mind the notion of “tactics” described in the previous chapter, seizing the opportunity of the moment. Mafia entrepreneurship under-

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went a subsequent evolution in phases that are well known to researchers: the agrarian mafia morphed into an urban-entrepreneurial mafia, then it became specialized in snatching contracts for public works, and finally it has taken the form of “finance” mafia, characterized by close connections between legal and illegal capital. In this passage, the mafia demonstrates an increasing “rationalization” of its entrepreneurial activities, a rationalization that reveals a transformation from “tactic” to “strategy.” And while the elements of charisma and trust (together with the use of violence) remain essential to the success of these activities, the mafia itself “appears increasingly as an impersonal market force” (Chubb 1989: 38). The mafia becomes a crime “multinational,” and at the same time, it conserves its attribute of firmly entrenched territoriality. Mafia is therefore a hybrid genre, just as that of tangente, a cross between the productivist rationality of the market with the personalistic qualities of raccomandazione. Mafia has evolved as a hybrid between, on the one hand, tactical cunning [furbizia], the calibrated use of temporality, violence, and personalism within a subordinated group—demonstrating a great capacity for adaptation (Galante 1986: 106–7; Falcone 1991)—and on the other hand, it features a strategic rationality with regard to the logics of accumulation. Initially a form of broker capitalism, mafia not only has enormously extended the range and intensity of its entrepreneurship but it has also “vampirized” the legitimate state, to borrow an expression from de Certeau (1984: 49). And like other strategies, mafia has always depended on the delineation of a proper space, first in its local spheres of action—“turf ” is always of primary importance—and then it insinuated itself into the spaces proper to the institutions of state and market. From this favorable terrain, it launched its attack as an alternative state. The hybrid quality of mafia bears the shape of a metatactic that has reached the level of a strategic alternative.

The Problem of “Rationality” in the Genres Up to now, the present study has sought to reconsider how criminality and clientelism have a rationality of their own, even if this rationality is opposed to that of “mature” democracy and capitalism. It is appropriate here to recall that Weber, one of the thinkers most deeply exploring the question of rationality and rationalization, emphasizes that rationality—but also irrationality—is not an attribute that is intrinsic to a phenomenon or action, “a thing is never irrational in itself, but only from a particular [. . .] point of view” (Weber 1965: 105n1). Weber also draws a distinction between formal and substantive rationality. Starting with

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the economic sphere in which capitalistic rationalization takes place, Weber considers formal rationality as it refers to the maximization of the calculability of action, while he defines substantive rationality “from the point of view of some particular substantive end, belief or value commitment,” especially social needs (Brubaker 1984: 36; see Weber 1961 1:96). With the extension of rationalization and its reciprocal reinforcement among various spheres (economic, political, juridical, religiouscultural), formal rationality aims at efficiency in order to reach a given end, while substantive rationality is delineated in terms of values or outcomes. The distinction between the two lies at the heart of Weber’s profound ambivalence with regard to two fundamental elements of the process of rationalization in the modern world, capitalism and bureaucratization (not only of the state, but every sphere). In his view, these elements present a great formal rationalization, yet they simultaneously lack substantive rationality in the values of substantial equality, fraternity, and caritas. Moreover, Weber underlines the progressive dehumanization that is taking place with the growth of formal rationality (Weber 1961, 2:289). This distinction between formal and substantive rationality is quite useful for examining an apparent paradox in this famous phrase by Falcone: In certain moments, these mafiosi seem to me to be the only rational beings in a world populated by lunatics. Even Sciascia asserted that Sicily is hiding the worst Cartesians. (1991: 72)

In Weberian terms, the mafia demonstrates great formal rationality, precisely because of its efficiency, in which on many counts it surpasses the state itself. This seems to be the spirit of what Padovani writes regarding Falcone in his prologue to the magistrate’s book: Is it so strange, though, that a fanatic of the state like [Falcone] is fascinated by Cosa Nostra, precisely for how it represents state rationality? (Padovani, in Falcone 1991: 18)

Much the same can be said of the tangente, the technologized version of the raccomandazione, seeing as both genres are used as a means of “improving” the state’s efficiency. Yet it is possible to go a step further in this reflection: in the preceding paragraphs, I highlighted the hybrid character of these genres as sites of the cross between a formal type rationality and a personalistic orientation. This personalistic orientation is none other than what Weber called substantive rationality, that is, recognizing values like brotherhood and an ethic of human dignity. Perhaps this consideration might offer an explanation for Falcone’s attitude of

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profound respect for the mafiosi, a respect that was at times misunderstood and that during his life raised suspicion and criticism. Nor is it far-fetched to suppose that this substantive rationality has been the cement of a certain social consensus around the mafia, just as it has been around the raccomandazione. The analysis presented here has documented the profound interconnection between these genres, which in turn have their foundation in a background of patrimonialism and personalism. In a similar manner, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ideology of popular Catholicism offers support for the type of substantive rationality we find in clientelism, with a certain homology between the intermediation of saints and that of the patron. We might speculate, moreover, whether or not the evident appeal of the romantic mafioso myth also has its basis in a desire for liberty from what Weber famously called the “iron cage” of the modern world. It is certain that to some extent substantive rationality offers an attraction to join the mafia, as demonstrated quite clearly in the important study by Massari. Within a description of the Sacra Corona Unita, the Apulian mafia, she documents the experiences of several different pentiti [informants] (Massari 1998). According to the narratives of these informants, they initially joined an association that upheld ideals of brotherhood and solidarity (toward prisoners and their families, especially). With time, however, they resented what they saw as the betrayal of such ideals by members who demonstrated an increasingly instrumental approach: that is, an increment in formal rationality to the detriment of substantive rationality. Massari writes, Many ex-affiliates appeared obsessed by a condition of oppressive skepticism. The original communitarian ideal had given way to a war of everyone against everyone. [. . .] [Dissenting opinions] began to circulate among the ranks of members who saw the rise of the Brindisini to be one of the causes of the association’s barbarization. And Rogoli did not seem to place any limit to the strictly utilitaristic line that was carried out by these new leaders. (Ibid.: 59)

Even if, on some counts, the genres of raccomandazione, mafia, and tangente demonstrate a form of substantive rationality, they nonetheless have as their consequence the reproduction of hierarchy and discrimination. In the end, they are inadequately rational from the perspective of a substantive rationality conceived of as the provision for the needs and desires of all members of a society. For this reason, mafia has always presented itself as a conservative force and has historically been violently opposed to Communism. As many scholars have observed, the outcome of the linkage between mafia and clientelist politics has been

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that of a “blocked democracy,” oriented toward the conservation of the status quo. The study by Gribaudi (1980) is valuable in this regard: she demonstrates how the DC in the South projected itself in terms of an ideology of “friendship” and of “protection of ties of family and neighborhood,” and so forth. The ideological appeal to a substantive rationality contributed in a significant way to the consolidation of a consensus around the DC, just as the same can be said of the mafia.8 Borrowing Schiller’s expression, Weber spoke of the “disenchantment of the world” tied to the progressive rationalization of modern society. In this sense, we may speak of the installation of universalizing, productivist rationality as a dominant discourse (Terdiman 1985). At the same time, the genres of raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia come to form an inevitable counterdiscourse, “contrary and transgressive” (ibid.: 65). Yet Weber himself recognized the fact that rationalization as a process is neither total nor definitive, not even in the West, where it had reached its greatest historical development (Giglioli 1977: 28–29). The crux of the problem lies in the fact that this dominant discourse in the West mistakes formal rationality for rationality tout court. In Weber’s perspective, rationality was a neutral analytical ideal from the evaluative point of view (Rossi 1982: 42), but the progressive extension of formal rationality to all spheres of society has caused it to become completely commonsensical and has ratified its “normality” in an ethnocentric Western view (and self-ascribed identity). In this way, rationality conceived exclusively as formal rationality has taken on a positive value as a feature inherent to modern Western culture. From the point of view of the people in the society examined here, though, it is precisely the discrepancy between formal and substantive rationality that has given rise to ambivalent evaluations of raccomandazione, tangente, and mafia, just as the evaluations of their own society are ambivalent. These genres are simultaneously normal and abnormal, referring to cultural norms that are shared and valued, but at the same time they are part of the discursive system of raccomandazione that in many respects is opposed to the ideals of the dominant discourse of formal rationality. They are intimately familiar, so to speak, but become pathological when viewed with an eye that presumes itself to be rationalist and that attributes a positive value to this rationality. This eye belongs to the face of Northern Italy and Northern Europe when they observe the South, as well as to the face of Southerners themselves when they look in the mirror, as chapter 7 will explain. Raccomandazione as a discursive system is indeed a dominant one on the local level, but it is necessary to trace its points of contact with the rationalist discourse that dominates (or pretends to dominate?) on a wider, extralocal level. This is a discourse that presumes

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to be able to judge the South (and in some contexts all of Italy) in an “orientalist” manner (Said 1978): a deviant, backward, amoral South where the combination of “amoral” and “familism” offers the critique par excellence of Southern substantive rationality.

Notes 1. A version of this chapter was presented at a workshop, “Criminalità e sviluppo,” at the Conference of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (Sezione di Sociologia Politica), Arcavacata di Rende (CS), 17–18 June 1999. 2. See Herzfeld 1992 for an analysis of negative stereotypes of bureaucracy. 3. We were discussing the clamorous Italian Court of Cassation sentence, 8 June 1992, under the aegis of the court’s president, Judge Corrado Carnevale. This sentence acquitted some members of the Socialist Party (PSI) in Calabria of the accusation of mafia association, which arose from the fact that they had asked for raccomandazioni from some representatives of the ’ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. The decision created a sensation in the press, which narrowed the content of the sentence into the principle tout court that “raccomandazione is not a crime,” completely ignoring the aspect of mafia association. Note the intertextuality between the discourses of raccomandazione and mafia in this case, between the mass media and popular discussion, with an additional connection through the figure of Judge Carnevale, who was nicknamed in the press as “the sentence-killing judge.” 4. Scamorza is a mild white cheese, something akin to a dried mozzarella. I say that it is “proverbial” in that people use the expression “bring the scamorza” as a euphemistic reference to this sort of propitiatory gift-giving. At times the reference is literal. 5. Certainly, one should not rule out that such discourses about the past might be colored with nostalgia. Other interlocutors spoke of the use of paid raccomandazioni and exchange voting for obtaining Land Reform allotments in the 1950s and jobs in the ANIC industrial complex in the 1960s. Even so, there seems to be a consensus among older interlocutors, but also many younger ones, on the deterioration of the quality of human relations in the community in recent decades. In their view, this was reflected in increased individualism, consumerism and crime. An oft-heard comment is that despite the dire poverty of the past, people were better off in terms of their human relations. 6. The anthropological literature subsequent to the Schneiders’ work has problematized the notion of honor raised to the status of analytical concept (see, for example, Herzfeld 1980). In the ethnographic context of Bernalda, onore per se is not a discursively marked category, but if we can reconceive the notion as something like figura [figure], I think it retains a great deal of validity and currency. 7. Interpreter and novelist Elizabeth Jennings has suggested that the Italian usage of “boss” was imported by Sicilian mafiosi through their dealings with their American counterparts (personal communication). 8. We must not neglect the fact that a “consensus” around the mafia is also the product of a quotidian climate of intimidation and terror, as Siebert (1996) emphasizes.

Chapter 5

Raccomandazione, Class Relations, and the Southern Question

The raccomandazione is an instrument of power, and it always serves the most powerful. —Giuseppe, lawyer in Bernalda My mother says that in the past things were different. There weren’t many rich people. Nowadays, we’re all rich. Before, everyone was a peasant. So, if you know how to manipulate people, you can get rich off of us. [In the past] there were rich people, and the rest were all equal. Earlier, people slept with the doors open, there wasn’t any crime. —Rosa, unemployed mother of five and resident in a public housing complex locally nicknamed “The Bronx”

On 24 September 1993, the Committee for Parliamentary Immunity of the Italian Parliament took a vote on whether or not to authorize judicial proceedings against their Neapolitan colleague Francesco De Lorenzo, member of the Liberal Party. In a clamorous decision only a few months earlier, prosecutors were denied such authorization to proceed against the long-time Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who had received dozens of avvisi di garanzia [notifications of being under investigation] for involvement in the tangente scandal unearthed by the Operation Clean Hands investigation, by then in its second year of activity. De Lorenzo, who had served as minister of health, was accused of various tangenti and voti di scambio [election votes in exchange for something]; playing on the pope’s honorific title of address, “Sua Santità” [his Holiness], the media rebaptized De Lorenzo “Sua Sanità” [his Health]. As information came forward on the alleged tangenti, there was great public indignation over stories of kickbacks on pharmaceuticals and even for

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public service announcements for AIDS prevention. Yet the Parliamentary Committee voted against authorization—a shocking decision that elicited criticism even from the president of the Republic. At this point, I thought that hell was going to break loose among civil society: I envisioned myself participant-observing the Neapolitan masses occupying City Hall, outraged citizens storming the Parliament, the Ministry of Health in flames, calls to lynch De Lorenzo. But contrary to my expectations, nothing of this sort took place. Not even a single tomato was thrown at De Lorenzo, which is more than what can be said for former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi after judicial authorization was similarly denied for his case. I was reflecting out loud on this event with a friend from Naples, expressing my astonishment. “Eh,” she said, “But do you know how many people benefitted in some way from that guy?” It seems likely that complicity is the better part of silence. If I have read the De Lorenzo case correctly, we need to ask by what mechanisms this complicity—or better, this collective will—comes to be installed. The hypothesis I put forth in this chapter is that the ideology of raccomandazione—as an ideology of power—played a key role in the establishment and maintenance of the hegemonic bloc that led Southern Italy from the postwar period to the early 1990s. In the recent “post-Tangentopoli” phase since 1992, the ideology of raccomandazione is still strong, but because the previous hegemonic bloc is no longer able to guarantee its efficacy in practice, the raccomandazione has become little more than special-interest lobbying (at best) and bare-faced corruption (at worst), while on a general level it still operates to reproduce class privilege. To say that in the previous period the raccomandazione was central to the consolidation of hegemony is not to imply that this hegemony was gained merely through the exchange of favors. Certainly, material interest was an important factor in the ability to gain a certain consensus, but it cannot be all: my anthropological analysis points to a surplus of cultural investment in the raccomandazione that exceeds the material realm per se, and hence we note the weight of raccomandazione as ideology. Had the raccomandazione been linked exclusively to material conditions, it would have gone by the wayside as soon as the dominant parties’ ability to deliver the goods waned. As my ethnographic research demonstrates, this has not at all been the case. In the post–World War II period, Southerners of very different social positionalities—fractured principally along lines of class—came to assume their places in the hegemonic formation through the cohesive capacity of the ideology of raccomandazione. Moreover, this development had specific consequences in terms of the Southern Question.

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In his notes on the Southern Question, Gramsci discusses the strategic necessity of an alliance between the Northern proletariat and the peasant masses of the South (Gramsci 1926 [1991]). As we can note with historical hindsight, such an alliance did not come about in subsequent decades, but not because the “hegemonic bloc” of Southern landowners and Northern bourgeoisie of Gramsci’s day retained its original strength. Since World War II, the landed pseudo-aristocracy of the South has declined, and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois strata have emerged as political power holders. This was only partly due to the land-reform process, but more importantly, the latter strata were able to gain control of political patronage resources—most notably jobs and financing that come into existence with increased bureaucratization and the special funding schemes designed to stimulate the South’s lagging development. In Gramsci’s depiction, the Southern Italian masses are the victims of an internal colonialism perpetrated by the North, while in later descriptions other scholars describe them as subject to the domination of indigenous bosses in politics and organized crime. Some analyses, such as that of Wade (1980), even suggest a synthesis of these two approaches, but in my view, such analyses are bound to remain incomplete if we do not attend to the ideological aspects of the problem. Here, I do not consider ideology as “false consciousness” but as a terrain of struggle. Following a Gramscian perspective, the ideological elements of common sense are an important site around which a collective will is forged, permitting leadership rather than domination, or in the case of patronage, a leadership that goes beyond a mere interest-based consensus. This chapter addresses raccomandazione as both an ideology and an ideological phenomenon, and as such, it covers its role in the hegemonic struggle and in the neutralization of antagonism to the hegemonic forces. Despite some common notions as to the nature of raccomandazione, it becomes increasingly evident from the ethnographic research that the uses, understandings, and evaluations of raccomandazione are not entirely identical among all Bernaldese. Many of the differences can be attributed to class positionality, making reference to socioeconomic class location to describe the various strata in a broad fashion. Yet I do want to caution the reader that what the analysis indicates are the strongly tendential but not mechanical ways in which people of different class positionalities employ and evaluate the raccomandazione. There is no absolute correlation between class and the nuances of raccomandazione, and the class groupings themselves are defined loosely, for it is beyond the scope of this study to provide a detailed account of specific class fractions.

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How Things Were “Before” As I indicated in chapter 1, Bernalda and its environs have undergone substantial changes in the last few decades. This is not to say that the society was completely static and underwent little or no modification prior to this time—a view one might be tempted to assume in a poetic vein, in a timeless representation of peasant civilization. It is quite reasonable to suggest, however, that the nature and rate of change since World War II have been unprecedented. I spoke with many townspeople over the age of sixty to supplement what I knew of these socioeconomic changes and to get a better sense of how people have lived through and viewed them. Here, integrating this oral-historical material, I present an outline of the evolution of the raccomandazione in the contemporary period. Under the Kingdom of Italy from Unification (1871) to the end of World War II, the great majority of Bernaldese were peasant farmers, shepherds or day laborers on the great estates. Their conditions of the most abject poverty are well known: poverty and unemployment, poor housing and hygiene, endemic illness, high rates of illiteracy and infant mortality. The other social groups were composed of the large landowners, the clergy, a small class of professionals and functionaries, and—a bit lower still on the social scale—merchants and artisans. Universal male suffrage was extended following World War I, but with the rise of Fascism in the early 1920s, there was very little time for the newly enfranchised (male) masses to enjoy this democratic right. Moreover, the hemorrhage of transatlantic emigrants at the turn of the century— known as a period in which people “voted with their feet”—slowed significantly in the early 1920s, as the United States closed its doors and Fascist policy did its best to discourage such movement in order to bolster the country’s population both internally and in the African colonies. Despite their descriptions of Fascist severity and oppression, as well as the deprivations of such indigence, my interlocutors expressed nostalgia for the sense of order and peacefulness that they claimed reigned in the town at that time. Elderly people who were youths or children under the Fascist regime recall that the raccomandazione at that time was rather different, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The following are excerpts from conversations with several elderly Bernaldese of lower-middle- and lower-class backgrounds: During Mussolini’s time, during the war, things were a bit sad. Power was authoritarian, it wasn’t flexible. Nowadays, everything that you do, there’s a raccomandazione. Back then, instead, no. . . . Say you needed something, you brought a gift. For example, if you needed to have some-

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thing written—since most people worked the land, few knew how to write. . . . The only ones who studied were those who had money. It was life full of sacrifices. There was not work. It was a form of slavery: you had to do this or that in order to have a day’s work, or bring a gift or something else. There was a general humiliation, you went to the landowner and bowed down. During the Fascist period and right afterward; wealth came after the war. First, the landowner bought the fieldhands. The job competitions entered into use after the war, after 1950. It has always been like this, even without a tangente. Before, the raccomandazione was in order to have a piece of bread, afterward, for work.

In the prewar period, the same scene took place morning after morning in Bernalda, as it did in towns throughout Basilicata: unemployed men lined up in the square and waited to see if they might be selected by the agent of the landowner to work that day. As an alternative to agricultural labor, some youths would apprentice with a craftsman—a carpenter, blacksmith, or even a mechanic: Before, there were more vocations. One learned them well, not like nowadays. The new generation doesn’t work, they don’t have apprenticeships. If a boy was good, maybe he received some gift from his padrone [employer]. Before, in ’35–’40, when someone finished school with a diploma, he found work. Things functioned normally. Today, no one wants to be a carpenter, mechanic or shoe repairman. Before, if you didn’t study, you went to work with a mechanic. Nowadays it’s going to end up that the cars will remain stuck in the roads without anyone to fix them.

In the prewar period, the social distance between the upper and lower classes was bridged by forms of gift-giving that made up the sort of “lopsided friendship” described in the classic patronage literature (PittRivers 1954; Waterbury 1977): Before, you went to the doctor, for example. He would give me some medicines. And then I’d think, “Madonna mia! My doctor!” [makes a gesture of desperation, putting his hand to his head] So I’d bring him chickens, eggs. I would pay for the medicine, but I’d also give a gift. [Another man comments: “In order to be treated better.”] It was something you did more out of friendship.

The overall effect of the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in the postwar decades has been to alleviate—but not eliminate—many of the markers of the gap between the upper classes (the landed gentry, professionals, functionaries), the middle classes (craftsmen, shopkeep-

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ers, lower-level office employees) and the lower classes (peasant farmers, shepherds, manual laborers).1 Before, there were only a few big shots. There weren’t so many doctors, schoolteachers. It was difficult to obtain a raccomandazione. Now, if you know a guy, he knows someone else. . . . It’s easy. Or if you have money, you pay for the raccomandazione. The big landowners] are fewer. Nowadays you see them, they drive the same car I drive, a [Fiat] Panda. They’ve changed their approach with the farmhands—there are more niceties. In fact, the landowner begs you to work. With work and the labor union today, you work seven or eight hours [per day] and not more than that. The young people couldn’t care less: they do their hours and that’s it. The large farms are doing badly.

If one knows some of the actual big landowners in Bernalda, one should note for the record that the modest Fiat Panda is likely to be their third car after the BMW and the Mercedes, which they probably prefer not to use for trekking out on the farm. Despite the appearances of a narrowing gap, however, differences in status in the community are very keenly felt, even when what appear to be objective socioeconomic bases are slight, and they do condition interpersonal relations to a significant degree. In the postwar period, a number of sources channeled an influx of monetary resources, spurring a slow process of modernization (often denounced as “modernization without development”): funds arriving through the Agency for the Mezzogiorno, emigrant remittances, real and bogus pensions of various forms. In more recent years (after 1980), these have taken the form of funds for earthquake relief, and subsidies for agriculture and entrepreneurship from the state and the European Community. As noted previously, the establishment of an industrial center in the nearby Valbasento district as well as the Italsider steel plant in Taranto provided salaries for many Bernaldese, though these attempts at industrialization revealed themselves to be “cathedrals in the desert,” and they ran into great difficulty by the late 1970s. Overall, the increase in per capita wealth helped alleviate poverty while at the same time enabling Southerners to become mass consumers, particularly of goods from the North (cf. Wade 1980; Gribaudi 1980). With the establishment of the Republic after World War II, electoral votes and money began to supplement and/or supplant traditional forms of gifts, such as agricultural or pastoral products. The vote became a new gift in the attempt to obtain a raccomandazione that would permit a share in the new cornucopia of resources available through or indirectly controlled by political figures. In this way, the raccomandazione has a basis

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in “connection capital” that can, to some extent, permit the mobility of members of the lower classes, while serving to enhance or consolidate the position of members of the upper classes. And with the burgeoning state bureaucratic-administrative apparatus, the points of contact between the citizen and the state multiplied. Somewhere along the line, the raccomandazione became “institutionalized,” as many interlocutors put it, often as a means of obtaining what was due by “right,” such as special financing, a license, or a pension. Some of the lower-class elderly comment as follows: The raccomandazione was discovered more with the period of democracy. Now you get yourself recommended to have a better job. Before, there were twenty or so big landowners. After the war, there was the Agrarian Reform. Those who supported the DC [Christian Democrats] received an allotment, the Communists didn’t. That was already a form of raccomandazione. Someone who was truly a peasant didn’t get anything, while there were many in Bernalda who had an allotment [in an illicit way]. If someone who had a raccomandazione couldn’t give money, he gave gifts: lamb, baby goat. He had to exchange favors. They opened the ANIC [industrial complex]. In the beginning they talked about three thousand jobs. But you had to pay a tangente. Some people sold their home in order to have a job there. The DC was in power—those who were Communists couldn’t get in. Corruption has always existed, there [has always been] someone corrupt. But nowadays, everyone is corrupt. Before, who read the newspaper? Before the war, we didn’t even have radio. No one asked for a tangente. You gave a gift gladly. And there were some people who didn’t even accept it: on the contrary, they got offended. Nowadays, the most ignorant person resembles the most intelligent back then.

With their destinations in Northern Italian and Northern European industrial centers, significant emigrant flows that had been interrupted in the Fascist decades resumed in the 1950s, and they continued until the 1970s, when the international recession slowed the demand for immigrant labor. The generations of youths among those who remained behind in Basilicata increased their educational qualifications, a “talisman” in pursuit of the ideal of the posto fisso [permanent job] that had gained sway. As a result, there are astronomically high rates of registered unemployment among youths (in Bernalda, the figure hovers around the 60 percent mark), few of whom are willing to perform the most readily available work in agriculture or construction or to apprentice in craft trades (Zinn 1998).

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We see from the oral-historical material that while the raccomandazione has always had a place in interpersonal relations in the society, there is the sense that its use has expanded among the lower classes with the changing wants and possibilities of the people. Additionally, whereas there was previously a greater emphasis on the gift—uncoerced if somewhat instrumental, coded in the language of “friendship”—in the period following the war, the emphasis shifted to “gifts” of money and/or political support, more often than not interpreted, respectively, as the tangente or voto di scambio. The aspect of coerced exchange has come to predominate over that of offering and the idiom of friendship with which it was bound. Lower-class people in particular commented upon this change with a great deal of resentment. Recalling the discussion of “gift” in chapter 3, the transformation of the raccomandazione into a purchase has had the effect of alienating traditional practices of gift-giving, though the latter have not vanished from the scene.2 Discussions with elderly members of Bernalda’s upper classes repeated some of the same points of the lower-class elderly, but accented others. From their vantage, there has been less change in the use of raccomandazione than was emphasized by the lower-class interlocutors. Specifically in reference to people of their own social stratum and status, there has been continuity, while they do note some changes in the use of raccomandazione among the masses: [The raccomandazione] has always existed. There’s not a single citizen who doesn’t use raccomandazione. Before the war, the gains to be had were less. Fewer people asked for a raccomandazione, people were satisfied with next to nothing. The raccomandazione was for peanuts [roba da niente]. Nowadays, [people] want a salary, they want a career. Before, it was a matter of necessity, of survival.

Unlike members of the lower classes, who described the importance of gift-giving and material exchange, the upper-class elderly stressed the basis of the raccomandazione in friendship and family privilege (what I have called here “autoraccomandazione”): There was Don P., a landowner [“No, he was a nobleman,” corrects another man]—a noble, who lived in that house over there [he points]. He recommended everyone. Everyone turned to him. I had just graduated university and I was formally invited to frequent his circle in order to facilitate . . . but I refused to get into it. Someone has needed us, and we have needed someone. It’s a chain. It’s friendship, no matter how you classify it. If I need something, you do

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it for me. I don’t need to beg you. Due to the very fact that you’re my friend, you feel obliged to do it. The raccomandazione has not lost its value. The son of a general will become a general. The son of the prefect won’t become a shepherd. First he’ll be a vice-prefect, then a prefect. Not due to his skills, but due to raccomandazione [Another interjects, “Due to caste.”]

The fact that fewer people had access to education before the war also gave these people lasting privileged contacts: Having studied, for a while still the most important people around were our schoolmates. Since people in power nowadays are sixty-five years old, for at least another five years or so it will be like this.

Through the socioeconomic changes and the altered expectations described earlier, we begin to get a sense of the continuities, as well as the qualitative and quantitative changes in raccomandazione as ideology and cultural practice. But just as the raccomandazione of old was not conceived of and experienced monolithically by people of different social class positionalities, so too do such differences remain in the contemporary period. The evolution has been even more striking among the underclasses. In the arena of employment, which is the most prominent site of the phenomenon, the “lamb” or “cheese” gift of the peasant or day laborer has evolved into an inevitable component of the search for a posto fisso, as many young people of comparable educational qualifications jockey for public jobs away from agriculture. Whereas previously “a handful of people commanded everything and the masses didn’t count for anything,” as one townsman said, today there are more people who can intervene in one sector or another, and these people are more accessible than the big shots [pezzi grossi, lit. “big pieces”] of the past. Moreover, as the earlier masses of illiterate and semiliterate people have become mostly literate citizens, and as the state apparatus has expanded for all alike, bureaucratic raccomandazioni are in popular demand to “grease the wheels,” as one woman put it: My father was convinced about this fact of raccomandazione. He used to say, “If you don’t grease the wheels, the cart doesn’t roll.

This situation is comparable with the data that Bossevain (1977) presents for Malta, in which he describes a similar multiplication of channels through the process of modernization. In the Maltese case, Boissevain argues that this has led to the decline of patronage: “As power is not monopolized by single individuals to the extent it once was, peo-

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ple are no longer as dependent” (1977: 87–88). As the traditional form of patronage has gone by the wayside, Boissevain observes that the use of specialized “brokers” has arisen in its place: the “patron/broker” who can “use his influence with people he knows well in the increasingly complex government . . .” (ibid.: 89) and “organizational brokerage,” which is akin to lobbying. Even so, Boissevain notes that personal connections are still important in Malta, and therefore we should not exclude the presence of a raccomandazione-like phenomenon. Again, the transformation of preceding forms of patronage should not blind us to the existence of ideological continuities in the modern setting, such as those we find in the category of raccomandazione.

The Re-articulation of Raccomandazione Ideology The concept of articulation, as developed in the work of Laclau (1977) and Hall (1986a, 1986b) refers not only to the enunciating quality of ideological articulation but also to a notion of connecting disparate elements. The latter offers another means by which neo-Marxian thinkers have sought to escape economic reductionism, for they operate on the premise that ideology has no inherent class belonging and that assorted ideological elements may be articulated together in a number of different ways; hence there is no pre-given unity to an ideological whole. This view of articulation helps us to understand how an ideology can, as Althusser put it, “interpellate” different groups into a hegemonic unity, while the articulatory form that the ideology takes on can actually differ widely despite a surface or historical resemblance. For this reason, it is possible for upper and lower classes to share an overall ideology of raccomandazione, while if we look more closely at each articulation we see that they differ. Furthermore, it is not necessary for the ideological articulation to have a complete internal coherence: by drawing together various elements, the articulation can make sense for subjects, while from an outsider’s perspective it appears irrational or contradictory. The ideology of raccomandazione has served as a principle through which the Southern political bourgeoisie was able to consolidate its hegemony as a leading class. Fundamentally, the raccomandazione is an ideology about power: it articulates common-sense conceptions of where power is located and how it is exercised. The precise form of this ideology, however, has varied historically from its prewar articulation to its postwar re-articulation. This re-articulation consists of a new alignment of various ideological elements, both old and new: hierarchy, mediation, democracy, family ties, gift-giving and Southern identity.

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The first element, hierarchy, is a central component of a logic that was carried over from the older patrimonial order. Thus, the landed gentry that populated the highest ranks gave way to political “bosses.” But the exercise of hierarchy extends all the way down the line as people try to assert their place over those “beneath” them or attempt to climb up. Here, the raccomandazione enters as a signifier of hierarchical precedence. For example, in Bernalda numerous unemployed youths refuse to work in the fields—a readily available form of employment in the area—because of its low-status association (Zinn 1998). Instead, they seek a raccomandazione for a public job, as one interlocutor pointed out, because “they only see someone they consider ‘inferior’ to themselves, maybe, is in the Carabinieri.”3 Outside of the arena of employment, as we have seen, the raccomandazione may be deployed to speed up bureaucratic matters—cutting in line by way of “jumping” over others who were already there—or to somehow obtain exceptional attention in a variety of situations. Hierarchy is reflected not only in the demand for special treatment for oneself but also in the discretionary dispensation of power at all levels in the treatment of others. One interviewee, recognized in the town as a “philosopher” of raccomandazione, noted the following: Power has to express itself in every possible way. Power begins with a school’s janitor. Even a janitor has his power, even if it is little. It’s a pyramid in which power gets exercised, managed.

One woman noted that when she was in the hospital, her husband and mother left “gifts” of money with the nurses, a practice that appears to be common in area hospitals: Maybe that’s another form of raccomandazione, isn’t it? The nurses exercise a power over the person who is ill. Instead of service, it’s a power. And then, if someone is judging in a [job] competition, for sure he’s not there to provide service.

Notice the tangible quality with which the interlocutors express this concept of power in both its organization and its deployment. Some people echoed the metaphor of a “pyramid,” while others drew a representation of power as a “ladder.” The logic of hierarchy in the ideology of raccomandazione is manifest in giving precedence, discounts, or simply just an occhio di riguardo [special attention] in virtually any context. A corollary of the worldview of hierarchy is the request for mediation through those persons who are on the higher rungs or levels. As we saw in chapter 3, mediation invests virtually every sphere of daily life and

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much of spiritual life: as one interlocutor stated, it is an “idiomatic” social style. I have spoken of raccomandazione as a languaging of the self, in which mediation (and the gift) intervenes and re-presents a self that is not considered sufficiently finalized to enter an arena directly and impel a positive response for whatever is being sought. Precisely due to the very quotidian character of many sorts of raccomandazione, and the pervasiveness of its most petty manifestations, it is difficult to root out more striking or infamous forms like the voto di scambio or the tangente, because these latter forms play on the morally sanctioned aspects of the former—their substantive rationality. And while I have been careful to recuperate cronyism, often downplayed or neglected in the patronage literature, much mediation does take place in situations of unequal power. Nonetheless height on the ladder is not absolute: it is context-sensitive, as in the example of the nurses. In a pyramidal conception, however, those who are higher control a vaster range of sectors below them. Vittoria, a local interlocutor, commented: There’s a fanaticism, in order to arrive at certain heights and not recognize one’s own limits. “I have to hang onto the coattails of anyone who’s stronger than me, contact various ministers.”. . . Here in Italy, there is a lack of will to work; people want things that come easily. And the easiest way is to get recommended by someone who’s already high up.

The traditional forms of mediation in the patronage system of old did not dwindle away in the postwar era but were instead re-articulated by raccomandazione, the same ideology of power; in this way, the patronage of notables became a patronage of mass political parties (Chubb 1982; Tarrow 1967). Even so, the logic of hierarchy would seem to be in direct contradiction with the democratic ideologies promoted with the establishment of the Italian Republic. It is worth reflecting upon Article 3 of the Italian Constitution: All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinctions of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, or of personal and social conditions. It is the task of the Republic to remove obstacles of a social and economic nature that, limiting de facto the freedom and equality of citizens, obstruct the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social organization of the country.

Yet, strange as it might appear, we might well suggest that the raccomandazione itself has been democratized. Recalling some of the oral-

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historical descriptions above, we see that it has certainly become more accessible for the masses. In theory, almost anyone can seek and obtain a raccomandazione, even if (as we shall see later) the degree of efficacy varies widely. In an interview, a former mayor of Bernalda commented on this democratized raccomandazione by inserting it within an old saying: “Like the title of ‘Cavaliere’ [Knight] and a cigar, no one is denied a raccomandazione.” Indeed, the institution of raccomandazione is widespread in all sectors of Bernaldese society. Herein lies a seeming paradox: though the raccomandazione is available to the masses, it is still fundamentally a cultural practice that is linked to and reproduces hierarchical differences. People can allow these contradictions to coexist precisely through the articulation of ideology, whereby they can draw such disparate elements together in a cohesive whole through which they make sense of their situations. Democracy in Italy brought new stakes and new resources for the raccomandazione. For families who, in the decades before the war, were peasants and day laborers, fully or semi-illiterate, the era of democracy has held out a diffuse promise of social mobility, of embourgeoisement, inconceivable prior to that time. Though the ideology of social hierarchy was somewhat freed up by the introduction of egalitarian democratic ideologies, the result was in fact not an abolition of the ideology of hierarchy. Rather, as we saw in the oral histories, raccomandazione has become democratized in the sense of being a universally available means to achieve this new mobility. To complicate the paradox, the functioning of the democratic system itself is an instrument that feeds the phenomenon to some degree: the citizen has a vote (or even a family or group of votes) that may be his most valuable resource in exchange for the raccomandazione of a politician. This is one of the most sought-after types of raccomandazione, as politicians have direct control over public jobs and funding. In this manner, the democratic exercise of the vote has been re-articulated and subsumed to the ideology of raccomandazione. Ideologies of family ties and obligation have also provided a measure of continuity in the ideology of raccomandazione. As discussed in the previous chapters, family ties not only give space to the autoraccomandazione, in which one is implicitly recommended by virtue of the family’s status, but they also create the obligation to respond to requests for assistance on the part of family members without having to seek an overt raccomandazione with them. Moreover, family members may and very often do intervene to obtain a raccomandazione for their relatives. For example, one interlocutor told me that he would not ask for a raccomandazione for himself, but he did do so on behalf of his unemployed brother, and I learned of other, analogous cases. Of course, strife inter-

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nal to families does take place, but where such tensions are minimal, members do provide a show of mutual support. For example, from the stories related to me, Bernaldese families often present a unified block of votes under the control of one family member, used as an item of exchange for the political raccomandazione. In the scholastic raccomandazione, also known as segnalazione, parents go to speak directly with a teacher, usually to raise the child’s grade. One high school teacher commented on this widespread form of raccomandazione: The segnalazione is a pressure. They come to see you, they bring you a gift. . . . Petty-bourgeois parents begin to do this when they start making moves to square away [their child], they begin to think about an apartment, a job. There’s the panettone cake at Christmas. . . . It’s a form of pressure, even if it’s soft, not very explicit. [The parents] give you to understand that you need to help the boy.

The element of family ties in this setting therefore provides a moral sanction for some raccomandazione-related activity: while many criticize raccomandazione per se, such objections are counterbalanced by the fact that actors are simply doing their duty as family members. Beyond the bounds of the family, too, a sense of obligation to friends can dictate or justify a raccomandazione di simpatia. But as people move still farther away in terms of affective distance, the ideology of reciprocity underlies the use of the gift to serve as a means of voicing the individual who is neither kin nor an intimate friend. The ideologies of gift in raccomandazione have blended with ideologies of the marketplace to produce the “paid raccomandazione,” or in some interpretations, the tangente. The oral histories of the lower-class elderly emphasized this ambiguity. With the expansion of the state, then, the people who had their hands on the resources—political figures, even civil servants— commonly re-articulated the traditional raccomandazione as a commercial transaction. Finally, Southern Italian identity plays a significant role in the articulation of raccomandazione ideology. Chapter 7 examines this issue in depth, but here I will outline a few points that are most pertinent to the question at hand. Hall (1986a; 1986b) has observed how individuals make sense of their position through ideology, without reducing subjectivity to a reflex of class positionality. This sense-making through ideology permits social groups to become actual social forces. In this light, we can view the ideology of raccomandazione in its connection to Southerners’ common sense about “the way things are” in the South: recognized by locals as an important feature of a presumed “Southern mentality,” it interpellates Southerners as such, rendering the raccoman-

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danti and the raccomandati accomplices in their guilty “deviance” from rational-universalistic norms. Such norms, we should note, are hegemonic discourses beyond the local level in which Southern Italians are placed as subordinate (as “backward” and “irrational”). Galante (1986) seems to be getting at a similar notion of complicity as he describes with great sensitivity what he calls “the mechanisms of recognition and belonging” with regard to the mafia in Sicilian society. I believe that the perception of the inevitability of the mafia presence hides, perhaps in a not entirely conscious manner, a recognition of the capacity of mafia to adhere exactly to social transformation and in some cases even to determine it. This is a recognition that unites with a feeling, one that is probably latent in the base of Sicilian society, of a sort of belonging. That is, inasmuch as it is a phenomenon that belongs to us, the mafia is thus perfectly recognizable, and is therefore an integral part of our world and our evolution, representing the tragic and perverse aspect of its unreconciled contradictions. It is certainly not a phantasm of the unconscious (or perhaps it is also this) but one of those monsters of a medieval epic with which, and tradition testifies to it, one learns to coexist (1986: 92).

Likewise perceived as an inevitable part of life in the South, then, the raccomandazione can change with time but remains cloaked in the “Southern mentality,” providing a basis for communalization that is “an indispensable component of any hegemonic process” (Brow 1990: 4). Thus, identification with a presumed “Southernness” through raccomandazione provides a ground for transcending differences in social positionality, particularly that of class. And after all, why should someone play by rules that are (in the ideology’s distinction) foreign to the Southern system—rules based on rational-universal principles—when one is expected to “act like a Southerner” and is evaluated accordingly? In any case, as Fantozzi (1993) has observed, clientelism is fundamentally made up of both a sense of belonging and a utilitarian aspect. For this reason, even where party loyalties have lessened in the wake of Tangentopoli, still more basic senses of family obligation and Southern identity have remained together with ever-present utilitarianism of raccomandazione.

Hegemonic Struggle in Raccomandazione The re-articulation of the ideological elements described here has taken place through raccomandazione, which assumes the force of a “hegemonic principle” in Gramscian terms:

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The intellectual and moral direction exercised by a fundamental class in a hegemonic system consists in providing the articulating principle of the common world-view, the value system to which the ideological elements coming from the other groups will be articulated in order to form a unified ideological system . . . (Mouffe 1981: 231).

By achieving an ideological re-articulation through raccomandazione, then, the Southern bourgeoisie have managed to create a “unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world” (Gramsci 1971: 348). But even if the ideology of raccomandazione has served as a hegemonic principle, cementing a collective will, we must nonetheless recognize that hegemony is never totally achieved (or fully “sutured,” as some scholars would say, drawing from Lacanian theory and film criticism): the cement is noticeably thinner in some places. If raccomandazione is related to Southerners’ common sense, not everyone holds it as such in precisely the same way. A plurality of regimes of truth exists, and some of them are subordinate to others. For example, I noted in the previous chapter that on a supralocal level (Southern Italy with respect to Northern Italy, and Italy with respect to Europe/North America), the ideology of raccomandazione is subordinate to that of rational-universalism. From the ethnographic data, we have seen that on the local level, while there is a strongly marked discourse of raccomandazione for all Bernaldese, it is certainly not the same for everyone: it is a site of both unity and contention. Although the raccomandazione is a widespread phenomenon throughout all levels and sectors of Bernaldese society, there remains the fact that people not only evaluate this practice in different ways but are also themselves evaluated differently as participants. A recurrent, often emotionally charged theme in the discourses of people of lower-class backgrounds is the element of being coerced into giving in order to receive, which assumes the quality of a commercial transaction. Strikingly, there is little or no comparable emphasis in the discourses of upper-class interlocutors, although there is a generic recognition of the phenomenon of the “purchased” raccomandazione. Rather, the latter discuss raccomandazioni in terms of family and friends: raccomandazioni obligated by family ties, fondness, or an amicable exchange of favors, while simultaneously emphasizing the possibility of achievement through merit. Furthermore, both the role of the raccomandato and that of the raccomandante are of a Janus-faced nature: a recommended person may be viewed as weak, mediocre, or compromised, or he may be judged as someone with clout, “someone who counts.”4 This latter evaluation

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emphasizing influence can apply as well to the person doing the raccomandazione, the raccomandante; or, negatively, he may be regarded as an arriviste or a profiteer, as Rosa’s quote suggests in the chapter epigraph. These various evaluations are, in Volosinov’s terminology, different ideological accents with an inherently social character: All ideological accents, despite their being produced by individual voice (as in the case of word) or, in any event, by the individual organism—all ideological accents are social accents, ones with claim to social recognition, are made outward use of in ideological material (Volosinov 1973: 22, orig. emph.).

This brings us back to the discussion of voice and genre in chapter 3, in which I blocked out a poetics of various genres of raccomandazione through the differential voicing of self. With this analysis, we see that the different raccomandazione (speech) genres are intimately linked to the social positionality of the participants (Bakhtin 1986). The point was made that the use of the explicit gift in raccomandazione, as a means of vesting the self, is a marker of social inferiority, whereas as social status increases (keeping in mind that it is strongly linked to class here), the presentation of self relies less on the semiotic material of the gift.5 I also noted that for someone of a particular social positionality to deploy the “wrong” genre of raccomandazione would constitute inappropriate and probably ineffective communicative action. In this regard, we may tie in some studies that define class in cultural as well as economic terms. Referring to the works of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, Foley (1990) for example has argued persuasively in favor of a cultural definition of class alongside the more strictly economic one that links class to position in the system of production. Of Bourdieu’s analysis, which draws from the Weberian emphasis on status groups, Foley writes that “this view of classes emphasizes the way that various groups of people enact the cultural logic of the production system rather than who controls the system” (1990: 170). With this notion of class, Foley incorporates a sociolinguistic perspective that yields the analytical category of “class-based speech communities” (ibid.: 181, passim). Such communities feature different communicative practices as well as differences in linguistic and cultural “capital”: that of the bourgeois is normative, authorized, and official, while those of other groups may be stigmatized. Such diverse communicative practices can reproduce social difference, as Heath (1983) concludes in her excellent microethnography of sociolinguistics in an Appalachian setting. Borrowing from Bernstein’s developments in sociolinguistic theory (Bernstein 1975), we may cast the class difference in communicative

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practice as one of “elaborated” versus “restricted” code.6 What I mean here is that members of the upper classes command an elaborated code that guarantees them competence in both the raccomandazione and the rational-universalistic paradigms, and they may deploy one or the other according to the context. People of lower-class background, however, are apt to operate out of a restricted code in which the particularistic raccomandazione modality is expected to predominate. This distinction helps to explain, in my view, the class-based accent differential observed above. The elaborated competence of upper-class people gives them an added advantage in establishing their superordinate position with respect to the lower classes who, lacking the connection capital of the upper classes, must seek their raccomandazioni through payment or vote exchange. Upper-class people can, on the other hand, utilize the language of raccomandazione—and still credit themselves with having the “merit” to proceed alone. On the local level of culture, upper-class people can accede to raccomandazione, often with greater facility than members of the lower classes. At the same time, they may deny their participation in it (and the risk of failure) by identifying with the rational-universal paradigm that is hegemonic on the supralocal level—in effect, having their cake and eating it, too. The woman quoted above illustrates this, recollecting her father’s belief in the need to “grease the wheels.” In our conversation it struck me how she made the point that her father thought things were this way, as if to suggest that he lived inside a bubble of “false consciousness.” While she insisted upon the possibility of advancement based on meritocratic, universalistic criteria, she nonetheless expressed the perception that indeed the practice of raccomandazione is “deeply rooted” in the South. The different genres of raccomandazione are therefore associated with such class-based speech communities. In and of itself, this tends to reproduce divisions among social groups. However, this distinction of the class-linked culture lies not only in the form of the communicative practice but also in its accentual thematic content. Here, the accent on coerced exchange in the lower-class people’s discourses resonates with an evaluative critique missing in those of members of the more privileged classes. Upper-class people, instead, stress a moral obligation to attend to the request for help from a friend or a family member, as well as the possibility of applying meritocratic criteria. Whereas in the past period, referred to as “before,” the gift component of the raccomandazione was part of the voicing of self to an unquestioned (if not unresented) superior, lower-class interlocutors commented quite bitterly on the instrumentalization of the gift in contemporary

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times. In this view, the gift (ostensibly offered freely) has become a coerced payment. Apart from expressing resentment over being “forced to give” to a degree that is often materially significant, these discourses bring to light the disappointment of the lower classes with democracy. First, where democracy should guarantee rights equally to all individual citizens, the raccomandazione reproduces an ideology of hierarchy and inequality. This may be the case, demonstrated amply in the literature on patronage, of two “unequal” parties, but there is another aspect ignored by much of that literature, so focused on the reified distinction between patron and client and their dyadic tie. That is, two parties who are more or less equals may use raccomandazione—in this case, what I am referring to as “cronyism”—to enhance their privileges with respect to third parties. Moreover, both the voto di scambio and the necessity of a bureaucratic raccomandazione have been exploited by arrivistes who exasperate the problem of class stratification that lies contradictorily at the heart of contemporary democracy. If such persons are not, in numerical terms, highly significant, they do, in my observation of Bernalda, stand out in the community and attract both the scorn of upper-class people and the bitterness of members of the lower classes. Finally, if the upper classes of yesterday seemed to have held their position a priori, and their superiority was naturalized by religious ideologies of hierarchical order, people belonging to the popular classes (known as the popolino, or “little people”) today are fully aware that their vote or payment for a raccomandazione directly feeds into the power of the recommendation giver. Let us now turn to the contrasting evaluation of the various participants in raccomandazione. Citing common expressions used by local inhabitants to describe the recommended person negatively, that person may be viewed as someone lacking merit and therefore in need of a “little push” [spintarella], someone “weak” who must ask for help, or even someone “compromised.” In contrast, the raccomandato may be considered in a positive light as someone with connections who gets priority and special treatment, someone with powerful friends or clout, or even someone who knows how to get things done [che sa fare]. Such judgments, however, are positive in a relative sense, because people often make them with ambivalence, in an envious or snide hue. The negative assessment of the raccomandato, on the other hand, may be mitigated by recognition that someone (in any case viewed as “weak”) was forced to seek a raccomandazione in order to get by, especially in order to create his own family and maintain it. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that these evaluations are, in effect, tendentially associated with different class positions. The notion that someone is “weak” implies above all that he or she lacks the

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resources to reach goals without resorting to an explicit raccomandazione—that is, the cultural and financial capital, connection capital, or a family with a status that would guarantee an autoraccomandazione. While persons from lower-class backgrounds sometimes do have such resources and are therefore not necessarily destined to be weak, we do find a stronger correlation, inversely, in that people who are considered weak are more likely to be lower class. By the mere suggestion or claim that an individual was recommended, one can make an implicit critique or cast doubt upon that person’s qualifications or performance. The commonplace that a raccomandato lacks merit can, in rare instances, be applied to assess the performance of someone in a higher class or status position, but it is most often used to comment on low-level public-sector employees who are, in this area of Italy, held to be living metaphors of both raccomandazione and inefficiency. This perception is due in part to a widely held belief that the private sector and upper-level public sector positions are more exacting with regard to merit, as noted in an interlocutor’s comment: The raccomandazione is more of a thing in the public [sector], even if it also occurs in the private [sector]. In many arenas it is impossible to get ahead with just the raccomandazione alone, [for example] a position of responsibility, a director, someone at a high level in a private company, a bank. The person who recommends realizes that he’s recommending a good person. He won’t waste time with someone who’s so-so. When the responsibility of the job increases, the qualification enters into play, especially in the private [sector]. A person who is leading a hundred workers needs to know [what he’s doing].

Once again, these distinctions are, in turn, correlated to class since the acquisition of a job in the lower-level public sector continues to be a pervasive ideal among lower- and lower-middle-class Bernaldese due to the perceived security and relatively good income and benefits such jobs offer, especially in relation to the cost of living in the South. On the other hand, upper-level functionary and executive positions tend to be filled in any case by people whose class background gives them the cultural capital that enhances their de facto qualifications and the perception of their merit (cf. Bourdieu 1984: 147, 151). A third negative characteristic attributed to the raccomandato is that of “compromise.” Compromise can assume a political tone, as Silvio related: My father works in the Cantina Sociale [a local winemaking cooperative]. He’s got the greatest seniority, so he asked if I could have a job

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there after I said that I’d like to work there. They told me I couldn’t work in the Cantina because I’m a Green [party member]. I would have to become a member of the DC [Christian Democrat Party]—the DC controlled the Cantina. When all this became public in 1985, my father risked getting fired. I would never do it [take DC party membership]. I’d lose my dignity.

For a young woman in particular, the notion of compromise may imply a very intimate level. One woman who was unemployed at the time of her interview noted the following: I’m not the type that can have a raccomandazione. I don’t give anything, I won’t lower myself to compromise. Other girls offer themselves, a physical favor.

And another unemployed woman commented: The raccomandazione for a man and a woman is the same. But some politicians are assholes. Women have to pass through various beds, from the doorman of the ministry on up.

The sense of compromise inferred in this assessment of the contrasts with spontaneous gift-giving used to curry favor: compromise takes place against the grain, in a dialogue in which something has been asked of the person seeking the raccomandazione. As with coerced giving, compromise was much less discussed by upper-class interlocutors than those of lower- and lower-middle-class backgrounds; indeed, the notion seems much more present for these latter groups. Moreover, members of the privileged strata are more likely to view raccomandazione in terms of the moral obligation to help family or as an even exchange of favors among friends, and therefore the issue of compromise appears to be irrelevant. The other main type of evaluative assessment made of the raccomandato, this time positive, is the depiction of a person who has important friends, who knows how to maneuver, or who has clout. This evaluation is made of those who are de facto recommended but who in effect have a more hidden raccomandazione; in common usage, they are not immediately implied in the notion of raccomandato in the same manner as in the negative characterization described earlier. As socioeconomic status increases, there tends to be a greater possibility of the autoraccomandazione or raccomandazione di simpatia.7 The lack of an explicit gift, together with any other cultural capital that people of these strata might possess, obfuscates the line between merit and privilege so that it

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becomes more difficult to conclude that the individual was unqualified and entered exclusively thanks to the raccomandazione. In fact, people of the more privileged classes expressed the conviction that someone “really talented” or “really sharp” could make their way without a raccomandazione, while members of the lower classes were more categorically pessimistic on this point. The definitions of “really talented” or “capable” have a built-in bias in favor of the upper classes, because the dominant strata define the normative, authorized forms of cultural capital and communicative competences. This is particularly clear in a number of studies of cultural discontinuity in the educational system, where scholars have identified schools as a key site for the reproduction of such social difference (Heath 1983; Foley 1990; Emihovich 1996). We thus return to the point made above regarding elaborated and restricted codes of communicative behavior. Even someone in a position to receive a more camouflaged raccomandazione may be highly ambivalent about following that path. One evening I was talking to Elena, a young woman from a solid upper-middle-class family, who had just taken and passed the Italian bar examination to practice as a lawyer. We were discussing the fact that a man named Armando on the exam commission was peeved in a good-natured way because she hadn’t tried to “contact” him: Armando was a close friend and distant relative of the lawyer with whom Elena had done her mandatory pre-exam internship period. She tried to explain her reluctance to contact Armando, saying, “I’m not the type—I’m embarrassed. I wanted to make it on my own, to challenge myself.” The evaluation of someone with clout can apply not only to the raccomandato, but also to the person performing the raccomandazione, the raccomandante. This accent assumes a more negative tone, however, if the recommending person is judged to be an arriviste or profiteer. In order to recommend in a given sphere, this person might be in a position of power in the context of the raccomandazione to be sought: he must have a somewhat direct hand in the matter or be able to contact the right people. The person who recommends out of friendship, family connection, or fondness is not evaluated unfavorably, because he is fulfilling what is generally held in the community to be a moral obligation to such parties—an obligation to respond to a request for help or to reciprocate previously received favors. However, when people perceive the recommending person to be acting primarily in order to exact a material gain (be it personal or, as in the Tangentopoli scandal, “for the Party”), the assessment is more decisively negative, as one interlocutor commented:

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Maria: The raccomandanti are people without scruples. In order to arrive where they arrive they would do anything. People don’t do it [the raccomandazione] just to do a favor or out of kindness. They do it, and that’s it. DLZ: Apart from the situations in which one has a family tie, right? Maria: Obviously. [In that case] you don’t need a raccomandazione, just pick up the telephone.

Again, class positionality tends to enter into such evaluations. Since people in the dominant classes have more possibility of modeling social or connection capital into raccomandazione, a negative evaluation would enter in where such connections neglected to fulfill a moral obligation to recommend. On the other hand, those of subordinate class positionalities, generally with less possibility to receive an implicit or morally compelled raccomandazione, are critical of the necessity to purchase a raccomandazione or exchange votes for promises of work. But just as someone may be viewed differently by many people in everyday life, the same participant in raccomandazione may be judged variously in a combination of favorable and disparaging ways, with many shades of ambivalence in between. Donato, married and with small children, is from a relatively well-off family, one that had close ties to a very highly placed regional politician. Various interlocutors asserted to me that Donato had received his university degree by way of raccomandazione and that he obtained a very good job directly after graduation, again through raccomandazione. He now even reportedly supplements his income by selling raccomandazioni. Though Donato has many buddies from several different groups in the community and is socially rather well liked, he is nonetheless the object of a good deal of disparaging gossip. This case is a reminder that we must attend to the subtleties of lived situations. “Struggle” may emerge in the midst of apparent accommodation; it may live in the ambivalence of a friendship. Here I have outlined the means by which raccomandazione has played a role in the consolidation of a particular hegemony in Bernalda, with direct implications for Southern Italy as a whole. The analysis takes into account an ideological level quite apart from a simple functional explanation. Although raccomandazione may draw together various class strata in a hegemonic formation, it cannot eliminate the traces of struggle that we have seen in the critiques of people of lower-class belonging and in the stigmatization of lower-class actors. Even so, it remains to be examined why the antagonism of those who contest raccomandazione has not erupted into a real force for social change. Tangentopoli momentarily pulled the rug out from under the feet of the hegemonic bal-

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ance, but despite all of the furor it unleashed, the Bernaldese, together with many other Italians, continue to use raccomandazione on a daily basis. I have already suggested that the raccomandazione is a communicative form that is deeply rooted, lying beyond those contexts, like “patronage,” in which its uses and abuses of power are most striking. In the remaining chapters, I will again take up this issue with reference to one of the most common uses of raccomandazione, the raccomandazione for employment, a domain that demonstrates how many types of antagonism to the system get neutralized. I will also examine how raccomandazione fits into a sense of Southern identity, a sense of belonging that countermands change.

Notes 1. The industrial worker as a category in Bernalda was negligible until the establishment of an industrial pole in the nearby Valbasento area and the construction of the Italsider plant in Taranto in the mid-1960s. Yet as Fantozzi (1993) points out, a true proletariat with a class consciousness never really formed here and elsewhere in the South. If anything, those Bernaldese who managed to get work at the ANIC complex or at the Italsider plant were able to enter into the ranks of the petty bourgeois. 2. The perception of the alienation of gift-giving seems to be linked to a wider Bernaldese commentary on the deterioration of human relations in the community. This may be seen, for instance, in the quote heading this chapter: the nostalgic discourse about the quiet, innocent life of days gone by follows on the heels of the critique of the corrupt profiteer. 3. The Carabinieri are a national military corps with some functions that are similar to those of the police. 4. Galt (1974) suggests that raccomandazione be glossed in English as “pull.” Having pull means being linked in an ongoing exchange relationship with someone who has greater power. That person is usually referred to as a “friend,” and the words “strong friend” are used to emphasize both the patron’s power and the strength of the client’s link to him (1974: 188). By flattening raccomandazione into the concept of “pull,” however, Galt offers an analysis of the more prestigious accent of the phenomenon while omitting consideration of the negative evaluations I discuss here. 5. Galt points out that factors such as “local familiarity” may be as significant as wealth or rank. He provides the example of the lowly university custodian who acts as a “patron” to students from peasant families of the hinterland. However, Galt’s argument does not contradict the analysis here, for we see that while the poor students gave the custodian gifts, students of wealthier backgrounds made him their own client. 6. This use of Bernstein’s work was suggested in Foley (1990). Bernstein also associates the terms “universalistic” and “particularistic” with elaborated and restricted codes, respectively (Bernstein 1975: 176). Although his usage has a more specifically linguistic connotation, it is worth noting that these terms bear a relation to the distinction in patronage studies between rational-universalistic and particularistic paradigms.

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7. It can occasionally happen, though, especially in a small community like Bernalda in which family relations are often numerous, that someone from a lower-class background can get a raccomandazione from a wealthier or otherwise powerful relative. In other instances, someone born into a situation deficient in social capital might garner raccomandazioni di simpatia through a particular communicative competence in “working connections” or an appealing personality. Social mobility for such persons is available, as a handful of cases in Bernalda demonstrate, when this competence is combined with being in gamba [capable]—that is, when the person has a certain professional talent or merit.

Chapter 6

Employing the “Little Shove” Raccomandazione and Work

Of this generation few peasant children, girls or boys, have ever worked in the fields. Well on their way to the false gentility of the half-educated, dressed in cheap versions of last year’s fashion, they loiter on the roads and in the piazzas or listen to the latest pop songs. In the winter they let four hours a day pass in school, in summer those same four hours slip by anywhere but in the fields, and their parents approve, even though in twenty years they have watched hundreds of neo-clerks remain unemployed, lounging their lives away until they are offered a job appropriate to their pretensions. Often they never are. —Ann Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows

Throughout the discussion of raccomandazione in the preceding chapters, I have placed a great deal of emphasis on widening the typically narrow horizons of analysis in the previous literature. Thus, I have sought to demonstrate how raccomandazione in Southern Italy goes well beyond the confines of patronage or clientelism per se and indeed permeates so many spheres of sociocultural existence as to qualify as a “total social fact.” I have also explored the multiaccentuality of the term raccomandazione itself, as the Bernaldese variously interpret it. Having made this point, it is nonetheless instructive to examine the raccomandazione in what interlocutors characterized as its most typical manifestation: the raccomandazione sought in order to obtain work. Local discourses on the work-related denotation of raccomandazione indeed constitute a large body of common sense on the subject, and an analysis of the specific example of work can demonstrate how resistance or antagonism to raccomandazione as a mode of articulating power relations is mitigated. This chapter explores some of the data and analysis from my related eth-

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nographic research on chronic youth unemployment in Bernalda (Zinn 1998). The issue of youth unemployment is of particular interest for considering the work-type raccomandazione: the search for employment is most visible among those who are new entries in the job market. In fact, the rate of youth unemployment (ages fifteen to twenty-nine for statistical purposes) in Bernalda averages over 60 percent, more than double the overall rate for the town and over five times the national unemployment level for all age groups (currently just over 11 percent). Several decades have passed since Ann Cornelisen published the book cited here in the epigraph, one of several nonfiction works she wrote based on her experiences in Basilicata, especially on her periods of residence in the town of Tricarico in the province of Matera. Despite its disagreeable and generalizing tone, the citation actually does offer a description of youth unemployment that bears a striking resemblance to the situation I have studied in Bernalda. Although there is little industry and commercial activity in the area, the local economy demonstrates a modest prosperity through the development of agriculture and tourism; despite this, a significant number of youths remain unemployed for long periods, often up to five or ten years, or even longer. The most readily available jobs are in agriculture, construction, and small manufacturing firms. From the perspective of the unemployed youths, the problem with such jobs is that most of these are off the books, in nero [unreported, literally “black” work]; no less importantly, manual labor—especially work in agriculture—tends to be deplored by the Bernaldese. Many interlocutors spoke of the attitude of contempt that townsmen hold for any type of work that they view as being “servile.” For example, I spoke with Maddalena, the mother of Marcella, an unemployed twentysix-year-old with a terza media [middle school] diploma. Marcella had recently completed two short regional training programs in hotel housekeeping and as a pastry chef. I asked Maddalena if Marcella had tried to find work in some of the nearby hotels along the Metapontine coast. She replied: Marcella doesn’t like to work in this area. They [the employers] are swindlers. And then, there are prejudices here in town: [adopting the imagined position of fellow townspeople gossiping] “Ah, Marcella is working as a maid in a hotel, she’s a servant.” In Bernalda, there are a lot of prejudices.

When Bernaldese say that there is “no work” in the area, they have a specific concept of “work” in mind, which is to say that there is a dearth of jobs that are regolari [on the books] and that do not risk demeaning one’s status. In general, young people who are able to do so avoid unreported work and/or low-status “nonwork” jobs: that is, those youths

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whose parents can afford to support them, for it is a given that if they can support them, they will (as Cornelisen notes). Such youths will either continue with their studies, often in a half-hearted way, or conduct a life of relative leisure in between concorsi [job selections] and an occasional training program. In my first period of residence in the town, I was struck with how the bars lining the Corso were teeming with well-dressed youths who lounged about smoking, chatting, drinking aperitivi, and reading the Gazzetta dello Sport. I found this style of life surprising by way of comparison with my own experience in the United States, where the great majority of young people take on jobs to earn extra money or support themselves in their studies, even if they are from privileged backgrounds. Yet these youths, often designated by other townsmen as “vagabonds,” formed only part of the entire group of the unemployed youth: the rest of them were less visible because, as they were officially unemployed but actually working off the books, they had little time or spare money to lounge in the cafés of the Corso. Many of their parents themselves earned a modest living through precarious employment, and they often found it necessary to accept the work that the others could instead afford to decline. This was and is particularly true of those who have left the school system with a middle school diploma or less and who tend to be from the lower socioeconomic strata of the community. Some youths emigrate, and in recent years, emigration from Bernalda to Northern regions and Northern Europe (especially Germany) has picked back up to the extent that, as part of a wider trend, a 1999 SVIMEZ report announced the “new emigration from the South.” In some cases, these emigrants accept jobs that they would not perform in their hometowns, but other emigrants find factory work not available in the area, or else they emigrate upon winning a job selection in one of the branches of the military. In many ways, the unemployed youths participate in what several observers have called a cultura di attesa [culture of waiting] or a stato di parcheggio [state of being parked] (Censis-Camera di Commercio di Matera 1986; Wallace 1986; Signorelli 1983). In Signorelli’s study, young people form the category of chi aspetta [those who wait], and the entire age group of youths becomes a “social stratum.” This situation is in contrast with the category of chi può [those who can], the local ruling class. However, my ethnographic work in Bernalda suggests that it is important to recognize the heterogeneity of unemployed youths as a group: within the “class” of youths, one must distinguish between males and females, but even more fundamentally between youths of different social classes. We may loosely describe the various groups as (lumpen)

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proletariat, petty bourgeois, and bourgeois.1 Supported by their parents, many unemployed youths of petty- and middle-bourgeois extraction are indeed able to cultivate a lifestyle of leisure: waking up late, hanging out in the local cafés, taking part in an ostentatious display of consumer culture (with, for example, motorcycles, cellular phones, and designer apparel). These are the unemployed youths, as many interlocutors described them, “with a £50,000 banknote in their pockets.” Other youths, especially those of the agrarian lumpenproletariat, cannot rely on their parents for maintaining such a lifestyle, and though they may be formally registered as unemployed, they work at various odd jobs. These jobs are usually off the books, most noticeably in agriculture but also in other fields such as small manufacturing, construction, and food and beverage service. Still other youths, a minority, might have the option of utilizing their family as an economic cushion, but they nonetheless choose to work under the table, either for a matter of principle to be doing something, or in order to have some spending money that allows them a certain autonomy from their parents, or even a combination of both considerations. Members of all these groups avail themselves, when possible, of opportunities for training programs sponsored by the European Social Fund or for joining the ranks of the Lavoratori Socialmente Utili (LSU, “Workers of Social Utility”). These options seem to break up the monotony of the wait for those who aspire to a steady, reasonably well-paid and relatively high-status job: that is, the posto fisso, or permanent job, especially one in the civil service. For those unemployed youths who cannot be supported by their parents, the training or LSU provides an appealing temporary alternative to the usual manual labor at which they normally work. In the academic literature as well as in everyday conversation and in the media, the image of waiting [attesa] is most commonly connected to the well-known ideal of the posto fisso: it is true that most of the youths who have economic support bide their time rather comfortably and prepare for public job selections. Pia, for example, an unemployed young woman from the petite bourgeoisie, commented that she had spent the last summers working as an assistant in a summer camp but that not all of the other youths were willing to accept this sort of work: In my opinion, if someone wants a summer job, he can find it. We’re used to saying “I want a posto fisso, I want a permanent job.” . . . They make every sort of job become black [off the books], so it’s understandable that someone wants a permanent job.

In recent years, however, what locals described as la mentalità del posto fisso [the permanent job mentality] has received a number of jolts:

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the unmasking of widespread corruption in Tangentopoli; the collapse of the old DC hegemony; the economic disarray of the local city government; the deindustrialization of nearby “cathedrals in the desert”; the reform of the pension system. All of these factors together have made the goal of the permanent job, especially in the civil service, more distant and uncertain than ever. Within this perspective, Enzo and Rossana represent the opinions of some of the new generation: Enzo: I think that the youths need to sow [their opportunities] everywhere. Invest in themselves, not take anything for granted. Today, nothing is certain. . . . I don’t believe in the presumption of a permanent job. Rossana: At this point, it’s really difficult to find a permanent job. . . . Why wait for someone to offer me a job? I can create my own business, like a cooperative.

Such youths have, on the one hand, internalized official and media discourses that have underlined the uncertainties of a new global economy, and on the other hand they are interpellated by new discourses of youth entrepreneurship in the South. For example, in a bulletin of Imprenditorialità Giovanile Company (“IG”), which manages public funds for the creation of new youth enterprises in the South, the managing director writes as follows: We think that, aside from telling young Southerners that they should abandon the culture of the “posto fisso,” it is important that they be presented with serious instruments that help them to make it on their own, which is something different from making do. (Imprenditorialità Giovanile Spa 1996: 2)

Yet for every Rossana or Enzo, there are still several youths who think like Walter: “I hope I end up in an office. It’s everyone’s dream.” It seems probable, too, that some youths aspire to a posto fisso even though the current social climate induces them to appear otherwise and espouse a rhetoric of “making themselves.” In any case, the fact that the permanent job as a goal is alive and well is attested to by the crowding for every mammoth job selection that comes up. At this writing, posters in shop windows throughout towns in Matera Province advertise for job selection preparation classes in centers in nearby Apulia. One such poster inquired of the passerby, “A public job at all costs?” Furthermore, despite government attempts to promote entrepreneurship, especially among youths, members of the lower classes expressed their frustration, perceiving that such new opportunities are available only to those who already enjoy certain privileges. For example, Mari-

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angela, an unemployed thirty-two-year-old woman, attended a regional training program: In Pisticci we had the theoretical part [of the course]. There was this guy from Potenza [the regional capital], he said that we need to have new initiatives. “You, what can you create? What can you do?” They say that the Region gives you a grant, but you have to put in something of your own. The bank won’t give me anything: I’m not employed. I don’t have money, we have to live from one day to the next. They give you grants, but where can I get money? What is someone like me supposed to do?

A group of unemployed youths made a similar complaint in conversation. With regard to setting up a business, one youth commented, “We tried to organize a group among friends, a dozen or so friends, we attempted to organize a company. In order to do this, it’s necessary to know people who are in politics, to have money.” The opportunities for entrepreneurship are, we see, conditioned by many of the same class considerations that affect the possibility of obtaining and deploying the raccomandazione, as I observed in chapter 5, precisely because raccomandazione depends on a cultural capital that is unevenly distributed among the various classes—a cultural capital that is intertwined with socioeconomic status. For many youths in the lumpenproletariat, they can at best develop an entrepreneurship that is marked as “deviant”: drug dealing, or the creation of an unauthorized parking “business.” The young members of the middle and lower-middle classes instead have the authorized and normative forms that allow them to actually be more “worthy” [meritevoli] and simultaneously have the possibility of getting the right “push,” often with an implicit raccomandazione—that is, one that does not place their merit in doubt. In any case, the search for a permanent job, whether in the public or private sector, is one of the key catalysts for activating a raccomandazione. Of course, if a youth’s family has its own business, he can almost certainly enter into it automatically, and this would be a form of selfrecommendation. While the posto fisso, particularly in the civil service, is sought by many youths, even manual labor that is entirely on the books is relatively desirable for those with fewer qualifications and aspirations, and it can be attained through the use of raccomandazioni. Grazia, mother of a modest family living in the local public housing project, told me of her job some years back working for a Milanese company in Metaponto that had a plant for packaging cauliflower and fennel. Grazia got the job with a raccomandazione from her family doctor. She described to me how she went to the doctor, who was a relative of the bookkeeper in charge of hiring for the plant: “I said, ‘Doctor, I heard

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that bookkeeper X is a relative of yours. Could you possibly see if he could . . . ?’ . . . In Italy, you need a raccomandazione in order to work.” Some of Grazia’s friends, she related, gave lamb to the bookkeeper in order to get jobs. She worked there for four years, but the plant closed when the owner died, and the heirs did not want to continue the business. Grazia was so pleased about the formalized character of her job that she still retains her payslips, which she proudly showed me. If the raccomandazione for work is the most typical form of raccomandazione, then within that category itself the most classic raccomandazione is a political one. As Bino said, “There are so many raccomandazioni, especially in political periods [during elections]. They promise jobs, give work for one or two months at the most, and then in the end people get abandoned.” And then, inevitably, there is the tangente payment for work, as discussed in chapter 4: Anna: My brother X., for example, paid five million [lire] in order to have a job. Saverio: When I met Anna, there was the possibility to get a job in the Mountain District [administration]. The go-between asked me for five million [lire] to guarantee a job. I refused, because I already had this work here, which I liked. Anna: My brother was without a job, he was forced to do it. Francesco: I could have worked for a company in Pisticci Scalo. To get hired, they wanted fifteen million [lire]!! To be hired for four years!

Before hunting for work, a youth might have had relatively little direct contact with the raccomandazione, and it is likely that his experiences with raccomandazione were of a passive nature, as the object of his parents’ activity. Perhaps during his school years, his parents employed forms of raccomandazione to help improve his school record. And certainly, if not as an active participant, the youth has since birth observed discussions of other people’s raccomandazioni and sundry modes of working connections [agganci, literally “hooks”]: wrangling for discounts, cutting in line, praying to the saints for divine intervention. But the moment in which the youth enters the job market often becomes a poignant initiation into the paradigm of raccomandazione, and by the time he begins to look for work it is part of his common sense that one needs a raccomandazione in order to obtain a job. In situations in which employees get hired directly or through small-scale selections, the raccomandazione establishes or consolidates a personal connection between the employer and employee. As cited previously (chapter 2), the importance of personal relationship in the sphere

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of employment was noted by Davis in his ethnography of Pisticci, a town that lies only a few kilometers from Bernalda. From the Bernaldese data it emerges that in effect the raccomandazione is viewed as a key instrument, virtually obligatory in establishing or justifying such a special relationship with a potential employer. From the employer’s point of view, the raccomandazione can serve as a means of establishing trust in the employee. Domenico, a surveyor from Bernalda who has lived and worked in Milan for many years, had this to comment: Many times a raccomandazione is a request if a company needs workers, because the Ufficio di Collocamento [public employment office] sends you the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, a bunch of people whom no one knows. . . . If someone hires you, there are a thousand obstacles to firing you. So that’s why I want people [I know] in my house, not people from the Collocamento.

Domenico’s perspective is probably widely held among private businessmen. In his experience in Milan, he related, the raccomandazione for work exists, but it must go hand in hand with actual qualifications. On the other hand, several interlocutors, including Domenico’s wife, remarked that in the South people get by with the raccomandazione alone and are often insufficiently qualified; this perception is linked with the predominance of public-sector work over private enterprise in the South. Vita, an unemployed university student near graduation, concurred with Domenico’s perception of a “rationalized” use of raccomandazione. At the time when I spoke with her about this, she was temporarily participating in a job-training program. She remarked, I believe that the raccomandazione is everywhere. In the North, I think they can recommend you, but as soon as they see that you aren’t worth anything, they send you home. Here, they cover you [her friend nods in agreement]. You manage to get a position, even if you’re worthless, they keep you on.

Michele, who has a vocational diploma as an electronic technician, had a short-term job with the post office in Milan, and he returned to Bernalda after it was finished. I asked him if he was thinking of going back North: Michele: I always had in mind this thing of going up North, of finding work there. Talking to my friends, they said that things have changed. Even there you have to find someone, just like here. DLZ: What do you mean when you say “find someone”?

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Michele: Find someone who can insert you into a job. Otherwise you need to take your chances. Here, everything lies in waiting for someone. It’s the usual raccomandazione. After a lot of job interviews, they promise you something. . . . When I came back here, I did interviews—at SNIA, at Fiat. They said to me, “We’ll let you know, we’ll let you know.” I did selections in Rome, the usual things that everyone tries—the financial police, the police. It’s the same thing: wait or you need to know someone. It’s the system that we all know.

Even so, the discussion of the raccomandazione for work in many conversations led insistently to references regarding “the way of doing things in the South” and a presumed “Southern mentality.” Alessandra, age twenty-one, had completed professional training in restoration. She stated the following: At the beginning [of the course], they told us that all of us would find work. Twenty did the course, three found work—through raccomandazioni. This is always the bottom line: if you have raccomandazioni, you work. If I want to work, I have to have a raccomandazione to work in a museum. The employment office doesn’t contact me. . . . I don’t think this happens in the North.

Sebastiano, officially unemployed but working off the books that summer as a lifeguard, had this to say: “Especially here, the search for a job is based on contacts—if you’re the son of Tom, Dick, or Harry. It’s not based on your skills. You need to be someone.” And, we should note, “being someone” is defined by one’s relationships, which Sebastiano explicitly contrasts with merit. The denouncement of clientelism was one of the main critiques that unemployed youths leveled at the government. Relatedly, they expressed the perception that politicians acted solely out of self-interest. Alessandra’s comment was typical: Speaking about Bernalda, in my view, [the politicians] only handle their own interests. All of the parties are equal—they square their own families away.

The supposition that the politicians operate out of family interest is certainly reinforced by the dominant ideologies of family obligation in this setting, for it appears “obvious” and “natural” to people that someone in a position of power would act to help family members, despite the fact that some politicians quite conscientiously avoid nepotism. At the same time, the contempt for behavior oriented toward self- or family interest is also connected to ambivalent feelings regarding individualism,

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in which the interest-based action of others—but not one’s own—is judged negatively as egotism. In their critique of local social conditions and institutions, the youths singled out the Ufficio di Collocamento in particular. The official unemployment register has objective criteria for establishing merit points and thence the rank list: seniority as to length of enrollment as unemployed, but also other factors such as having a family to support or being without a parent. The unemployed youths, however, complained that the rank lists were consistently passed over in order to serve clientelistic interests. I asked Dino, an unemployed thirtysomething who works as a day laborer, if he had applied for some of the new initiatives created with the Socially Useful Workers or the training programs, and he replied, “I don’t have any faith [in such things] anymore. They’re all recommended.” Dino described some of the new public works projects on the Basento River: “There’s no rank list, or if they have one, they pass over it.” The perception that the unemployed youths had of the local administration and its political initiatives for the unemployed was closely tied to their vision of life in the South as a whole. Marina, who had been signing on and off of the unemployment register for nine years, stated: You can’t place your hopes in the work of the Ufficio [the employment office]. Unfortunately, in Italy you have to know someone. Not in Northern Italy—in the South. In the North, they’re more advanced.

This comment enters into a more complex discourse on Southern identity, one that I will develop further in the next chapter. It is sufficient to note here that the unemployed youths attach great emphasis to the fact of being Southerners, and as such they critically perceive the functioning of the state and economy in the South. Clientelism is viewed to be part of the “Southern phenomenon,” and labor—defined exclusively as work that is formalized and of a relatively good status—is one of the most important resources managed by patronage in a setting in which it is held to be scarce. The socioeconomic differences that I have indicated within the category of “youth” play a significant role in the reproduction of forms of inequality through clientelism. Indeed, sooner or later it is necessary to reproduce or renew the class of “those who can,” as Signorelli called them, but in her otherwise excellent study it is unclear from where the new members are drawn. The common trajectory described by Signorelli moves from the unemployed youth who refuses clientelism, to accepting clientelism in his search for work, to success in obtaining a job, and, finally, to the use of one’s own power in order to sistemare [square

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away] someone else, especially a relative (Signorelli 1983: 136). Yet one must wonder what happens to those youths who remain outside this path, to those youths who continue to wait, and to those who cannot afford to wait at all. For many people, participation in “the system” is one means by which their potential for protest or antagonism is neutralized. It may be the case that they do seek and obtain a raccomandazione for a job selection. Generally, however, it is impossible for the available number of desirable positions to satisfy all of the recommended applicants. There are two explanations given to account for the failure of the hundreds or even thousands of raccomandazioni used by people competing in the same job selection: either the raccomandazione was not carried out in good faith or, if it was actually carried out, it entered into a hierarchy replicated within the pool of raccomandazioni, for in point of fact all raccomandazioni are not equal. Thus, the effectiveness of a particular connection is not always guaranteed. Cristina was a victim of a “bad faith” raccomandazione in which a politician up for election got her hired by a firm in Matera just before the polls. Her entire extended family “delivered” its votes in favor of the candidate, but she was let go from the job shortly afterward. In another narrative, a lawyer named Rocco told me about a young man he knew who didn’t win a job selection in Bari in the legal sector despite the fact that he was “super-raccomandato,” as he put it. I asked why this was so, and Rocco replied that the others who surpassed him on the rank list were sons of so-and-so and so-and-so, so thus they had priority, while the super-raccomandato who didn’t pass the selection had worked in an important law office and therefore had an implicit raccomandazione. “In any case,” concluded Rocco, “he becomes the first in line for next year.” So we see that even if “everyone” has a raccomandazione, the ideology of hierarchy is further reproduced within the spread of raccomandazioni presented within a given context. But it is not a hierarchy organized according to a single, abstract absolute: it is always a hierarchy in relation to the figure(s) behind the competition and in conjunction with his/her/ their interests. For this reason, precedence may be given to candidates with “strong” raccomandazioni, but the element of strength is somewhat of a wildcard. One woman noted this in her observation: You don’t really know which raccomandazione is the strongest. It could be that the professor’s maid or gardener is the best raccomandazione.

Another interlocutor described how people turn to the mayor, the vicemayor, or a city councilman:

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It’s all a chain. A percentage [of people] go to the mayor. Someone gets a job through a friend, a friend recommends another friend. But maybe any old one is more effective than the mayor’s.

The concept of spartizione [dividing up] can also affect the creation of a single, unified hierarchy. As several interlocutors described, the available slots in some cases may be divided up among different interest groups, each of which is allotted a certain number of positions to bestow upon “their” raccomandati. Within each group, too, internal politics can create a subhierarchy among their protégés. Certainly if the raccomandazione is successful, the recommended person will continue to feel obliged to his recommender, and it is in his best interest not to challenge the system. Even if he mentally displaces his use of raccomandazione and convinces himself that he has “made it” purely on the basis of merit, he will have no incentive to challenge the system: his very participation works to neutralize his antagonism toward the system. This effect is evident in Angelo’s comment: We criticize these forms [institutions and practices], but in the end each of us practices them. We all hope to make it through these means, sooner or later. We ourselves should be criticized, too. People blame the institutions, but we are also to blame.

An alternative to participating in “the system” may be one of a number of expressions of resistance. Some youths entirely renounce participating in job selections, because they are convinced that the winners are already designated from the beginning: B: Three thousand participate in the selection. Twenty or thirty get accepted, and they are always raccomandati. Sara: The raccomandazione is a great thing—for the person who has it [laughs]! It’s horrible for someone who doesn’t have it. If there were no raccomandazione, everything would be easier. For concorsi [job selections], too, because you already know who is supposed to win the selections. For this reason, a lot of people don’t take part in the selections.

Still others might refuse to seek a raccomandazione as a matter of principle, viewing “the system” with disgust; either they do not want to “compromise” themselves or they want to know that they got in on their own merits and not feel obliged to anyone. Paola, a bright and dynamic young woman from a modest lumpenproletariat family had this to say: DLZ: Have you even sought a raccomandazione for work? Paola: No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to because I wouldn’t like to adopt such tactics.

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I was struck by Paola’s attempt to make a direct contact with a potential employer, a successful local entrepreneur, in the type of approach that is quite standard in the United States: I asked my bookkeeper, “What do you think if I send him a letter? Maybe he’ll be curious and call.” He answered, “If you have someone who can recommend you, good, otherwise he’ll throw you [your letter] in the trash.” At this point, I’m not going to send anything. I don’t need that.

Still other youths would use the raccomandazione if they could, but they have difficulty in obtaining one: perhaps their families have no “hooks”; they are apolitical or affiliated with the “wrong” party. More likely than not, though, they simply do not have the money to “purchase” a raccomandazione. There is a strong correlation between this lack of access to raccomandazione and class position: my research on youth unemployment confirmed that the vast majority of unemployed young people coming from the lower end of the lower middle class and underclasses speak with absolute conviction of the necessity for a raccomdazione, and they are equally firm in their pessimism about the possibilities of obtaining one. This was exemplified, for example, in the comment by Anna, age thirty-two, unemployed, with a middle school diploma: I think that this life will never change. I hope things change. To have a posto fisso, you need to have keys to open the door. Here in Bernalda, they give work to those who are already well off.

This remark is in sharp contrast with the fact that those who express the most faith in meritocracy are usually those individuals who come from better-off families, who indeed have far greater access to the cultural capital that defines “merit.” There is a great deal of pessimism even among those lower-class youths who have a relatively high level of education, as this conversation with Cosimo, who holds a university-level diploma from the Institute for Physical Education Sciences (ISEF), and Agata, who was about to graduate from university, demonstrates: DLZ (to Agata): In your opinion, is raccomandazione important or not for getting a job? Agata: Jeez! Maybe it’s the only criterion for getting in. Cosimo: In my view, the raccomandazione has always existed. Agata: We are unlucky, we don’t have it. Cosimo: There was a concorso for support teachers . . . Agata: You needed a key that was a bombshell!!

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Cosimo: Teachers to support handicapped students. Nowadays it’s the only entrance into teaching. If they take you, you do a course that costs ten million [lire]. Then there are five years that you’re required to be a support teacher. After this, they won’t even do it again. Agata: We’re shut out. It is the only way to get into teaching. Cosimo: They held the concorso at the Fiera del Levante [a large exposition center in Bari]. Three thousand people for forty positions. Before, people didn’t want to do it—[speaking as if an average person then:] “Hey, I have to be with a handicapped kid, clean his nose . . .” Now, you need a raccomandazione, one that is stronger than your adversary’s. DLZ: But how did P. and his wife manage it [to enter into this type of work]? Cosimo: They entered earlier, in the right moment. In that period, no one wanted to do it. It was enough to speak [with the head of the special training school], “Will you let me in?” There were few requests. DLZ: How many? Cosimo: Maybe two hundred candidates for forty positions. Not like now—you need the Ministry of Public Instruction to get in. [later in the conversation] Agata: [referring to herself and Cosimo] The possibilities for us are limited. DLZ: What are your former classmates doing? Agata: They’re all unemployed. They’re all waiting to graduate, they’re all optimistic. . . . They think, “Graduation will surely be followed with a teaching job.” DLZ: Are they all aiming for teaching? Agata: Yes. Maybe their family situation gives them grounds for optimism. DLZ: What do you mean? Agata: It was a small reference to raccomandazione. They are the daughters of people who count—people inserted into the world of work, professionals, teachers [referring to herself and Cosimo]. We are starting from scratch. It [the university degree] means a lot to my parents, it’s a matter of pride. They didn’t think of it so much in terms of work as in terms of their own personal satisfaction—not mine.

For some youths, apart from the considerations made above, being excluded from the raccomandazione seems to be a matter of an inability to “work” connections, which is in fact a problem of communicative competence if we consider the raccomandazione as a genre of communication. Bakhtin comments precisely on this difficulty:

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Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres . . . (Bakhtin 1986: 80)

Michele seemed to fit precisely into this category of those who can’t work connections. He described to me how his attempts with raccomandazione have proved unsuccessful: DLZ: You spoke to me earlier about raccomandazione. Have you ever used one to find work? Michele: I’ve tried so many times, but in the end I didn’t have this “opportunity,” if we want to call it an opportunity, because I’m not the only person. Others manage to get it because they know someone. Nowadays, it’s not as if they take you because you’re good, because you have this or that qualification.

In the search for employment, the basic alternatives for people who cannot or will not get a raccomandazione are as follows: participate in the selection anyway, attempting to get in on the basis of merit; “follow the law” in some cases, which means gaining seniority points slowly but surely until one cannot be denied a regular job; lower one’s expectations and accept work that is below one’s qualifications or status level; engage in illegal activity; remain unemployed and receive support from one’s family. Emigration, too, is an important option available to many unemployed youths. While I have discussed the “new emigration” at greater length elsewhere (Zinn 1998), it is sufficient to comment here that for the unemployed youths, “the North,” or sopra [up there], represents a potential escape hatch, a place in which conditions appear to be better. There is the widespread feeling that if things really get bad, “one can always leave.” By associating the problem of unemployment principally with perceptions of the South and its “typical” social conditions of clientelism and exploitation, the historic role of Northern domination—and, in a broader framework, international capitalism—remains obfuscated. One effect of this ideology of the South is that it contributes to the acquiescence of those youths who do not emigrate: by casting blame for their condition on the Southern system, youths constitute emigration as the only alternative to a relatively quiet acceptance of their state of unemployment. In the ethnography of youth unemployment in Bernalda, I noted how some young people adopt a “vagabond” persona to heighten the perception of their freedom and status, lounging in the bars and displaying

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consumer goods. The youths “with 50,000 lire in their pockets”—who are able to be supported by their parents in their unemployment—can represent their lifestyle of leisure as a form of freedom from the subjugation of demeaning work or the exploitation of unreported work [lavoro nero], identifying themselves with an image of the well-to-do who do not have to work. With this posture, these youths might obliquely critique “the way things are in the South” or the poor opportunities for “real” work (i.e. permanent employment) without, however, challenging the use of raccomandazione as a whole. On the other hand, the acceptance of lavoro nero on the part of other youths becomes a way through which they create a degree of autonomy from their parents and of participation in the system, again without posing a fundamental opposition to it. In this case, it is almost as if the unreported work were a circumvention of the system, as if to say, “I can succeed without your help.” In recent years, I have observed an increasing emphasis on consumerism among the unemployed youths who work under the table, though in a manner that differs from that of the kids with 50,000 lire in their pockets: even if their modest family situation and meager earnings do not allow them to compete with their wealthier counterparts, these youths, to a much greater extent than in the past, seek to create and display their own sense of liberty and identity through motorcycles, styles of dress (including piercing and tattoos), and choice of music. A rhetoric of expression through consumption and display, cast in terms of a “freedom” to be as they choose, has displaced critique of “the system” and antagonism to it. Significantly, the loudest forms of protest and struggle of the unemployed take shape around the question of prolonging the terms of Socially Useful Workers, but not as a more fundamental movement for their category (as in some of the Neapolitan organized unemployed groups) or for political change. In some regards, the neutralization of protest and antagonism is also an effect of the system itself. The very nature of clientelism encourages and, at the same time, reflects the existing social fragmentation, thereby countermanding the possibility of organizing the unemployed youths. Clientelism has a self-perpetuating quality, as described by Graziano, who makes explicit what I was able to intuit in discussions with unemployed young people—that is, the emphasis placed in this society on vertical relationships rather than horizontal ones: When clientelism integrates people in the social and political systems, it does so in a way which prevents the restructuring of society along associational lines. . . . In brief, lack of effective organized action discourages the emergence of categorical groups, people who share an objective interest

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and may even be conscious of it, feel forced to act through age-old dyadic communication. (Graziano 1977: 5, 26)

Leaving aside Graziano’s notion of dyadic communication, which I have critiqued elsewhere in this work, we can appreciate the hierarchical nature of channels and relations through which the unemployed youths feel compelled to exercise what little participation they may have in the system. If clientelism is indeed “the real system,” as Galt (1974) puts it, we must also recognize that the system is, nominally, based on the official ideology of meritocracy-individualism, a system that is putatively just. As Willis notes, the ideology of meritocracy legitimates and reproduces a system of class stratification (Willis 1977: 128); at the same time, as Signorelli observes, “The most ambitious and gifted individuals can find channels for individual mobility without it being necessary to contest the system as a whole (1983: 136, my trans.). This brings us back to the point made in chapter 3 that someone who is considered “too good” or “too capable” can make it in the system despite the prevalence of raccomandazione: the fact that these few may do so neutralizes the critiques of others, cruelly holding out impossibly high standards of merit for everyone else. People may not contest the system, as Signorelli states, but they certainly do criticize it. In fact, one of the effects of the intersubjective personhood of raccomandazione is that unemployment is attributed to the “system” rather than to individual shortcomings. If one perceives a system to be based on meritocratic principles, then the logical conclusion to draw from unemployment is lack of merit, while the reverse is true where the ideology of raccomandazione dominates. The comparison between my ethnographic data on youth unemployment in Bernalda with that of other areas of Europe is instructive: in those settings where meritocratic principles and an individualist ideology of subjectivity (the finalized Western notion of the individual subject, described in chapter 3) is more pronounced, studies have revealed the tendency of unemployed youth to attribute the blame to themselves, and not to the system, for their situation. For example, a study by the OECD cites some Swedish and German research, asserting that “many unemployed young people perceive the problem to lie in themselves; they apply an individualistic ethic to unemployment” (OECD 1983: 68–69). Likewise, in a study on an area of Wales, Hutson and Jenkins (1987) write the following: While unemployment in general may be explained as due to the failures of the “system,” individual unemployment is likely to be seen as a result

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of personal inadequacies: poor education, not enough experience, lack of effort, character deficiencies, or whatever (1987: 104).

The authors cite analogous results in studies conducted in England and Australia. In Hutson and Jenkins’s research, a result emerged that would be unthinkable in Bernalda: the mothers of the unemployed youths opined that their children’s unemployment was a consequence of their way of being as individuals (ibid.). Equally inconceivable in Bernalda, a good part of the parents studied said that they “did not want life to be too comfortable for their children” so that the youths could learn to appreciate the value of money and maintain a certain independence (ibid.: 96). Not only do the parents of unemployed youths in Bernalda wholeheartedly offer their children their economic support to the extent that it is feasible (even those parents in difficult economic circumstances) but they also often take an active role in the search for work itself and in other respects of their children’s lives—a striking difference from the parent/child relationship prevalent in the United States. For example, I observed many parents going to the employment office on behalf of their children, especially to inquire about the Socially Useful Workers. At the time of the research, the vice-mayor and councilman for employment policies had this to say: DLZ: Who comes here, and what do they ask for? GS: A bit . . . A wide variety of youths. They come to ask for positions in the town hall, ask for useful information on the laws for young people. Many times they are accompanied by their parents. They ask to be hired at the city hall or some other public organization. The point about the parents, I’m not mentioning it by chance. It’s interesting to observe this. For example, for assigning the Socially Useful jobs, there are rules. The parents are often the ones who accept these rules the least. There are criteria, and it’s the employment office that chooses. The parents want to bypass the rank list. It’s often easier to convince a youth to accept the rules than his parents. The parents come from an experience of political hirings from some twenty years ago.

My ethnographic work on youth unemployment in Bernalda revealed that while Bernaldese youth, both employed and unemployed alike, clearly participate in a certain modern ideology of consumerism, their participation in another ideology of modernity—that of individualism—is more ambiguous. By individualism, again, I do not speak of “egotism,” but rather of a certain definition of subjectivity as individual,

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the dominant ethos in Western societies. By considering the type of subjectivity articulated through raccomandazione, in which one’s single, individual voice is held to be inadequate for addressing another, we see that the local notion of subjectivity goes much farther beyond the confines of the individual: here, family relations in particular play an important role. When a youth is seeking work, the official discourses of the system that are based on an individualistic ideology and emphasize meritocracy conflict with the ideology of raccomandazione that penetrates the conditions of existence in all spheres. The ideology of raccomandazione proposes a concept of subjectivity that is intersubjective, interpersonal, and dictates the necessity to find the right key, or else it is tied to the family “that can,” borrowing Signorelli’s expression. It is true that some unemployed youths recognize themselves in the ideology of individualism and meritocracy, yet these are the exception: those from bourgeois families and perhaps some from more modest families who nonetheless demonstrate a predisposition for social mobility compared with their families of origin. With the legislation of the last few years, from the Pacchetto Treu of 1997 on, we see the reappearance of the politics of “extraordinary interventions” to combat unemployment. But along with these interventions, the infrastructures in the zone, as throughout the South, are in need of great improvement in order to create incentives for investment and productive development. The school system needs to better orient and train students for the labor market. Good intentions are not lacking in the city hall of Bernalda: For example, the city government has created an information counter for young people to help cover the need for guiding figures and structures for those who want to create new initiatives, enterprises, or “simple” cooperatives. With regard to the latter, there are very few cooperatives to date that manage to survive after the first years of activity, and still fewer that are actually successful. The youths with whom I spoke attributed this difficulty to conflicts within the group, “envy,” and in any case, a sense of disorientation due to their lack of experience and professionality. Sometimes, instead, the group behind the façade of a cooperative is all too strongly led by the figure of the president, to whom the members are made subordinate. The ideology of hierarchy here, as in raccomandazione, is alive and well. So many youths mobilize their energy in order to attain a position in the Socially Useful Jobs (LSU), which offer a salary of 800,000 lire a month for one year; beyond that there is no hope for the future other than an extension of the LSU through protests at the provincial, regional, and state levels of government. The job fairs that have taken

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place in Basilicata have gained less participation than anticipated: this form of incentive also regards fixed-term jobs with few prospects for permanent hiring. The firms make the contracts at their own discretion, mainly in favor of relatives or in order to formalize those who are already de facto working there, but under the table. As usual, those with no agganci [hooks] are destined to remain excluded. Another important feature that has developed in recent years within the overall question of unemployment is the flow of immigrants arriving from developing countries, who are estimated to form approximately 5 percent of the labor force in Italy. In Bernalda, there are small nuclei of North Africans and Albanians who have found a niche working as day laborers in agriculture. The presence of these immigrants in an area of such high unemployment, one from which Bernaldese youth emigrate, seems to pose a paradox. In point of fact, the local labor market is heading toward the type of structure that has already been consolidated elsewhere in Europe, what Mingione calls the uneven tripartition of the employment structure: the securely employed, the unemployed and the irregularly employed, and Third World immigrants in the worst jobs (Mingione 1995: 29). In the present period, the local youths who work as day laborers in agriculture do view the immigrants as competition; some youths interviewed cited the presence of immigrants as a reason why: “Now, you need a raccomandazione even to work on the farms.” With the modernization of Bernalda in recent decades and the reduction in its social and geographic isolation, the young people of the town are adopting more and more elements of the lifestyle of their counterparts in other areas of the Western world, a form of homogenization marked by rave parties and the internet. Although these tendencies confer a patina of postmodernity on the town despite its recent history as a peripheral, peasant-based society, they are displayed more noticeably in the better-off youths, those “with 50,000 lire in their pockets,” and they widen the distance that separates the youths of different social classes because, for example, it is not possible to have internet at home if there is not even a telephone. In a way, this gap reflects a phenomenon emerging throughout Europe in the wake of transformations of the post-Fordist economy: the new pauperization or socioeconomic marginalization. The youths of the most disadvantaged classes remain extraneous to the new policies and interventions: they are the ones who are most disheartened by the specter of raccomandazione.

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Note 1. These class groupings are my own as an outside observer and not necessarily shared within the local perspective. While my categories are fundamentally congruent with traditional sociological ones, it is difficult to speak of an industrial proletariat in this area in the classic sense. In fact, on the basis of their status and standard of living, factory workers here may be considered petty bourgeois. I use the term “lumpenproletariat” to refer to those people who live in a semipermanent condition of precarious employment, especially agricultural day laborers and construction workers. Lumpenproletariat families often live in very modest conditions, perhaps lacking a telephone or fully equipped bathroom.

Chapter 7

“We’re Not Uganda, but Almost” Raccomandazione and Southern Italian Identity

“We’re not Uganda, but almost,” said Corrado, a member of the town elite, in our interview: the citation pithily sums up one of the self-representations of local identity of which the raccomandazione is a major part. When I say “local” identity, I am referring to an expandable notion of identity in which Corrado’s commentary stretches effortlessly to represent Southern identity. For this study is not only concerned with the ideology and phenomenon of raccomandazione per se but how this ideology figures into people’s metacultural discourses—culture commenting on culture—about who they are as Southern Italians and even as Italians tout court. In Bernalda there is a great deal of self-referential discourse in which the various genres I have grouped under the heading of raccomandazione play a substantial role, for people do not only deploy the genres, but they also talk a great deal about them. Such discourse both embodies and emerges from a certain common sense about what it means to be “Southern,” or as Foucault might put it, a “regime of truth” regarding the South. Although, as I have pointed out in the previous chapters, not everyone actually participates in or condones raccomandazione genres, this discourse constructs raccomandazione as shared culture, an intimate part of identity. Intimate in the sense of intrinsic or essential, but also essentializing, for raccomandazione is precisely one of those cultural “embarrassments” so aptly described by Herzfeld as part of those shared, unseemly stereotypes that actually play an important role in the coalescence of a group or national identity (Herzfeld 1997). The analysis of Southern Italian identity presented here is grounded in anthropological views of identity as an ideologically constructed phe-

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nomenon, and the position held is that some such ideological aspects can be understood by examining metacultural discourses that construct the Self and differentiate it from the Other. In the case under examination, I am interested not only in how Bernaldese construct themselves as Southern Italians through their discourses about raccomandazione but also in how they construct the Others of Northern Italy and Northern Europe. While the raccomandazione is certainly recognized as an institution throughout Italy as a whole, it nonetheless might be ideologically configured in a different way in the Center-North. I cannot devote attention to examining this Northern ideological terrain more specifically, but the discussion that follows will evince how some aspects of identity in the Southern context are reproduced on a national level. Despite nearly 140 years of being united as a political entity, Italians are still very sensitive to the longue durée of their history as a peninsula of divided localities and states, and it is no news that the North/South split (or rather, Center-North/South) remains the largest fissure. The discourse of Italy’s “Southern Question” has a long history, with antecedents well prior to Unification (Petrusewicz 1998).1 There has been a long and fertile tradition of Southern Italian studies—from the early meridionalisti to current neo-meridionalisti intellectuals—whose work has dealt with political, economic, and social aspects of the Southern question, including how Northern discourses have inferiorized the South and Southerners. One aspect that has, however, received relatively little attention is that of how Southerners actually view and construct their own identity, and this despite the fact that localism and the construction have long attracted a good deal of interest among Italianist anthropologists (as with, for example, the classic study of Silverman 1975). Gribaudi’s excellent essay “Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as Seen by Insiders and Outsiders” (1997) is one of the few academic treatments of Southern self-representation. If Southern identity seems analogous to other forms of identity with place-reference (such as national, regional, and local identities), the comparison is actually more ambiguous. Unlike these other levels, the South is not a political unit with its own levels of government (although Umberto Bossi of the Northern League Party has advanced the proposal that it become one). The primordiality of connections to place might suggest one notion for exploring Southern identity, but the various geopolitical regions and innumerable localities that comprise the South offer a greater number of unifying elements in terms of what are called “objective” cultural grounds (i.e. traditions, political apparatuses, history, dialect, cuisine, etc.) than does a Southern identity per se. How, then, does one speak about a sense of Southern identity? On what

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grounds do people share an aspect of their identity in an area characterized by Gramsci as “a great social disaggregation”? Indeed, the very definition of the South is variable, sometimes referring to the Continental South, sometimes including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. And depending on who is asked, the South coded as “Africa” may begin just south of Florence or Rome. Discussions of Italian Unification, the Risorgimento, inevitably refer to Count d’Azeglio’s maxim: “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” By recognizing the invented rather than primordial quality of national identity, d’Azeglio was actually not far off from Benedict Anderson’s noted conception of the nation as “imagined community” (Anderson 1988). The cultural revolution of the nation has effected social integration to a fair degree: the Italians have indeed been “made,” but they have emerged in Northern and Southern varieties. Whereas some scholars, like Corrigan and Sayer (1985), claim that the process of nation-state formation leads to the disintegration of other loci of identity, the discourses in Italy of the South and Southerners have instead become more deeply rooted, so much so that Southern identity now acts as something akin to an ethnic form of identity. By this, I do not mean to say that Southerners are an ethnic group, an affirmation that would be historically and scientifically false and risk reifying Southerners into such a category. But, as we will see, there is a very real sense of Southern identity that, while not offering much in terms of primordial ties to Southerners as a community or offering a basis for political mobilization, does form one level of what anthropologists call “segmentary” identity. The notion of segmentary groups is most closely associated with the work of Evans-Pritchard (1940) among the African Nuer, in which the concept of segmentary descent lineages is used to describe Nuer political organization. One can visualize the segments as nesting Russian dolls, in which the closer the relationship among members is drawn, the greater a sense of “us” and the mutual obligation implied by it. By detaching the concept of segmentation from the category of descent or political organization, Herzfeld has pointed out that it provides a fundamental basis for the perception of social relations in all human societies, and not just exotic or stateless ones (Herzfeld 1987a: 157). When we speak of segmentation, we refer to a framework that permits shifting in the levels of identity that defines “us” and “them”; significantly, the same shifting movement takes place in the concept of particularism—the paradigm associated with clientelism in contradistinction to universalism—since the boundary between “us” and “them” can be wider or narrower depending on the unit of reference, as Mutti notes:

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According to what constitutes the unit of reference—the individual, the dyadic relation, an interest group, a community of identification that is more or less broad (local, national, ethnic, religious, etc.)—the line of demarcation towards the “outside” varies greatly (Mutti 1996: 502).

The question is whether a society makes an explicit reference to its segmentation, as in the Bernaldese recognition of raccomandazione as part of a sense of identity, or else masks it with a predominant ideological emphasis on universalism (Herzfeld 1987a). In order to understand more clearly how the ideology of raccomandazione fits into this discussion of Southern identity, I would first like to present a few broad points on Southerners as an identity group and the ideological bases of this identity. Without necessarily categorizing Southern identity as an “ethnic” form of identity, we can recognize that the concept of ethnicity, more than other forms of identity, still presents some analogies for it. One of the main points reiterated from Barth’s influential work on ethnicity (Barth 1969) has been that ethnicity is a means of drawing inclusiveness and exclusiveness. A number of anthropological studies have demonstrated the malleability of ethnic boundaries and have increasingly pointed to the nonessential character of ethnic identity, despite all of its pretensions to primordiality (see, for example, Clifford 1988 and Roosens 1989). Whether defined by objective or subjective criteria, ethnicity does not constitute the group a priori (Royce 1982). What emerges from this is the constructed quality of ethnicity, as with other forms of identity. Of course, the fact that identity is constructed does not mean that it is less real or meaningful for those who bear it (Fabietti 1998). While some interpretations of ethnicity stress what scholars often describe as objective bases of identity (common descent, language, etc.), we would be hard-pressed to find analogous objective grounds for a pan-Southern identity. Yet the ideology of raccomandazione—at least as the Bernaldese see it—does provide a basis for “a sense of belonging together,” and it is recognized by the group itself as an important defining aspect of a Southern identity. Indeed, we might define raccomandazione as what Royce has called a “shared historical style” (Royce 1982). If the nation-building process should promote national integration and the primacy of national identity over other forms of identity, we must then ask why Southernness remains as a residual category. Some authors have suggested that uneven capitalist development is the source for the development or reinforcement of residual identities like ethnicity. In Hechter’s influential notion of the “internal colony” (Hechter 1975), for example, which is essentially based on the case of Great Brit-

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ain, the exploitation of the dependent periphery by the core area leads to stratification (a “cultural division of labor”) that in turn promotes the development of ethnic identities. The model is tempting, to the extent that many, including Gramsci himself, have described the Italian South as the North’s internal colony. Yet Hechter’s ideal types do not account for the fact that a good degree of integration has actually taken place in Italy despite the persistent differences (particularly economic) between North and South, and thus the texture of identity is more complex than his analysis permits. The second point is that ethnicity in Hechter’s analysis becomes conflated with class, as ethnically marked cultural stratification is superimposed upon class. This does not leave any room for class divisions that are internal to the colonized/ethnic group, whereas in reality Southern identity cuts across class lines. Indeed, whether or not Southerners actively mobilize a sense of community on the basis of a Southern identity, we can at least note how the category of “Southern” subverts other axes of difference such as class or locality. Similarly, Hannerz has demonstrated how leaders in some African settings use ethnic attachments and—not uncoincidentally for our Southern Italian case—clientelistic practices to dampen intraethnic class divisions (Hannerz 1974). The failure to dissolve Southern identity into a wider Italian identity is therefore not simply an epiphenomenal effect of capitalist exploitation. Rather, what exploitation has occurred dovetails with an overall failure to achieve or approach an ideal of capitalistic rationalization in the South as part of the wider “cultural rationalization” project in the process of state formation (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), where the South instead counters with an alternative rationalization through the hybrid of raccomandazione, as discussed in chapter 4. One author who has recognized the complicity of local factors along with externally based capitalist exploitation is Wade (1980), who presents an insightful description of how the tension between the “needs of capital” in Italy and the sociopolitical fabric of the South (and specifically clientelism) has perpetuated the latter’s relative underdevelopment. I think, however, that it is crucial to consider identity in the picture: the very categories we have been exploring here—raccomandazione or even mafia, which are then re-elaborated by Southerners as part of their identity, for better or for worse—do recognize and reproduce this incomplete rationalization. At the same time, they mask the role of Northern exploitation and justify a blame-the-victim stance of the sort promoted by the Northern League. As Fantozzi (1993) has stated, clientelism features a strong element of belonging along with its utilitarian aspect. We have seen that this sense of belonging functions within the relationships

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of clientelism’s actors in the form of kinship ties, friendship, or fondness (which may be based on shared community). Yet the data from Bernalda suggest that beyond the confines of clientelist behavior per se, raccomandazione is part of a shared sense of Southern identity: “how people are in the South” and a presumed “Southern mentality.” Thus, in the Italian case, the processes of development of an internal “other” are inseparable from the very nature of the “other”: the Southerners’ seeming refusal and/or inability to be fully, normatively rationalized is in effect what the Southern identity is, in large part, all about. This is not to claim that Southerners are “irrational,” as a time-worn tradition of denigration would hold, or even “uncivic,” as the newer version of this tradition states (Putnam 1993). Rather, it means that the peculiarities of the South are intimately connected to a divergent assimilation of the rational-universalistic model of the modern state: hence we return to the role of raccomandazione. We may seek further evidence for this interpretation of the South as a construct through an unresolved perplexity with regard to the invention of “Padanian” ethnicity, the group identity of the Northern Italian regions touted by the Northern League Party. In his excellent comprehensive discussion of ethnic identity, Fabietti introduces the case of Padania and examines how the construction of a padana identity draws upon typical elements of what he calls an “ethnic configuration” (Fabietti 1998). Referring to data in a study by Biorcio (1997), Fabietti observes that, surprisingly, the “system of production” plays a significant role in Padanian identity: It is interesting, however, to note that alongside the typical elements of an ethnic configuration, the “system of production” appears as an element of “Padanian” distinction. In fact, in Biorcio’s investigation, the system of production as a distinctive feature even turns out to be in first place, ahead of “moral values.” The system of production is an element that is apparently extraneous to and clashing with those that contribute to configure ethnicity. It is actually a “factor” that, though it resembles the “cultural” element of ethnic configuration, possesses a “rational” character, and it is therefore hard to transfigure symbolically, and consequently, it is not very suited to founding an “ethnic group”. . . (Fabietti 1998: 153–54)

Fabietti leaves aside this unusual, albeit key, element in Padanian identity in order to focus on the use of symbols and rituals in Lega discourse, elements that are more amenable to the study of ethnic configuration. As odd as the “system of production” appears in this ethnicizing context, however, we can make sense of it by keeping in mind that identity is not

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only a construction of “us” but also of “them,” i.e. the South in Lega discourses. The Leghisti take the image of a system of production as something invoked to contrast with the purported inefficiency and parasitism of the South, a geographic construction that in these discourses also embraces Rome. In this regard, the rhetoric of the Lega strikingly mirrors the academic discourse of a number of scholars on the “Southernization” of the Italian state (Allum 1973, Graziano 1977, Wade 1980). Having made this brief detour on the construction of Padanian ethnicity, let us return to examine Southern identity, for which no equivalent attempt at ethnicization has (yet) been made. An individual’s sense of identity in Southern Italy, as anywhere, has many facets: gender, class, religion. For example, identity in relation to place takes on many levels: quarter, parish, town, province, region, and, at times, even intermediate levels such as “the Metapontine area,” which groups Bernalda in a geographic designation together with nearby towns of the Ionian Coast. Other key aspects of identity come from one’s family and occupation. A linguistic marker of such elements of identity is the manner in which they became nicknames, common in Bernalda as in many areas of the South (cf. Jacquemet 1992). It has sometimes been difficult for me as a native of the United States to realize the full weight of place in the Bernaldese construction of identity. Zi’Antonietta, for example, an elderly neighbor, was gossiping about another woman in the quarter whom she referred to as “Giuseppina the foreigner.” “But hasn’t Giuseppina been living here for over fifty years?” I asked, because it seemed funny that after so much time, this woman from the Salento area of neighboring Apulia could still be considered an outsider. “That’s what she’s called,” replied Zi’Antonietta with a shrug.2 But it is not only through embedded markers such as nicknames or objective elements of shared culture—such as the Bernaldese dialect, the patron saint’s festival in honor of San Bernardino, or a distinctive gastronomic predilection for bitter onions [lambascion’]—that people articulate various aspects of identity. We must also consider the metacultural discourses in which people comment upon their identity. The Bernaldese with whom I have worked, for example, express precise, essentializing notions about themselves, the people in the towns around them, and the people of neighboring regions (cf. Pratt 1980: 37): this is one facet of the oft-noted phenomenon of campanilismo [parochialism]. And so, too, do the Bernaldese have particular views of themselves as Southern Italians, but these views embody many of the orientalist descriptions ascribed to Southerners from outside their ranks. Said’s notion of “orientalism” refers to the process through which the texts of Western conquerors, literary figures, and academics discursively constructed

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“the Orient” (Said 1978). Carrier has taken the concept of orientalism a step further by calling attention to how some indigenous groups adopt such external constructions as part and parcel of their own identity in what he terms “ethno-orientalism”: “. . . essentialist renderings of alien societies by the members of those societies themselves” (Carrier 1992: 198). In this, he further explains, “what had been only a distinguishing characteristic, albeit an important one, becomes a defining characterization” (ibid: 204). Almost invariably, in an ethno-orientalist fashion, people in Bernalda place this key characteristic under the heading of what they call mentalità [mentality], an encompassing category that we may consider a form of shared historical style. Mentality can mark the different segmentary categories of identity: traits generally recognized to be part of the “Bernaldese identity,” such as alleged spendthrift behaviors, flamboyancy in dress, etc., are in the local view outgrowths of an overall “mentality.” Locals contrast the “Lucanian mentality” with that of nearby Apulia, and, worthy of note here, they speak of the “Southern mentality.” By understanding the connections between place, identity, and mentality, it becomes clearer why place-related tensions (North/ South, between towns) are often cast as razzismo [racism], even though the concept of race in a popular, biological sense has little to do with the identities involved. I was interviewing a group of youths when a young woman from the nearby town of Ferrandina made the following remarks: The Southerners are treated like slaves in the North. We’re racist, too. We have racism between here [Bernalda] and Ferrandina, between Ferrandina and Matera. We Italians don’t know how to get along with people [i cristiani]. I was in Turin last year, and in a bar there was this sign: “No smoking, no entrance for dogs or Southerners.” Or they don’t rent homes to Southerners.

With regard to the North/South situation in the Italian case, Herzfeld’s analysis of identity in Greece is quite suggestive (Herzfeld 1982, 1984, 1987a). He discusses a “disemia” emerging from the split between two alternative constructions of Greek identity, in which the Hellenic model refers to a pure, classical Greek past, in contrast to the Romeic model, with its qualities of disorder “polluted” by Turkish influence. The tension of this disemia is played out on and between all levels of community, from the family to the international scene. In the Italian context, a similar polarity gets played out spatially, where the South represents the polluted/polluting element. There is an alterity between the idealized images of Roman/Renaissance traditions and the construction

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of the South as “backward,” “African,” and (as Gramsci cited) “the ball and chain” of Italy. As Moe’s studies point out, the logo of the magazine Illustrazione Italiana features symbols that make reference to a number of different monuments of the North—the Tower of Pisa, the Duomo of Milan, Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, to name a few—but the South appears solely in the symbol of Vesuvius (Moe, cited in Petrusewicz 1998). Thus the North is represented as a panorama of Western civilization’s great works, while the South is not only depicted as lacking such monuments (its own important classical Greek heritage is elided, among other things) but also simultaneously associated with the brute force of nature. Such a North/South distinction, moreover, is associated with analogous dichotomies of culture/nature, male/female, rational/irrational, active/passive; in each of these dualities, the North assumes the positive attribute, while the South is associated with the negative one. As I will discuss below, the gender-based dichotomy of male-female in particular recurs in the discourse of raccomandazione, which assimilates the North to “order” and the South to “chaos” or the “loose woman.” Despite these negative connotations, on the local level of the South, people in Bernalda identify positively with what they represent as traditions of Southern excellence. Cristina, for example, relates her view that Northern League leader Umberto Bossi and his followers, who launch racially charged critiques of the South and of Southerners, “are actually envious of the South because the Southerners are more on the ball.” Interestingly, Cristina applies envy to the Northerners—a quality that many Bernaldese impute to their fellow townsmen—in a sense leveling the moral playing field. She mentions the fact that up North numerous doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals are transplanted Southerners. Many other interlocutors made similar remarks, for example Rocco in the following: The further South you go, not only in geographical terms of Italy but also in terms of social class, the more there is an ability in these things: the capacity for struggle. For example, in sports, all the champions are Sicilian. The intellectuals, too. It’s connected with the possibilities that people have. If you go to the North, all the professors are Southerners.

Townsmen attribute these examples of excellence to a “Southern” capacity for struggle, for survival. In this sense, they are an elevated version of the famous Neapolitan arte dell’arrangiarsi, an art of making do. This art of making do is associated with lower-status manifestations, including the phenomenon of raccomandazione. As Lorenzo, the local “philosopher” of raccomandazione, said:

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Here, it’s a continuous clutching at straws. The raccomandazione is a mechanism created to give space to these phenomena. If you want a public works job, you have to have fifteen signatures. It’s the system’s motor, the grease. It’s arrangiarsi. In Naples l’arte dell’arrangiarsi is more extreme, but people make do on all levels.

L’arrangiarsi has an aura of precariousness, disorder: if it is the motor of the Southern system (or the Italian system as a whole), it maneuvers at the same time in and out of the system. In any case, as I argued in chapter 3, l’arrangiarsi is a poor relation in the family of raccomandazione genres. People associate l’arrangiarsi with the South, but when they refer to raccomandazione in the North, it takes on a more “prestigious” form: In Milan, there’s the tangente—a raccomandazione for companies. Here in the South, it’s the poor slob who’s looking for work. Those guys [in Milan] have done it in grander style. The large metropolises, big capitals. . . . There are great possibilities for getting money. . . . By now the raccomandazione has entered into the Italian mentality.

Or else, what raccomandazione does exist in the North is thought to be used more “rationally” than its Southern counterpart, as noted in many of the interlocutors’ comments in chapter 6. And while the skills of arrangiarsi can be honed to a fine art and linked to Southern excellence in many endeavors, Southerners might also apply them to maximizing gain with little effort. In this sense, it is important to bear in mind the key role that raccomandazione plays in the prevalent ideal of public employment in Bernalda. Many interlocutors also maintained that the “Southern mentality” favors secure gain rather than entrepreneurial speculation. Another aspect of the averred Southern mentality commonly noted by the Bernaldese is the centrality of family ties, or in local terminology, “family feeling” [il senso della famiglia]. As mentioned in chapter 2, Southern Italian familism was made famous (or rather, infamous) by Banfield’s controversial work on “amoral familism” (Banfield 1958), which continues to inform more recent scholarship (Putnam 1993; Fukuyama 1995). But leaving aside the critique of the amoral familism concept, there is clearly evidence for a certain strength of family ties in Bernalda, although this should not be considered particularly remarkable. On the contrary, as Berkowitz puts it, “Only by judging South Italian families against the norms of the North American and northern European upper-middle classes do we emerge with a strong sense of the former’s ‘familyness’” (Berkowitz 1984). The Bernaldese themselves, in an act of ethno-orientalism, identify their senso della famiglia as noteworthy by defining themselves according to such “occidentalist” norms

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(cf. Carrier 1992). Carmelina, for example, spoke of immigrants to Northern Italy and Germany: The first thing they’ll tell you is that they’re better off there, but that it’s better here for human relations. In the South we are very sentimental. I, for example . . . for me it means a lot to be hospitable. We’re all like this, friendly, we Italians. It’s a historical fact. With all the disasters we’ve had, it’s like the unity of a family, especially in the South. We always need other people, we’re not self-sufficient.

Family ties and obligations are just one aspect of personal interconnectedness, although among the strongest. Two youths related what they view as a negative personal interdependence with the backwardness of the South: [The raccomandazione] is terrible. The day comes when you have to walk on your own two feet. And when it comes, if you’re raccomandato, you don’t do it. The South doesn’t develop: the ones who are schemers [inciuciati] get themselves recommended.

Another feature of the presumed Southern mentality claimed by locals is an acute attention to appearances or “exteriority.” Some interlocutors hypothesized that these concerns create the phenomenon of raccomandazione, in that raccomandazione is a means by which, for example, an unworthy student enhances his grades or someone obtains a “better” job. Fabio, a high school teacher, gives the context of the school system as an example: I believe that these pressures on the scholastic level arise more from a matter of image, in order to demonstrate to the others a higher grade, a better one. . . . It’s a matter of image, of prestige.

Vittoria, whose husband is from Central Italy, cited this concern with appearances as a North/South difference in gift-giving. “In the North it’s different. We [Southerners] are more bound to this exteriority, this superficiality.” Moreover, many interlocutors also attributed the raccomandazione to a “lack of democracy,” a “feudal” aspect of the Southern mentality that has been “accustomed to subordination.” Corrado, who made the statement that serves as this chapter’s title, had this to say: There are some differences between the North and the South. If you go to the Policlinico [Hospital] in Bari, you get this feeling of the Third World, of approximation. Unlike a hospital in Verona. This way of living day by

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day, almost totally lacking in civicness . . . that’s the difference between the North and the South. There’s a culture of years of obedience.

Luciano commented as follows: In the South in general, I think that [the raccomandazione] is more deeply rooted. It’s a historical fact, not being accustomed to democracy, to meritocracy. We’re used to asking for favors. Here, people turn to the state to find work, unlike in the North.

While such discussions of raccomandazione commonly associate it with the category of the Southern mentality, I found that people often remarked that “nowadays, it is part of the Italian mentality,” though they would quickly add the assertion that, in any case, there is “more” (raccomandazione and the mentality encompassing it) in the South. Certainly, the publicity surrounding the kickback scandal in Milan has had an effect on Southerners’ perceptions of an “Italian mentality.” Discourses about the Southern mentality that are cast in a pathological vein embody the view that, like disease, “mentality” can spread, take root. Some people explained Tangentopoli by way of just such a South-to-North contagion of mentality, much in the same way that academics have described the “Southernization” of the Italian state, mentioned above. Discussing the geography of raccomandazione, Saverio asserted that “maybe in the sixties in Milan it was different, but nowadays the phenomenon is widespread there, too.” Another interlocutor echoed this notion of the spread of raccomandazione: Here in the South [the raccomandazione] is deeply rooted. The mafia, too. Maybe because of unemployment. I don’t think it’s that present in the North, but you see what’s happening in Milan [the Tangentopoli scandal], and the phenomenon is spreading.

Similarly, the raccomandazione can even spread to what many people stereotypically hold to be a rational-universalist paradise like Germany (which at least was held to be so, before ex-chancellor Kohl’s recent kickback scandal). I spoke with a young woman, the daughter of a Bernaldese family that had immigrated to Germany, who was visiting her hometown. She had spent most of her life in Germany, and when I asked her if there was raccomandazione there, she gave the following reply: In Germany, I think it’s arriving. The Italians are bringing it. But I don’t think it will ever reach the levels that are here—they’re too precise in Germany. This is a good thing about it there, especially for work. Work

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is sacred. Raccomandazione didn’t exist some time ago, now that I think about it, but it’s arriving. Italians make friends with Germans, and the Italians know how to get things done . . .

As I noted above, the discourses of raccomandazione figure importantly in an ethno-orientalist construction of Southern identity. While there is some appreciation for Southern excellence, or for some people even cunning [ furbizia], raccomandazione is generally discussed in negative terms. Many people commented that they wished things would function “normally”—that is, according to universalistic-bureaucratic and meritocratic ideals. For these indigenous social critics, the raccomandazione by contrast signifies a permanent state of pathology or abnormality.

Roberto’s Theory In June 1992, a group of friends and I were hanging out on a pleasant summer evening, sitting in an outdoor café on the main street of Bernalda. It was nearly four months since the Tangentopoli scandal had broken out in Milan, and the arrests were mounting daily. Television news broadcasts regularly toted up the notices of investigation and arrest warrants much in the way that war reports give daily body counts. Roberto, a small entrepreneur who is generally recognized as a very astute if not highly educated person, delivered his characteristically facetious interpretation of how things were taking place: “A judge in the South can’t have success: since there’s omertà [the code of silence], everyone remains silent. So a Southern magistrate, Di Pietro, goes to the North in order to be successful, to move ahead in his career. He arrests one, and that guy sings!” Tommaso puts in, “It’s not like M. [who had just been arrested in nearby Matera on charges related to kickbacks in Venice]. I saw him on TV, and his reaction was, ‘Whaaaaaaat?’” Everyone is in stitches at this rendition, which Tommaso accents with a goofy tone and facial expression. Someone asks him to repeat M.’s reaction, and we’re roaring with laughter. Roberto, stimulated by mention of a Southern arrestee, quips: “Here in the South, they steal four or five million [lire, about $5,000], but in the North they steal billions [millions of dollars], but they’re all afraid and sing.” Roberto has an excellent comic delivery, and we’re all laughing. Antonio brings up the recent case of a woman cammorista [a member of the Neapolitan mafia] that they had shown on the news a few days earlier.

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She was filmed resisting arrest, cursing the police, thrashing and even throwing her shoes at them. The description of this scene renews a burst of hilarity among the group. Roberto seizes upon it: “When the Carabinieri arrive to arrest the Northerners, they’re afraid [he punctuates this with an amusing mock whimper]. In the South, they throw shoes.” The conversation continues in this vein. Then Roberto adds, referring to the Northerners arrested in the tangent scandal, “And these are the companies that put bread on Italy’s table.” Antonio comments, “The difference is that in the North, they stole to give the money to the [political] parties, while in the South they kept the money for themselves.”

This exchange is quite rich with common-sense notions about Southern and Northern Italians, both re-presenting such notions and relying upon them for an overall interpretation, and the conversation therefore merits a closer examination. First, the reference to omertà invokes the stereotype of the Southern “code of silence.” Omertà is usually discussed in the context of mafia activity—that is, people remain silent out of fear. In this case, Roberto has crossed from the genre of organized crime to place omertà in the context of bribes and kickbacks. The code of silence does not apply here to the general public or to the captured crime figures, as in the case of mafia, but to the Southern entrepreneurs and politicians under scrutiny. Antonio Di Pietro was the leading magistrate in the Operation Clean Hands kickback investigation, the epicenter of which was in Milan. In the first two years of the investigation, Di Pietro’s image was projected on television on a daily basis along with coverage of the latest arrests: he became a national hero, assuming almost mythic proportions at the time. Yet the Di Pietro we glimpsed on the television news of the period had a modest, unassuming demeanor. This image gained further strength in the summer after Tangentopoli broke, when the magistrate vacationed in his hometown in the province of Campobasso, and the television news showed Italy that its new favorite son was from a small Southern town and that his mother appeared to be a stereotypical Southern granny dressed in black. In Roberto’s interpretation, however, Di Pietro is not some Southern bumpkin but a furbo [a shrewd guy], because he realized that he could make his career up North, whereas he would never have gotten anywhere by remaining in the South (where people don’t inform or “sing”). Furthermore, as a magistrate, Di Pietro is also a metaphor for the state, whose presence is often asserted to be lacking in the South. In fact, as we saw in chapter 4, in some areas the mafia is held to be an alternative state. So it makes sense to those participating in the conversation that Di Pietro was able to be successful in the North where the state is “more present.”

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Furbizia also figures into the humor of Tommaso’s imitation of M. M. was a public functionary who had made lots of money in ways that appeared questionable to a number of people in the province, including this group seated at the café. This fact in itself had already been sufficient to create a reputation for him as a furbo. Then, unlike his Northern counterparts who “sing” when arrested, M. feigns ignorance: in Tommaso’s representation, his response on television is so exaggerated, so calculatedly fesso [idiotic], that it actually enhances his image as furbo.3 The quality of furbizia is highly appreciated in Bernalda, even it if is criticized in many instances: as a form of cleverness, it can take on sinister nuances of “slyness” or “wiliness.” By suggesting that the Southerners are more furbi than the Northerners, Roberto and Tommaso are also tapping into common discourses about Southern capability, like those described above. Di Pietro’s own biography is congruent with the recognition that many Milanese luminaries are of Southern origin, especially in the wake of the emigrations to the North that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Again, numerous interlocutors claimed that this emergence of Southern talent is related to the Southerners’ capacity for struggle, for arrangiarsi. On the other hand, the art of arrangiarsi is classically associated with the poor of Naples (cf. Belmonte 1979), and analogously, Tangentopoli featured its own split between an affluent North and an indigent South. Roberto juxtaposes what he views as relatively petty thievery in the South (“four or five million”) with the “billions” stolen up North. Although the full (and anything but petty) extent of the tangenti in the South became more clearly documented in the course of the kickback investigation, at the time of the café discussion Roberto presented an interpretation of Southern “stealing” that aligned it with the perception often expressed by interlocutors that what was happening with Tangentopoli in the North was in grander style compared to the kickbacks in the South. Analogously, locals identified raccomandazione in the South as “a poor slob looking for work,” whereas in the North it assumed this more prestigious aura of big-money payoffs among big-name entrepreneurs. Even though many describe raccomandazione as a phenomenon that has “spread” to the North, then, the common-sense perception of the form it has taken there fits into stereotypic notions of Northern superiority. In a similar way, Southerners who had immigrated to the North and Northerners I had the chance to interview confirmed the presence of raccomandazione in the North, but they depicted it as “rationalized” in comparison to its Southern versions: they claimed that one could not get by through raccomandazione alone, that real qualifications are essential.

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Roberto’s discourse then creates a level of equivalency between the Northern kickback arrestees and organized crime figures by drawing the comparison between the Northerners who are “afraid” and the fierce woman cammorista. This is made possible by the slippage of genres in the South, discussed in chapter 4, in which tangente takes on the nuances of extortion and mafia. I would also like to point out the play on gender, in which the whimpering, fearful Northern men are pitted against a Southern woman who demonstrates more “balls” [palle], so to speak, and thus through a symbolic inversion renders the Northerners effeminate. The last comments made by Roberto and Antonio are related to other common-sense notions about Northerners and Southerners. That the Northern companies put bread on Italy’s table was echoed in a television documentary on the South of the same period, Sergio Zavoli’s Viaggio nel Sud, in which one discussant stated that “in the North, they steal to produce, in the South, they steal not to produce.” This contrast is rooted, again, in a perceived difference of “mentality”: the stereotype of Northerners as industrious and entrepreneurial versus “passive” Southerners interested in easy gain. As evidence for the latter, people cite the widespread Southern ideal of a civil service job, the stock character of the do-nothing Southern public office clerk, and the Southern propensity for drawing interest on bank accounts or bonds rather than creating “active” investments.

Raccomandazione, Belonging, and Identity In considering the perpetuation of certain forms of domination (chapter 5), I mentioned how Southern identity has been one element in the neutralization of antagonism to the system (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). While I have already considered some of the ideological elements of identity, here we must look at how subjectivity, along with institutions and relations, helps to ground hegemony (Hall 1986a, 1986b). In this sense, we must reiterate Fantozzi’s observation that clientelism features elements of belonging above and beyond its strictly utilitarian qualities (Fantozzi 1993). It is necessary to explore this sense of belonging on many levels: the family, friendship, the parish, political party membership, and certainly the community as a whole. In all of these cases, the element of belonging works to neutralize latent antagonisms, although it often happens that antagonism nonetheless breaks through and causes a lasting rupture. On the other hand, Southern identity transcends positions of both class and locality by deploying relations of equivalence to

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the South as a whole. Antagonism is thus neutralized on the local level as other forms of positionality are reduced to “mere” difference, while it is displaced to the North, constructed as “anti-South.”4 The anti-South construction is “negative,” not because it has negative connotations, but because it is an absence: in linguistic terms, it is the unmarked case, in which its own constructed quality is hidden. But the antagonistic potential of the South to the North is ambivalent—the construction of the nation works to neutralize it, yet it gnawingly poses the limit of the social, subverting the desire to construct the nation, which through equivalence would refer to all Italians. We should not neglect the point that as an ideology of power, raccomandazione is also empowering. For though being “Southern” may be subordinate as a positionality, and for a lower-class Southerner all the more so, there is an identification with the positive evaluation of furbizia, of being furbo rather than fesso. Schneider and Schneider (1976) write the following about Sicily, but they note that the furbo/fesso distinction is common throughout the South: Anecdotes Sicilians tell about themselves also celebrate the shrewd manipulator who can maneuver others who are more rich or powerful than he. A classic story tells of the Sicilian astronaut who demands that a space agency administrator pay him 9 million lire to fly to the moon, compared with only 3 million requested by a German astronaut. When asked to explain the amount, the Sicilian astronaut tells the administrator, ‘Three million are for me, three million for you, and three million to send the German to the moon.” (1976: 84)

Precisely the sort of rule-oriented behavior associated with the rational-universal paradigm is a prime target for being taken for fesso, as the example provided by Galt (1974) illustrates: “A fesso might sit back trusting that without personal intervention the government will eventually pay him money for crop damages.” In this way, the ideology of raccomandazione works to position Southerners as furbi, able to get the better of the fessi to whom they may be subordinate on other levels (such as Northern Europeans and other non-Southerners who are usually depicted as rule followers). There is also an element of gender inversion, because the furbo/fesso distinction is symbolically analogous to the masculinist dichotomy that places “female” as subordinate to “male”: the furbo is strong, powerful, and masculine, while the fesso is weak and cuckolded. Indeed, as Galt has pointed out, the word fesso in many Southern Italian dialects refers to the female genitalia (ibid.: 201). The gender-related implications of furbo and fesso are what give these terms their symbolic charge, powerful enough to provoke insult and injury.

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Brandes (1980: 87–91) makes a comparable observation in his analysis of cuckoldry discourse among lower-class males in an Andalusian town: a cuckold is symbolically feminized. Brandes claims overall that the Andalusian folklore genres he examines, including cuckoldry discourse, help to perpetuate power relations through the temporary inversion of dominance in the play with gender symbolism (ibid.: 207). Such ritual inversion, of course, has been the object of a great deal of attention in anthropology and social history (see, for example, Bakhtin 1968; Davis 1973; Darnton 1985; Stallybrass and White 1986). In Southern Italy, the symbolic economy of furbo and fesso is so powerful that even women sometimes adopt this perspective in order to identify themselves with the superordinate position (see Schneider and Schneider 1976: 83). The furbo/fesso distinction and the raccomandazione connected to it form part of a wider sense of Southern identity: as Barth (1969) notes, it is if the sense of belonging to the same group lets us know that we are all “playing the same game.” Having drawn a picture of the self-representation of Southern identity and the place of raccomandazione within it, I would like to address this identity in the context of other levels: local, national, and supranational. As mentioned earlier, contemporary cultural anthropology has sought to emphasize how identity on all levels is constructed. Weber’s description of ethnicity as “presumed identity” captures its created or invented quality, much in the same way that Anderson has analyzed the nation as an “imagined community,” and both ethnicity and nationality have in common processes of communalization—bringing the group together—and primordialization, in which the “naturalness” of bonds between group members is emphasized (Brow 1990). Southern identity does not exist in a void, and we must consider how it interacts with various other levels (excluding for the moment other forms of identity such as religious and gender identities): local (Bernaldese), regional (Lucanian), and national (Italian). There are related processes of communalization in each of these different forms of identity, but do we then conceive of these forms as congruent, and how would Southern Italian identity figure among them? Raccomandazione is like a drawstring running through the various segmentary levels: by tugging on it, we can pull them together more tightly. I have already hinted at how, from its central position figuring into the Bernaldese interpretation of Southern identity, the raccomandazione slides into a wider interpretation of Italian identity: “nowadays, it’s part of the Italian mentality.” Like particularism, raccomandazione and segmentary identification function through sliding group boundaries of “us” and “them.” In fact, the bounds of particularism can expand to

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identify with the entire national community. We see this in sociologist Sciolla’s succinct volume Italiani: Stereotipi di casa nostra [Italians: Stereotypes of Our Home], which describes how, on a national level and in parallel to the analysis I have elaborated here for the South, Italians as a whole have adopted the stereotype of particularism that has been attributed them by numerous observers, what Sciolla terms the “particularist syndrome”: An ever-increasing number of Italian authors of various disciplines agree with English and American scholars in attributing to a primordial weakness of civic culture or to its opposite, the familistic/particularistic syndrome, the causes of the anomalous modernization in Italy that has led to crisis these last few years. In an implicit manner, without finding any resistance, a convergence seems to have taken place today between selfand hetero-representation. (Sciolla 1997: 30)

To document how such representations have taken hold among Italians beyond the academic sphere, Sciolla cites a survey: Among many other questions, a representative sample of the Italian population is asked to express an opinion about some standardized definitions of the traits that distinguish Italians from other peoples. The vast majority chooses negative definitions like l’arte dell’arrangiarsi (79%), family interests (70%), parochialism, localism (64%)—on the positive site, there is only creativity (64%). (Ibid.: 32)

In short, Sciolla’s data and analysis draw a picture that is strikingly similar to what I have been describing for the local context of Bernalda: the importance of l’arte dell’arrangiarsi, which I have already described as the low-status relation in the family of raccomandazione; the centrality of the family; parochialism; and even creativity, precisely the quality that the Bernaldese attribute to Southern successes. As Fabietti eloquently reminds us, virtually all forms of identity are bound up in relations of power between “us” and “them” (Fabietti 1998). If, as the Bernaldese data suggest, Southerners have internalized a sense of Southern identity conditioned by the South’s subordination to the North, it is worth noting that the North/South split internal to Italy is replicated in the European arena. A newspaper headline that appeared in the wake of the tangente scandal summed it up: “European Milan, shattered dream.” The Italian new media betray a constant fear of not being up to European snuff with a stream of headlines that hammer Italians with the same litany: “Italy, second rate,” “Italy leader in EEC scams,” “Italian mail services the most expensive and slowest

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in Europe”—with one eye on the European prize, the other is looking over the national shoulder and tracking its embarrassing “Southernized” shadow. And returning to the discussion in chapter 2, the segmentary boundaries slide still further: patronage (and raccomandazione as a local category within it) is Italian, is Mediterranean, drawing together an entire category of “South” on a global level. If, as Löfgren (1989) claims, national identity has managed to subordinate the loyalties of other bases of identity, we must recognize that this is by no means absolute and that tensions remain at all levels. And doubtless, individual subjectivities within the group do not share precisely the same sense of belonging. Despite this, I have argued here that the Bernaldese construct raccomandazione as an important part of a shared Southern identity. In a way, this chapter begs the question of how (ethno-orientalist) self-constructions of Southern Italian identity developed in conjunction with the (orientalist) discourses constructing the South from outside. The answer to such a question would entail an archaeology of the discourse of the South, as initiated in Petrusewicz (1998), which in any case is beyond the horizons of the present work. In the next, concluding chapter, however, I would like to sail closer to the edge of these horizons to pursue the raccomandazione in connection to some of the broader issues of power at stake within Italy and without.

Notes 1. Of course, in a sense my own text itself replicates the North/South distinction that has preceded it, having delineated as an area of study a Southern Italian town. 2. On the same basis, predictably, I am known as l’americana, or a megghier’ do avvucuat [the lawyer’s wife]. 3. A close friend of mine who is a distant relative of M. related to me that he had the opportunity to hear M.’s own version of his arrest experience. According to this friend, M. said at a certain point in his interrogation, “Look, it’s useless for you to interrogate me. First of all, I think you are disagreeable. Second of all, I don’t know anything. And third, if I did know something, you would be the last person I’d say it to.” 4. It should be noted, however, that these positionalities are not fixed. The Northern League has since the early 1990s constructed the North as positivity along with an “anti-South” identity. This movement is manifest in its pseudo-ethnic discourse (see Rivera 1993).

Conclusion Raccomandazione and the Bourgeois-Liberal World Order

The march of bureaucracy has destroyed structures of domination which had no rational character, in the special sense of the term. Hence we may ask: What were these structures? —Max Weber, “Bureaucracy” We need to handle everything with a sense of proportion. Without being too rigid. If you’re too rigid, there’s an absolute mental closure. But it’s also wrong that everything gets based on a phone call to a politician. If this form of raccomandazione diminished a bit compared to what’s been going on for the last thirty years. . . . Not that it should disappear completely. This behavior of always turning to someone for any old thing has to diminish. —Luciano, member of Bernalda’s upper class

In the preceding chapters, I examined the phenomenon of raccomandazione in its sundry manifestations, drawing together different genres that are informed by it both ideologically and stylistically. Raccomandazione itself features a number of subgenres: the raccomandazione di simpatia [taking kindly to]; l’autoraccomandazione, including cronyism and nepotism; raccomandazioni with exchanges; religious raccomandazioni with the saints. Along with these subgenres, we must also examine raccomandazione in the related hybrid genres of mafia and tangente. Focusing on ethnographic research conducted in the town of Bernalda, I argued that raccomandazione is a site in which ideological struggle gets played out between the upper and lower classes, but it is also articulated by the hegemonic group in a manner that reinforces its position. I then sought to go beyond previous work on patronage to consider how Bernaldese cast raccomandazione in the metacultural discourses through which they construct their identity as Southerners. Part of this con-

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struction of identity relies on the contraposition of what is perceived to be a local culture of particularistic raccomandazione and the culture of rational-universalism. In this concluding chapter, I will focus directly on raccomandazione and the rational-universalistic paradigm as two distinct but interconnected discursive codes or systems. Conceiving of the two as discursive systems allows us to avoid some of the pitfalls of considering them Weberian ideal types, as they have tended to be cast in the literature: whereas ideal types are useful heuristic and analytic instruments, as we shall see, both actors and analysts sometimes attribute an excess of concreteness and monolithic character to them. The notion of the discursive system instead compels us to constantly bear in mind the ethnographic, discursive composition of such categories and how meaning gets codified within and through them. At several points in this study, I have emphasized the textedness of raccomandazione: where past research has dwelled on the instrumental aspects of patronage, I have preferred to explore raccomandazione as a way of languaging a concept of self, identity, and interpersonal relations. The various cultural genres I have discussed belong to a common discursive code or system of raccomandazione, which makes them intelligible to local actors and unifies them despite the different manifestations they present. Unlike the ideal types that have represented raccomandazione (under the heading of particularism) and rational-universalism as mutually exclusive, the concept of the discursive system allows us to see points of connection and hybridization between the two by emphasizing their constructedness. Here, I will examine how one of the most important points of connection is the form that authority assumes in each and authorizes the distinction between the two systems: central to this analysis is the ideology of hierarchy common to both, which gets played out in metaphors of gender. Through an examination of the nature of authority in the two systems, we will return to several of the issues of power that I have raised throughout this book. In her ethnography of clientelism and youth unemployment in a community in the Campania region, Signorelli notes that the interlocutors deprecate the clientelistic practices of others while naturalizing their own actions. She writes, Basically, everyone activates or at least participates in private relations (or ones that are perceived and described as such) in order to obtain effective results in the public sphere: but there is the widespread conviction that that is not well done, to the contrary. Well done as compared to what? . . . Evidently it is a matter of a principle opposed to the one that itself informs the behavior in question: it is thus a universalistic principle that takes as its evaluation criteria for access to resources not personal rela-

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tions, but the publically measurable and evaluable individual requirements: in short, it is a principle of impersonal rationality and thus of a possible equality. (Signorelli 1983: 53)

Signorelli proceeds to argue that there is an ambivalence in Southern Italian culture regarding universalistic and particularistic orientations: In Southern popular culture, the ambivalence between universalistic and particularistic orientations has a very long history. . . . Such an ambivalence has permeated all of the modes of representing social stratification that Southern popular culture has expressed. . . . Therefore within each one of these representations of social stratification, contents (knowledge and values) that are oriented in a universalistic and egalitarian way coexist with contents that are particularistic, personalistic, clientelistic (ibid.: 55).

My own interlocutor Luciano was quite frank in his assessment of the raccomandazione, expressing precisely the sort of ambivalence that Signorelli describes. Using the example of the bank, Luciano contrasted raccomandazione with universal principles like “waiting one’s turn” and “regularity”: In order not to wait on line [in the bank], some people go to the director or leave everything at the counter. It’s not fair from a moral point of view to those who are waiting in line. But I am not completely against this, because if once in the space of a year, a lifetime, I ask the director for something, I want to know that I can count on her. This is also a form of raccomandazione. . . . I notice that in my bank, there’s regularity. It’s so regular, in fact, that a lot of people complain. They’re precise. While in another bank, you know the employee who will do you a favor . . .

This “ambivalence,” which Signorelli attributes to certain forms of domination and the relations of production, is less surprising if we consider the actual commonality of what appears to be two opposite poles: the rational-universal and the particularistic, under which guise raccomandazione is generally subsumed. First, we must draw attention to the fact that the categories have been treated as Weberian “ideal types.” In effect, they are constructs that, as an analytic shorthand in social science, are meant to be clear and unambiguous. But the actual relativism of both terms often gets ignored, and thus, for example, we lose sight of how a discursive code or system like raccomandazione can hybridize with idea-typical rational-universal forms like the market and the state (as we saw with mafia and tangente, chapter 4). Mutti is correct in arguing the following:

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The history of the particularlism/universalism dichotomy is a good example of how the inappropriate use or difficult translation on an operative level of ideal-typical constructs ends up, in the long run, producing ultrasimplified representations of the reality under observation, completely incapable of capturing the ambivalence and the processual nature of social phenomena (Mutti 1996: 501).

I would go a step further beyond Mutti’s emphasis on the relativity of the two ideal types and their de facto complexity: rather than deal with particularism as an abstract ideal type, I examine the local category of raccomandazione as an ethnographic and ideological instantiation, as a language, as it re-constructs the ideological and discursive reality of rational-universalism. In fact, as different as the two appear, they actually share some similar constructions of authority. Raccomandazione and rational-universalism are respectively anchored in the political types of patrimonialism and legal domination. More precisely, though they may differ, both in Weberian terms and in the emic perspective, as “irrational, traditional” authority on the one hand and “rational, legal” authority on the other, they nonetheless share a hierarchical, masculinist discourse. Hence, people’s ambivalence, as in Luciano’s commentary, is recognition of the fact that neither term is a satisfactory alternative to the other.

How the West Was Won: From Patrimonial to Legal Domination Foucault once stated in a lecture, “I believe that the King remains the central personage in the whole legal edifice of the West” (Foucault 1980: 94). He elaborates: When it comes to the general organization of the legal system in the West, it is essentially with the King, his rights, his power and its eventual limitations, that one is dealing. . . . There are two ways in which we do so speak. Either we do so in order to show the nature of the juridical armoury that invested royal power, to reveal the monarch as the effective embodiment of sovereignty, to demonstrate that his power, for all that it was absolute, was exactly that which befitted his fundamental right. Or, by contrast, we do so in order to show the necessity of imposing limits upon this sovereign power, of submitting it to certain rules of right, within whose confines it had to be exercised in order for it to remain legitimate (ibid.: 95).

The point here is that the liberal-bourgeois democracy did not land on the West from somewhere outside the existing system but instead

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evolved out of the systems that preceded it. The king may appear nowadays to be an absent term, or—in constitutional monarchies—reduced to an almost entirely symbolic function, but as Foucault so perspicaciously observes, it is necessary to recognize the roots of the modern system in the reaction to the patrimonial authority that characterized many previous forms of domination. This is particularly evident in the context of the Italian state, where the Constitution founding the Republic goes to an inordinate amount of trouble (in what some poeticians might term a semiotic surplus) to explicitly ban male heirs of the Savoia dynasty. In any case, Bendix’s analysis concurs with that of Foucault, while also indicating economic factors in the development of liberal ideology: In Western Europe autocratic rule and mercantilist economic policies preceded the rise of nationalism which brought with it the idea of the rights of the people. This sequence suggests that the idea of a political community involving the people as citizens emerged during the eighteenth century not only in opposition to the ancient régime but also to some extent as a part of the ideology of autocratic paternalism. (Bendix 1964: 47)

In a similar vein, Weber refers to the struggle between the rule and the estates that fomented autocratic paternalism and eventually cleared the way for legal authority: The triumph of princely power and the expropriation of particular prerogatives has everywhere signified at least the possibility, and often the actual introduction, of a rational administration. (Weber 1946: 298)

Moving back a little further in time, we note that autocratic rule itself had gradually supplanted the earlier medieval pattern that featured the tension between feudal and patrimonial rule (cf. Bendix 1964: 39). Both feudal-patrimonial domination and absolutism have their basis in what Weber referred to as “traditional” authority, which was of a patriarchal character: Patriarchalism means the authority of the father, the husband, the senior of the house, the sib elder over the members of the household and sib; the rule of the master and patron over bondsmen, serfs, freed men; of the lord over the domestic servants and household officials; of the prince over the house- and court-officials, nobles of office, clients, vassals; of the patrimonial lord and sovereign prince (Landesvater) over the “subjects.” (Weber 1946: 296)

In traditional authority, norms are inviolable, regulating routines and everyday conduct: they are concomitant with the arbitrary will and

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personal favor of the ruler—“sanctified arbitrariness” and “sanctified precedent”—though in practice they are often in conflict. Like charismatic authority, traditional authority is “irrational” in the terminology of Weber, who contrasted both forms with rational-legal domination (ibid.). The absolute monarchies, in effect, extended the legitimacy of the patriarch to the level of national government. With respect to our central object of discussion, raccomandazione, we should note that Southern Italy has often been stereotypically characterized in the popular imagination as a “semi-feudal” or “neo-feudal” realm, making reference to the large estates (latifundia) and the pseudoaristocracy that dominated the society of many areas until after World War II (see Graziano 1977: 361). References to feudalism among my Bernaldese interlocutors were not lacking, and a popular indigenous theory of clientelism attributes it to a tradition of subjugation: At the root [of raccomandazione] there is a non-respect for democracy, a social immaturity. Maybe our democracy is too young. We’ve always been used to subservience.

This comment is from a member of Bernalda’s upper class. The mayor of Bernalda at the time of fieldwork (a representative of the Democratic Party of the Left) directly invokes feudalism to explain raccomandazione; moreover, he uses the concept to critique the hegemony of the Christian Democrats (DC) in the South since World War II: Since we have not fully developed a concept of citizenship, there is a recourse to privilege. Feudalism has never disappeared. . . . It’s strange that there is such a high and stable level of unemployment, yet the DC has always kept control. It’s evidence of a feudal regime.

The “feudal” analogy has also been employed in scholarly works to describe modern patronage relations. Shore, for example, examines the use of the term baroni [barons] with reference to the Italian university system (Shore 1989: 62). The actual veracity of the feudalism analogy as a description of Southern reality or history is not the point here, and historians would most likely take exception to its use. For example, many, if not most, Southern baronages were created for or purchased by the ascending agrarian bourgeoisie. Even so, the characterization of “feudalism” used in a commonsensical fashion in Bernalda aligns raccomandazione and clientelism with Weber’s ideal type of patrimonial rule rather than with that of bureaucracy. In Bendix’s re-elaboration of the Weberian framework, three elements stand out in this regard: the arbitrary decisions of the ruler; qualification for office not on a meritocratic

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basis, but on the ruler’s personal judgment or a wider patrimonial basis; the conduction of government “upon payment of a fee or as a unilateral act of grace” (Bendix 1964: 108)—these latter, in other words, a tangente or a raccomandazione. In contrast to this description of patrimonialism lies the ideal type of formal legal rationalism, which is central to the development of Western bureaucracy. Among other qualities of legal rationalism, Weber notes the following: Our modern “associations,” above all the political ones, are of the type of “legal” authority. That is, the legitimacy of the power-holder to give commands rests upon rules that are rationally established by enactment, by agreement or by imposition. The legitimation for establishing these rules rests, in turn, upon a rationally enacted or interpreted “constitution.” Orders are given in the name of the impersonal norm, rather than in the name of a personal authority; and even the giving of a command constitutes obedience toward a norm rather than an arbitrary freedom, favor or privilege (Weber 1946: 295).

Another key characteristic of legal authority is the separation of the “private sphere” from the “official sphere”; this separation in the realm of government also takes place in other “officialdoms,” Weber argues, such as the Church, and in the end it parallels the separation in capitalism of the worker from the means of production (ibid.). In the Weberian analysis, the Western nation-state effects a separation between the social structure and the formally instated authority (the state), but in fact the insulation of the bureaucratic from the social (e.g. kinship, property interests) is conditional at best.1 Returning to Mutti’s critique, however, it would seem that the ideal types have been ideologically substituted for the real thing, therefore masking such subtleties. In this manner, the tensions or ambivalences that people seem to hold regarding the two are based upon their own assimilation of the two terms as distinct ideal types. Certainly one of the most pressing problems in the liberal conception of law and society is the extension of democratic rights to a community of purportedly equal citizens while at the same time maintaining substantial inequality on economic and social registers (and hence we return to the distinction between formal and substantive rationality examined in chapter 4). But it is precisely the ideological separation of “public” and “private” that creates a justification of the coexistence of “public” equality with “private” inequality (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). And, as we saw in chapters 5 and 6, it is the critique of this very contradiction that lower-class interlocutors made, for they speak out against

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the betrayal of the promise of democratic equality that has taken place through raccomandazione. Together with the changing forms of domination, the conception of the individual subject also underwent modifications in the long shift from feudal-patrimonial to legal-rational domination. This is a complex issue that merits much greater attention, but here I would simply like to sketch a few points that bear on the discussion of raccomandazione. In the medieval period, rights were extended to groups, corporations, and estates rather than to individual citizens (Bendix 1964: 55); authority relations of a traditional character were later replaced by those of an individualistic character. The development of a bourgeois, individual subjectivity took place contemporaneously with the ascent of legal authority (Habermas 1991: 54–55). As we have seen previously, this individual form of subjectivity is a “faith in the self-sufficiency of a single consciousness” linked to the cult of European rationalism (Bakhtin 1984: 82). In contrast to this notion of “monologic” subjectivity, Bakhtin develops a notion of dialogism, anticipating some of the conceptions in poststructuralist and feminist thought in film and literary criticism of the nonessential, “unsutured” subject. Specifically in chapter 3, I examined the raccomandazione as a way of voicing the self in which there is precisely such a more dialogical construction of subjectivity, where one’s self is not considered to be a self-sufficient entity. Hence, even for mundane daily life situations, one “automatically” seeks out “someone whom he knows,” and even those who have faith in their own meritocratic qualifications hedge their bets by getting themselves recommended. One’s identity—essere qualcuno [to be someone]—depends at least as much on the social relationships through which the self is defined as it is on what is written on one’s identity card, which defines the individual citizen of the state. Relatedly, the ambivalence noted above between the raccomandazione and the rational-universal also gets played out on the level of subjectivity. For example, in the fieldwork a number of interlocutors sought to distance themselves from the ideology of raccomandazione—where dialogicity and interdependence are viewed negatively as self-insufficiency and dependence tout court—by counterposing a monologic-type subjectivity and espousing the values of meritocracy and individualism. Carmelina, for example, had the following to say about raccomandazione: It’s an ugly concept. To lose one’s freedom, bend oneself to the will of others. If one day you find work, you always have to thank someone: you never know if you made it on the basis of your own merit.

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Vittoria, daughter of a successful man, offered this comment: Fortunately I’ve never needed to “connect” myself, even if I could have done so. My father was a person who stood out, but he did not look favorably on this [the raccomandazione]. He was someone who made it on his own. I don’t want to leave home thinking that I owe something to someone.

Such expressions present the individual, monologic subjectivity as an ideal, preferable to the relational (or dialogic) quality that I found to be very present in local subjectivity, a quality that develops in the context of family and intimate friendships in the ethnographic setting. With this, I would like to draw attention to the affective dimension of personal relations in Bernalda, something quite different from the categorization of Southerners (or even Italians as a whole) as amoral familists. Understandably, many scholars have wanted to focus attention on relations of domination between “patrons” and “clients,” and as a result, those elements of an affective type have often been portrayed as some kind of smokescreen or ideological mask for exploitation (see Gilmore 1982). But where some analyses of clientelism focus primarily on the instrumental aspects of the phenomenon, the subjective features of affect and belonging need to be recuperated to complete the picture. Like Carmelina and Vittoria, other Bernaldese are aware of “monologic” criteria of subjectivity, and sometimes their assessments assume these criteria. Interestingly, a dual standard emerges in which the “help” of family and friends is not condemned by monologic criteria, but the reliance of others outside this context is judged critically as submission, mediocrity, and a threat to the integrity of the individual. In fact, as already noted, the overt forms of raccomandazione take place not among family and intimates but with those who are more distant. Moreover, the monologic quality of subjectivity is normatively bourgeois; members of the lower classes are the ones who need the most overt forms of raccomandazione, inasmuch as they generally do not have friends and family positioned in such a way to offer “help” that does not threaten the integrity of their individual subjectivity. Thus, the class distinctions traced in the preceding chapters are also replicated at the level of subjectivity: the monologic ideal is more easily achieved (if not in reality, at least in appearance) by the more privileged classes, and dialogic or relational subjectivity—as emphasized in raccomandazione—is relegated to an inferior status. Thus the raccomandazione, when it attempts to apply dialogicity to all social relations, is critiqued by the same rationalist paradigm that

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defines not only a monologic subjectivity but also the distinctions of intimate/distant, interior/exterior, private/public. Academic scholarship has emphasized the connection between subjectivity and these dichotomies, as we see in this passage from Ferrarotti on the genre of mafia: Mafia as a structure of power has not been defeated in part because the individual in this modern sense has not yet been born, at least to a full extent: an autonomous being capable of independent, personal evaluations, who needs no other protection besides that of neutral law, equal for everyone; which does not confuse public and private, and which therefore possesses a sense of the state as an open, democratic community and not as an oppressive bureaucratic dominion (Ferrarotti 1978: 287, my trans.).

Above and beyond a reiteration of Mutti’s note of caution in employing such dichotomies, it is precisely the public/private distinction and its analogies that have been subject to deconstructionist criticism, especially in the last two decades and in particular by many feminist thinkers. In this sense, the gendered quality of these distinctions merits further attention.

Authority and Gender Jones (1988) offers a deconstructionist framework of the notion of authority by considering the dominant discourse of “rational” authority. Her central argument is that this dominant discourse is a masculinist construction that excludes female/feminine elements, thereby explaining, as the article’s subtitle states, “Why Women Are Not Entitled to Speak.” An examination of her key points is quite suggestive for a comparative analysis of the construction of authority in raccomandazione and rational-universalism. Inspired by the work of Foucault and various feminist scholars, Jones states the following: It is my claim that this [dominant discourse of rational authority] is constructed on the basis of a conceptual myopia that normalizes authority as a disciplinary, commanding gaze. Such a discourse secures authority by opposing it to emotive connections or compassion. Authority orders existence through rules. Actions and actors are defined by these rules. Compassion cuts through this orderly universe with feelings that connect us to the specificity and particularity of actions and actors. Authority’s rules distance us from the person. Compassion pulls us into a face-to-face encounter with another (1988: 120–21).

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The four main characteristics Jones identifies in the dominant discourse of rational authority are (1) an overemphasis on the “rationality” of authority, restricting it to formal rules; (2) a definition of authority as a system of conflict resolution between competing private interests, rather than one of consensus building; (3) a view of adjudication that requires the “surrender of private judgment,” thereby making inherent a conflict between personal autonomy and authority; and finally, (4) a stress on obedience that institutionalizes hierarchy, in which inequality and control are untouched by compassion. Together, these characteristics “help define [authority] as a system of rules for social control within the context of social hierarchies” (ibid.: 121). In Jones’s view, these traits form a masculine model that excludes those elements that she allies with the feminine: emotion and emotional connectedness, labeled in the masculine discourse as “irrational”; the “private” sphere, as opposed to a dispassionate, male “public” sphere; female nurturance versus instrumental individuality; a stress on relationship rather than abstract rules or rights. While the overall framework Jones outlines appears valid, it seems to me that, as in some strains of feminist thought, she runs the risk of essentializing the very notions of “masculine” and “feminine.” To back up her male and female models of authority, she posits that their attributes are gender-linked and sifts in a bit of evidence from psychological studies and literature, especially from Carol Gilligan, whose work has itself been critiqued for conceiving of a monolithic or stereotypical category of “the feminine” (Butler 1992; Cornell 1992). In effect, Jones’s own discourse reproduces the gendered distinctions of the dominant, masculinist discourse, though she employs a tactic of the subaltern in reappropriating and revalorizing what is purported to be the feminine. Without going to the length of such essentialization, however, we can cull her gender analysis by recognizing what she hints at in the beginning of the piece: the “dominant discourse on authority silences those forms of expression linked metaphorically and symbolically to ‘female’ speech” (1988: 120). This is a crucial point, for the dominant discourse not only constructs gendered distinctions like public/private and rational/irrational, but it then uses them to subordinate those elements—like raccomandazione, but even Southern Italy as a geographic-discursive construction—linked metaphorically and symbolically to the feminine. Jones’s analysis helped me to clarify my own ambivalent feelings with regard to raccomandazione. On one level, I have to some extent enjoyed numerous raccomandazione anecdotes, chuckling as the rational system gets subverted, circumvented, and hoodwinked; oftentimes I have admired the deftness of many raccomandazione philosophers and artists. Even so, this pleasure has consistently borne a disagreeable underside:

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an awareness of the problems of those who are shut out of the game and the arrogant swagger of the real “bosses,” not the two-bit players. And while I have a good deal of sympathy for the elements of human connectedness and flexibility regarding rules in raccomandazione—indeed, it was often pointed out to me how raccomandazione can be used for solidarity with the weak or in defense of them—still, the recognition that it reproduces a hierarchy of power dampens my appreciation of it. If, as Jones suggests, the dominant discourse of authority is a rational one, then raccomandazione is in effect an alternative discourse of authority that penetrates the rational system, particularly in its manifestations as what is typically called clientelism. The rational discourse’s emphasis on the adherence to formal rules is subverted, but not openly denied, by the impulse in raccomandazione to get around “the system.” Private judgment is certainly not evacuated in raccomandazione, nor are actors impermeable to “emotional” ties such as friendship and kinship. To a much greater extent than the rational-universal discourse, raccomandazione serves as a means of building consensus. As discussed previously, actors in raccomandazione are also linked by a sense of belonging, a common complicity that works to reduce antagonism to this unofficial system. Indeed, the interlocutors’ recognition of the weight of raccomandazione constructs it as an alternative system, yet one intertwined with the rational-legal one, and it features the authority of a system as such. Although raccomandazione, like Jones’s female model, stresses the personalistic aspects of relationship, it is nonetheless connected to both patrimonial authority and the dominant, rational construction of authority in that it still rests fundamentally on a notion of hierarchy. This is true even in the subgenre of cronyism, where the relationship between the actors has a more decidedly horizontal countenance, but it reproduces hierarchy with respect to outsiders. Although some interlocutors defended the raccomandazione by pointing out how it might protect the weak, it deploys a top-down approach like many other forms of charity, which is something quite different from horizontal solidarity. In effect, raccomandazione in such cases alleviates the negative consequences of hierarchical difference without placing the hierarchy itself into question. The effect of raccomandazione is one of sustaining vertical relationships and social fragmentation, where it might instead have proposed its relational model of authority “as a way of cohering and sustaining connectedness” (Jones 1988: 127)—that is, recuperating the positive aspects of raccomandazione in terms of defense of the weak and solidarity. It is a hierarchy that, moreover, assumes the same male/female opposition that Jones critiques in rational hierarchy. Thus, despite bearing some of the characteristics of Jones’s female model, then, raccomandazione

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cannot offer an entirely satisfactory alternative to the rational model in which discourse associated with the feminine becomes subordinated. This male/female opposition is visible, for instance, in an important feature of raccomandazione: the furbo/fesso distinction (discussed in chapter 7), which assigns a privileged masculinity to the actor who positions himself as furbo: by feminizing the fesso, the furbo deploys gender-linked representations of power. In this manner, the ideology of raccomandazione works to position Southerners—stereotypically associated with raccomandazione—as furbi, able to get the better of the fessi (Northerners, Northern Europeans, Americans) to whom they may be subordinate on other levels. Here there is an element of gender inversion: because the furbo/fesso distinction is symbolically analogous to the masculinist dichotomy that privileges the male, a lower-status furbo may invert the hierarchy of his relation to a higher-status fesso. Unsubverted, the hierarchy may—and indeed, often does—rest on factors of class and status, but in any case it always presumes a privilege, a particularism outside “the rules,” constituting a neo-patrimonialist conception of authority. By virtue of this particularism, as it has commonly been described, raccomandazione is (like Jones’s model) subordinated to the dominant discursive code of rational authority. This subordination occurs despite the fact that, together with rational authority, raccomandazione shares an emphasis on hierarchy and a rejection of cohesiveness. Thus, raccomandazione is placed lower than rational authority in a hierarchy of discursive codes, a subordinate position that it itself legitimates by accepting the gendered hierarchy of male/female. This subordination is replicated on the international level, as we have seen with the Italian media’s morbid concern with being second rate with respect to Northern Europe and the United States (cf. chapter 7). In some cases, “rational” observers do not at all recognize raccomandazione as an alternative authority. Hence, Italy (and especially the South within it) is viewed as “anarchic,” an image that is typically projected in gendered terms in the figure of the “irrational woman.” In effect, the dominant code of rational-universalism has discursively feminized Italy (and the South) for its supposed irrationality and the promiscuous mixing of public and private spheres. This gendered construction of a feminized Italy is ceaselessly reproduced as new issues emerge: for example, in terms of the so-called new immigration of the last decade and a half, Italy has been criticized as the weak link in the European fortress, the “loose woman” with porous boundaries open to penetration by immigrant hordes (Zinn 1996). Germany, as many interlocutors put it, is more efficient and strict, but at the same time “colder.” Yet, like the Sicilian astronaut who wants to make an easy

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profit out of sending the German to the moon, the Southern Italian can hoodwink the “squares” and console himself with a masculine image as a furbo.

Might Makes Right As I observed above, Signorelli states that the phenomenon of clientelism is to be understood as “private relations (either perceived or described as such) in order to obtain effective results in the public sphere” (Signorelli 1983: 53). Here again, the public/private distinction and the infiltration of the private in the public seem to lie at the heart of the oppressive nature of Southern Italian clientelism, which her volume documents at length. While Signorelli does not offer an explicit alternative to clientelism, its doppelganger throughout the work is a system in which things function according to a rational-universal order, a “pure” public sphere (or, as my interlocutors would say, a system in which things functioned “normally”). This is clear from her emphasis on the ambivalence toward particularistic and rational-universal values she posits as a fundamental note of Southern Italian society, for which she finds supporting evidence in various genres of Southern folklore. From the discursive posture of a clientelism/universalism dichotomy, which we also saw in some of the Bernaldese commentaries, a logical consequence is that any alternative to clientelism must be formulated in terms of a rational order, for there appears to be no other means of transcending this paradigm. Taken to its extreme, this rational-legal paradigm can produce such absurdities as the cases of children arrested in U.S. schools for violating school codes with such heinous crimes as kissing fellow students or throwing stuffed animals, where school administrators and law enforcement abdicate moral judgment and contextualization in deference to “the rules” (see Mantovani 1998). Or else, it is worth recalling, the rational-legal paradigm can produce monstrosities perpetrated by those who, like Adolf Eichmann, were “just obeying orders.” It is important to note that the notion of a hyper-rational order (in the sense of formal rationality) bears the risk of a poor translation in political terms as an exasperation of the right. For example, we find such a discourse of “order” among some Bernaldese, and the town has in recent years been touched by a wider far-right revival throughout the Metapontine zone, with groups like Fiamma Tricolore and Forza Nuova gaining popularity and visibility. The comments of some of the elderly interlocutors feature “order” as a centerpiece:

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In Italy, the laws are phony. We don’t respect the laws. In other countries, there are strict laws. Here, no. [another interjects:] In Italy, we need the electric chair! [another:] We need to try to apply the existing laws.

Such expressions exemplify why there is a nostalgia for fascism among many people in the area. Everyone has heard (and some claim to remember) how “the trains ran on time when the Duce [Mussolini] was at the helm.” If we consider Italy as a whole, in fact, two parties that espoused “order” received tremendous impetus in the immediate years following Tangentopoli: Alleanza Nazionale (heirs to the former Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-fascist party that underwent a mainstream restyling) and the Northern League. The movements on the right might offer an alternative to the economy of furbo and fesso held out by the First Republic, but it is still a discourse articulated with metaphors of masculine-dominated hierarchy. In recent years, Northern League leader Umberto Bossi has toned down the worst excesses of his masculinist language, including his references to celodurismo2 and the vulgar rhetoric of sexual domination that he has employed with female opponents such as Margherita Boniver and Alessandra Mussolini (the latter herself, granddaughter of Benito, known to be “a ballsy woman” [una donna con le palle]). Yet Bossi and his party offer new and not-so-new hierarchies: the inferiorization of the South and Southerners, of women and immigrants from developing countries. Like the Lega, Alleanza Nazionale (AN) articulates its discourse of order through an anti-immigrant rhetoric. AN’s genealogy from Fascism through the MSI provides an ample stock of references to masculinity and women’s subordinate role (Cheles 1991), but one might also examine recent homophobic discourses of leading AN figures in this light. Leaving aside the risk of a hyper-emphasis on discourses of the right, the current alternation between center-left and center-right does not appear to have made much impact on the use and abuse of raccomandazione, whether in Bernalda or elsewhere throughout Italy. The system of raccomandazione—but only some of its aspects—came to a temporary halt with Tangentopoli: in the years following the scandal, there was a brake on public contracts, and an economic crisis unfolded as the state had its moment of reckoning with decades of bloated personnel registers, false pensions, and boondoggles. With drained coffers and the bark of judicial watchdogs, the bosses had fewer goods to offer their clientele, and the genre of tangente was thoroughly unmasked. Since the assassinations of prosecuting magistrates Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, many

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blows have been dealt to the mafia(s). By now, though, some years into the unofficial “Second Republic,” we have seen that neither new (and renewed) faces in the halls of government nor the imposition of order from above will translate spontaneously into a rejection of hierarchy and privilege on an everyday level, as they appear in raccomandazione. Thus we return to Weber’s problematic for reexamination: the conflict between the process of rationalization, in the formal sense, and substantive rationality. In the post–Cold War world, this problematic has had spectacular manifestations, and the insinuation of raccomandazione-type phenomena within capitalism around the globe has appeared nakedly: the crony capitalism of Asiatic countries, the development oligarchs and mafia in Russia and in Eastern Europe more generally. In many societies, the rapid ascent of the market economy has brought with it widespread corruption, criminality, and, at the same time, a deficit of substantive rationality with the exasperation of poverty and social inequalities. We might hypothesize that in many of these cases there might be something of the same hybridization between aspects of formal and substantive rationality that are to be found in the Southern Italian situation, as we have seen with raccomandazione and its sister genres. This is not to suggest that no such forms are present in settings that are usually held to be “rational”: indeed, in light of various recent scandals in the heart of rational Europe, we have reason to doubt that a rational ideal could ever be achieved. Thus the alternative to the negative aspects of raccomandazione cannot be a hyper-emphasis on a rational-universal paradigm. In some fashion or another, personal interconnectedness as embodied in raccomandazione is part of the human condition, whether or not it is recognized as an indigenous category like raccomandazione, and whether or not it is authorized to show its face. Truth be told, as the Italian saying asserts, stretching the logic of the segmentary group to its maximum bounds, tutto il mondo è paese [it’s the same the world over].

Notes 1. This point has been illustrated by Habermas (1991), who has traced the emergence and transformation of the concept of the “public sphere” in liberal bourgeois society (cf. also Bendix: 140–41). 2. For several years, an oft-repeated slogan of the Lega was “La Lega ce l’ha duro” [the Lega has a hard-on]. This sexual metaphor became known as celodurismo, the Lega’s self-ascribed political philosophy that implied an uncompromising, no-nonsense stance.

Epilogue What Happened When They Read What I Wrote: Mediterranean Clientelism and Corruption Revisited

In the struggle for the imposition of the legitimate vision of the social world, in which science itself is inevitably involved, agents wield a power which is proportional to their symbolic capital, that is, to the recognition they receive from a group. . . . It is the most visible agents, from the point of view of the prevailing categories of perception, who are best placed to change the vision by changing the categories of perception. But they are also, with a few exceptions, the least inclined to do so. —Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

When I began working in Southern Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, raccomandazione as “classic” form of Mediterranean patronageclientelism had to take into account the emergence of discourses on corruption, especially with the Tangentopoli kickback scandal that shook the country in 1992. Over the last two decades, in fact, the issue of corruption has become a global discourse (or “ideoscape,” to use Appadurai’s expression [1996]), and it has drawn attention to countries well beyond the range of those circumscribing the Mediterranean Sea. In the current geography of corruption, Italy is ranked 54th out of 180 on Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), with a score (50 out of 100) that places it exactly in the middle between “highly corrupt” and “very clean.” In this, it joins other countries bordering the Mediterranean, with the exceptions of France and Slovenia, as relatively corrupt in comparison to “cleaner” countries further north (Transparency International 2017). The CPI Index is only one among the key elements in a vast discourse of anticorruption that has developed over the last fifteen years (Sampson 2005, Harrison 2006). As Nuijten and Anders note (2007: 6), such elements are them-

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selves worthy of anthropological interest: “[W]e would be well advised to conceptualize them as cultural artifacts embedded in the context of global politics and contested meanings.” Following this route, some of the more recent works in the anthropology of corruption do not so much take anticorruption as an analytical point of departure as they enquire about the ethnocentric aspects of this paradigm (Nuijten and Anders 2007: 2; Gledhill 2004; Shore and Haller 2005; Torsello 2012). Anticorruption itself is part of a wider discursive universe of corruption tout court, in which anthropology has focused on the peoples and institutions we study, the media, and the various narratives that emerge from them (Gupta 1995 and 2012, Hasty 2005, De Vries 2007, Pardo 2004a; Tidey 2013). In this discussion, I want to underline how this discursive universe of corruption and anticorruption can also feature the participation of anthropologists themselves, and, unfortunately, the terms of this participation are not always established by the scholar involved. I came to understand this dynamic when my book on raccomandazione was taken on and deployed within a discourse of corruption and anticorruption in a way that was largely beyond my control, and rarely respecting what I thought to be its messages. Specifically with regard to Italy, Italo Pardo (2000a, 2000b, 2004a, 2004b, 2011; Pardo and Prato 2011) has provided some of the few ethnographic studies of corruption produced since the previous wave of literature on patronage-clientelism, with his work focusing in particular on governance, the public health sector, and elites and the judiciary in the wake of the Tangentopoli scandal. Renewing the 1980s critiques regarding earlier Mediterraneanist anthropology (Pardo and Prato 2011), Pardo has consistently argued in favor of a nuanced thinking about corruption in terms of multiple moralities, calling for a fine-grained attention to what he terms “graded corruption”: those forms of corruption that fall outside the bounds of strictly legalistic definitions or too narrow ones, such as that of the World Bank—“the abuse of public office for private gain”—usually utilized by stakeholders and many social scientists in an uncritical fashion. Thus, Pardo insists, what is officially legal may well be considered immoral or illegitimate, while what is illegal may be widespread practice and considered morally right. Moreover, he observes that an “inflated rhetoric” of corruption has its own nefarious effects on reality, and the tandem of corruption rhetoric and reality dangerously corrodes people’s trust and legitimacy in governance. Pardo’s work on corruption in Italy has much to commend it, and in many instances it does resonate with the results of my own research: by examining the ideological features of raccomandazione, I observe the same sort of conflicting moralities and contiguities with corruption that

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Pardo has described, as well as the very real effects of corruption rhetoric, especially in terms of the labor market, social inequality, and relations of power. Even so, when he asserts that ordinary people “always express their unequivocal condemnation” of disservice and corruption in public life (Pardo 2004b: 39), or that some Italians have “unequivocally punished” a certain style of government in elections (Pardo 2011: 31–32), it seems to me that we risk losing sight of the nuances that he so efficaciously depicts elsewhere: behind people’s seemingly “unequivocal” judgments, one finds a much greater ambiguity—not to mention considerable swaths of consensus—that begs explanation. As I will suggest here, multiple moralities mark the connections between both sides of the “clean”/“corrupt” dualism, producing deep ambivalences and inconsistencies that are often shared by ordinary folk and the elite, by the governed and the governing.1 Several authors (Haller and Shore 2005, Hasty 2005, Blundo 2007, Harrison 2006; Torsello 2012) have raised the empirical problem of how to conduct research on corruption in light of the fact that it is among the social categories most surrounded by secrecy and attempted cover-ups. Moreover, various ethical problems emerge, including respect for our interlocutors, protection of their privacy and safety, and the legitimacy of participating in the corruption phenomena under examination.2 Recently, anthropologists have convincingly insisted that there is a need to attend to the narrative and rhetorical dimensions of “corruption talk” (Pardo 2004a, Tidey 2013, Gupta 1995 and 2012, Torsello 2012). However, the discourses of corruption that we produce as social scientists are almost never a part of the picture. The case I present here applies a reflexive approach, “lest we forget our own role as academics in the production and dissemination of corruption narratives” (Gupta 2012: 113–14). Moreover, I would like to highlight yet another aspect of the problem: once it has entered into the public sphere, our research risks being inappropriately appropriated. This is a variation on a theme explored in Brettell’s (1993) edited volume, which asks, “What happens when they read what we write?” Following ScheperHughes (1979: v), I intend to focus reflexively on the reaction from the field as a further source of ethnographic data.3 Sharing Robertson’s (2006) view that participant observation of corruption tends to treat the phenomenon from a disembodied, mentalist perspective, I would like to explore how the uses and abuses of my book propelled my research into a previously untouched dimension, drawing me more squarely into a web of crosscutting desires between those who posited me as embodying an anticorruption stance and those who, quite to the contrary, held me to be a bearer of corruption.

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The Second Life of an Anthropology Book In 2001 I published my research in Italy as La raccomandazione: Clientelismo vecchio e nuovo (Zinn 2001). Based on long-term ethnographic work in a small Southern Italian town, the book described how clientelistic practices (whether in stronger or weaker forms, legal or illegal) are a key social idiom and cultural institution in Italy. Rather than treating this idiom as a stigmatizing characteristic of a stereotypically corrupt Southern Italian culture, however, I explored the importance of the ideological dimensions of raccomandazione, and in particular, how it becomes adopted in a self-essentializing, ethno-orientalist manner as part of Italian identity. Above and beyond the (often substantial) material stakes connected to the use of raccomandazioni, the analysis emphasized significant dimensions of social belonging and relationship. Since publication of my book, this point has been further elaborated in corruption studies in calls for the analysis of complex forms of sociocultural desire and affect (respectively, Hasty 2005: 271 and passim; Gupta 2012: 113, 138). Additionally, I demonstrated how discourses of raccomandazione reproduce hierarchies of status and power on local, national, and international levels. The book’s concluding chapter problematized the dichotomy between rational-legal and neo-patrimonial paradigms that underlies calls for “cleaning house,” in many ways anticipating some of the subsequent observations in the literature—as will be further discussed later—that corruption and “the Law” are not so neatly or diametrically opposed, and that they instead actually entail one another. Although the book was not aimed at a general public, it began to have a wholly unexpected circulation, getting woven into an intertextual discourse on raccomandazione and corruption. Suddenly I found myself dragged into a new and different field experience, in which I (and/or my book) was treated in newspaper and periodical articles, interviews, television and radio shows, and in at least two works of art. Following Brettell, then, I draw a few fragments from a diary that I kept for more than a year after the book’s publication, as well as some other texts produced as a direct consequence of my own, in order to raise some questions relative to the “imposition of my vision of the social world” (Bourdieu, in the epigraph). Just as with some of the contributions in Brettell’s volume, (Brettell 1993a, 1993b, Davis 1993, Greenberg 1993), the problem of authorial accountability in my case was above all with regard to those who did not read the book and spoke about it anyway. Indeed, there seemed to be an inverse correlation: the less the book was

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read, the more it was commented upon. Moreover, those few who actually did read the book interpreted it in their own way. One might say that the book per se was not so much discussed as it had instead become “good to think with,” like corruption itself (Shore and Haller 2005: 9). From my own point of view, the book became like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, in which each person saw what he or she most strongly desired.4 This leads me to suggest that, as some anthropologists of corruption have observed in recent years, it is worth reflecting on how desire and pleasure, on all levels, are an integral part of the universe of corruption and should be incorporated into our analyses (De Vries 2007, Hasty 2005). With an almost Bach-like insistence and cyclical rhythm, the Italian press periodically refreshes motives of raccomandazione and corruption within a dominant narrative. The narrative goes more or less like this (cf. Zinn 2001): Italy is the land of raccomandazioni and corrupt, crafty people, and within it the South is especially backward and lacking in civicness. In fact, this disease, this “cancer,” extends from the South and gradually corrupts the more virtuous areas of the country; meritocracy and good government are to be found elsewhere, in Northern Europe and North America. It should be noted that this is not simply a journalistic or literary depiction: it is a narrative in which, in part, social science scholarship has played a role (e.g. Banfield 1958 and Putnam 1993; but also historically, in works from various disciplines dating from the nineteenth century, as noted in the contributions in Schneider 1998). Upon the book’s publication, both it—which critically examined this dominant narrative—and I as an individual entered into a circulation of discourses and representations between myself, the mass media, and real persons. Two points were particularly discouraging for me in my anthropological project: first, to the detriment of my “scientific neutrality,” I was taken on—even in an absolutely contradictory fashion— within discourses on the morality of corruption; second, and even more unpleasant for me, my work was utilized to reinforce stereotypical and essentialist constructions of the Italian South.

The American “Anticorruption” Anthropologist Various articles and reviews took the book up with a positivist spirit as the latest proof of the dominant narrative, a documentation of the existence of reprehensible raccomandazioni. I found it curious that some journalists had an obsessive drive to create folkloristic portraits of Bernalda, the town in Lucania where my fieldwork began. Among the first

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distortions of my work, a journalist from the leading daily La Repubblica added the picturesque but false detail that raccomandazioni were necessary in order to obtain a spot in the local cemetery. As in the children’s game of gossip, in which a message is passed among those seated in a circle and is inevitably garbled, the raccomandazioni for burial chambers became sedimented into an apocryphal version of the book that was subsequently adopted by many other journalists. The strength of the journalists´ conviction and mutually reinforcing references was such that at one point I even wondered whether or not I had actually written something of this sort.5 The other issue that drew particular attention was my relationship to the Bernaldese community, within which certain segments did not look too kindly upon my work: not because they had actually read the book but because it constituted, for them, an embarrassing revelation of local cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 1997). As an aside, it should be noted that my own relationship to Bernalda has been further complexified by my marriage to a local man whom I met on an early research stay, and although we moved from the town several years before the book’s publication, we maintained close ties to people in that community, especially our many friends and relatives. The journalists’ desire and their satisfaction in writing about an American anthropologist studying raccomandazione is, I believe, quite worthy of reflection.6 This desire was not simply a matter of selling papers;7 instead, I think that in a certain sense I was taken on as a surrogate by many journalists, who with more than a little jouissance appropriated my work, ostensibly in order to “discover” and “uncover,” but in effect confirming what was already written in the dominant narrative. We can see this in the headline of the first article that angered the Bernaldese, despite the fact that several pieces about my book had already appeared in the press: “Is the capital of raccomandati really in Basilicata? An anthropologist from Texas. A town in the South, Bernalda. And a thesis: everything here functions with the classic string-pulling. Is it really the case? We went to find out in the field, asking the people who live there, from the mayor to the parish priest” (Zanuttini 2001: 42, orig. emph.). I had met with the journalist from Venerdì di Repubblica during her “fieldwork” in the town and spoke with her at length. As soon as she returned to Rome from this “journey of discovery,” she telephoned me before she had begun to write the article expressly to say that she had just had to “recommend” a friend in order to get him admitted to a hospital. I tried to encourage her to speak about this in her article, but the final product was a wholly facetious and folkloristic portrait of the town. Following this, a journalist from Il Giornale, a paper on the right of the political spectrum, even went so far as to assert that the right-wing,

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anti-South leader of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, would like my book, thus completely reversing the critical messages of my work (Materi 2001: 16) . Fortunately, not all of the journalists insisted on this aspect; on the contrary, many clearly understood that my aim was not to stigmatize Bernalda. At this point, however, the game moved onto a wider scale, that of Italy as compared with other nations. Due to the mere fact that I, an American scholar, spoke about raccomandazioni, some media figures automatically enlisted me among the ranks of anticorruption crusaders. The importance of my being “American” should not be underestimated: let us try to imagine for a moment the reaction to an African anthropologist who publishes a study on clientelism in Italy. On several occasions my “Americanness” was itself invoked in essentialistic terms, in contrast to an equally essentialized “Italianness,” depicted in a form of classic Lombrosian criminal anthropology, duly revitalized with references to molecular biology.8 For example, a review of the book in the periodical Diario states as follows: What is interesting about Zinn, and (consequently) her book, is the special point of view she chooses—or to which she is bound, it being all the same—in attempting to understand a phenomenon that is not written into her genetic make-up, that did not form part of her life and whose existence was unknown to her until she set foot in Italy. (Piccolo 2001: 60–61, my emph.)

And in the daily newspaper Unità: Certainly, the point of view of an Anglo-Saxon scholar is all the more discomfiting for the idea of raccomandazione that silently dwells in Italic chromosomes . . . a natural ingredient of the Latin soul. . . . Let us limit ourselves to noting that fortunately the Anglo-Saxons . . . and various other populations around the globe are genetically unsuited to having anything to do with raccomandazioni. (Pistolini 2002: 27, my emph.)

My position, naturalized as a “pure” body (and hence morality) by virtue of my nationality of origin,9 was thus interpreted along the lines of a trope of “the Americans are coming,” bringing the necessary “cure” from a country that is “more advanced,” “rational,” etc. Despite the controversy surrounding the book at the local level, many people categorized me favorably with this view. A few people in Bernalda attributed me with powers—perhaps magical—of a public prosecutor: I received phone calls from two different people who wanted to show me their “dossiers,” claiming to “have things to tell me.” I even received an anonymous letter that detailed the circumstances regarding

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alleged, illicit hiring practices at a local hospital. Several people I ran into in the street said to me, “Good job! Enough with these louts!,” and I accepted such effusions politely, without bothering to address the merits of the issues and clarify my position. On the other hand, I was sincerely moved when one of my interlocutors, an unemployed youth, embraced me on the main street, thanking me for having published the book. The interpretation that placed me on the side of anticorruption was also taken up by a local artist, Girolamo Lacertosa, a sculptor and performance artist who is well known in the area for the works he creates with his car. Girolamo is a liminal figure, a sort of local jester who has used his liminality to carry out his own form of antipolitics, and he has specialized in revealing “public secrets” (Taussig 1997). It is no exaggeration to say that he delighted in appropriating the media storm over my book to contribute to the dominant narrative in his own way, using his car as a canvas for a collage of photocopies from the newspapers. He parked his car for several weeks in the central streets of Matera, where the Materani could admire it and relish the disgrace of their rivals, the Bernaldese, with great schadenfreude.

A Corrupting Presence? If, on the part of some actors—local and non—I was taken to be the American scholar who would “clean house,” uncovering the muck, I was also—quite to the contrary—perceived by others to be a “corrupting” element. I penetrated the local intimacy, and the publication of my work provoked a certain disorder in local self-representation, as if— especially in the view of some Bernaldese—I had introduced an apple into the idyll of their town. The ambiguity that favored the “corrupting presence” interpretation began to develop even before the book was out, when I happened to pass in front of the university building in Matera. The doorman stopped me to say that there was an article about me in the paper, and he invited me in to show it to me. I saw the South Italy supplement to Corriere della Sera, with the following title in heavy block letters: “Why I Absolve the Raccomandazione.” It was a long article that announced and discussed the theme of my book, with a few excerpts from a telephone interview. Another of the doormen present started to snicker, saying that a certain person in the administration liked the article. The person in question was well known in the university setting as the object of rampant gossip accusing him of illegal and immoral behavior, although he had never been formally

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charged or convicted. A few months earlier, he had “recommended” his friend’s son for an exam with me, upon which I told him that if the boy studied he certainly wouldn’t have any problem. But after the “I absolve the raccomandazione” article was printed, he would greet me with coy, knowing little smiles whenever I encountered him at the university. It may be that this new friendliness on his part (which did not gratify me) was due to the fact that he saw me as an American accomplice—not unlike those representatives of multinationals, development agencies, and international donors who are partners in corruption in Africa (see Smith 2007: 89 ff.). On the other hand, it could also be that he had somehow accepted me as an insider. How much of an insider had I really become? One journalist from Avvenire touched precisely upon this point, asking me in an interview if I had “adapted to my environment.” I replied that I felt privileged, and in that sense I had certainly benefited from autoraccomandazioni based on my class and status, while I had also probably enjoyed some raccomandazioni di simpatia, especially when I was younger and cuter. This frank and rather playful reply was subsequently transformed in the published interview: the journalist stated I had obtained raccomandazioni “thanks to being a foreign woman,” thereby placing me in a much less innocent category, that of the foreign woman as an agent of sexual corruption (cf. Hasty 2005). Along similar lines, my husband observed the following exchange between two women at the post office, where customers often complain about the long lines and the scarcity of personnel behind the counters: “Where are they [the other workers]? She [Zinn] was right, they’re all raccomandati, loafers.” “Hah, like we really needed that American to come here, with all the problems they have there, that pig of a president they have [Clinton] with all of his scandals.”10 The fatal blow for my soul arrived when Bernaldese parish priest Don Mimì hung a fatwa against me and the journalist from Venerdì di Repubblica on the church bulletin board. If this were not enough, gossip in some quarters held that I had been “recommended” in order to have the book published and get it reviewed in the national press.11 The book thus provoked opposing interpretations, a moral polarity that reflects the same moral ambiguity that characterizes raccomandazione and corruption (Smart and Hsu 2007): the raccomandazione is a linguistic shifter in which other people’s raccomandazione is always deplorable, to be condemned, while ours is not recognized as such or is justified as a moral obligation. The problem with such dualistic interpretations is that they do not recognize the inevitability of the connections between the two (Holden and Tortora 2007: 119; Taussig 1997: 5, 18–19, 23, and passim; Tidey 2013: 191–92): as recent works have suggested, corruption is the hidden underbelly of the law (Nuijten

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and Anders 2007: 2, 11–12). Whether I was considered an anticorruption heroine or corrupting presence, the (disembodied) “scientific neutrality” that I was seeking, with which I actually attempted to affirm how the two sides are interrelated (see the conclusion to this book), was not granted to me by either perspective. The spectators/members of the jury chose their sides on the basis of their own play of desires and their own location in the segmentary system of belonging.

The Dichotomy between “State” and “Civil Society” As Gledhill notes, many anticorruption formulas propose a cure in the strengthening of “civil society” (2004: 156, passim). It is a public secret that Italian television is one of the prime national arenas for the compenetration of state and civil society, to the extent that it is possible for us to conceive of a division between the two. The public RAI radiotelevision system is widely held to be a den of raccomandati, while the “Italian anomaly” of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi—as the owner of private networks and head of a government that regulates telecommunications, especially in the public sector—was so obvious that it was no longer even perceived by the opposition, which in the course of two decades consistently squandered any and all possibility of creating a law regulating this conflict of interest. It was during the heady Berlusconi years that my book was published and I was invited to discuss it on the popular talk show Porta a Porta, hosted by Bruno Vespa on RAI 1. This is a television show that on almost every weeknight makes a spectacle of the promiscuity between the Italian state and civil society, usually placing parliamentarians and ministers side by side with showgirls and some “expert” talking heads. The show in which I appeared on the theme of raccomandazione was no exception, and among the numerous guests in Vespa’s parlor were two representatives of the state: Giulio Andreotti, ex–prime minister, lifetime senator, and living icon of raccomandazione, and ex-minister Raffaele Costa, then a member of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. It was difficult to remain indifferent to Andreotti, whose mythical powers as a recommender were heightened by his prominence in a host of conspiracy theories, and, as a hunchback, by the supernatural forces attributed to him in Italian folk belief. In point of fact, however, his comments on the book were disappointingly lame. Ex-minister Costa, true to his neoliberal position, instead spoke compellingly about the need for transparency, citing various measures the government had instituted to guarantee “clean” public hiring competitions and so forth. I discovered later that while Costa was speaking, one of his close col-

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leagues was making shameless advances to the friend who had come with me from Matera, both being seated together in the area of the audience reserved for people accompanying the show´s guests. Married, with children, this parliamentarian even offered her some raccomandazioni: “. . . And if you ever need anything when you´re in Rome . . .” Again, we can see the two sides of the same coin: transparency bears its Other, an indelible desire.

Attempts at Resistance Why should a book aimed primarily at an academic audience stir up such interest in the general public? Basically, people enjoyed the fact that an American had come to speak about the dirty national public secret. I was irritated by the hypocritical pleasure of the journalists, who rather than admit their own involvement in “the system” gave a performance of chastity, all the while laughing at the little Lucanian town from which the study had proceeded. During interviews, I impatiently began to put out signals of resistance. To a journalist from RAI Radio who asked me, “Is the raccomandazione still so important?” I committed a faux pas, rejecting the fiction of the journalist’s own disembodied neutrality by replying bluntly, “Why don’t you tell me, seeing as you work for RAI?” leaving my interlocutor momentarily astonished.12 I was initially surprised in the interviews and write-ups by the obsessive requests for comparison with “the American system,” where it was expected that I would invoke “America” as an antidote to Italy’s ills. Here, I never missed the chance to the undermine the expectation of the United States’ supposed moral superiority, citing proverbs and expressions that recognize what gets silenced within the dominant meritocratic ideology.13 I was particularly satisfied when I was able to seize the opportunity to describe then-president Bush as a perfect example of a raccomandato: the product of family connections, elite schools, and his university fraternity; crony of Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay, president of Enron, a paradigmatic case of fraud on a vast scale; his ties and those of his administration with Halliburton, the company contracted for the reconstruction of Iraq. At times this discourse was well received, but on Radio 24 (connected with the financial daily Sole 24 Ore), it simply met a moment of pregnant silence. And so perhaps the woman from the post office was right to criticize me and think of Bill Clinton: the American emperor has no clothes. The very idea of the moral superiority of certain countries is reflected in the discourses that construct some of “them” as corrupt, and some of “us” as clean (Smith 2007: 90 ff.; Aiyer 2004). The rational-universal

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paradigm asks us to strip ourselves of primordial ties (Banfield’s “amoral familism”) and reduce the person to the individual. As Bourdieu has observed for the bureaucratic sphere, however, this is merely a fiction of disinterest. Like ex-minister Costa, one talks the neoliberal talk, all the while ignoring the fact that “social libido” is never exorcised (Bourdieu 1998). To use an expression from the world of finance, the neoliberal paradigm has managed to give rise to “toxic” forms of capitalism, leading some scholars to wonder if corruption is actually part and parcel of advanced capitalism’s functioning (Schneider and Schneider 2004; Aiyer 2004; Gledhill 2007). As Aiyer writes, “This hypocrisy is not an issue that just affects US lawmakers, but is part of the wider conceptual apparatus and policy prescriptions that emerge out of Zurich or Davos.” Corruption and influence peddling is seen as cultural practice in the South, but only exceptional in the North (Aiyer 2004: 25). Following the Schneiders (2003: 303), I maintain that the siren calls of an unbridled neoliberalism risk making us lose sight of phenomena of structural injustice, thus we are left with the idea that Southern Italians, “Mediterraneans,” or Africans should simply “change their culture”— or, for the neo-Lombrosians in the Italian press, “change their DNA.” The events surrounding the reception of my book demonstrate how difficult it is, when we speak about corruption, for an anthropologist to go public with messages that do not easily fit into a neat scheme of moralisms. As Heyman and Campbell write, “Ambivalent realities are justified and mystified by ideologies of good versus bad, clean versus corrupt” (2007: 191). Places along the border—like the Mediterranean or the border Heyman and Campbell studied between the United States and Mexico—take on the role of “symbolic repositories for the dangerous and unclean. Such outer edges do the dirty work of hypocrisy and absorb its negative connotations” (ibid.: 215). If the Italian South occupies this role for the whole country, Italy itself appears dangerously “borderline” among Western democracies, where corruption is normally thought to be “incidental.” It is perhaps worth reflecting on how, amid the current European debt crisis, the Mediterranean countries of Spain, Italy and Greece continuously alternate in the role of “the sick man of Europe,” and the latter two in particular have been at the receiving end of much finger-wagging for high levels of corruption contributing to their national debt.14 Nuijten and Anders observe: Italy is something of a special case. Although it has been one of the leading economic powers in the world, in northern Europe it is still regarded as a hotbed of corruption. But because of its economic prowess it is not a prime target of the global anti-corruption coalition (2007: 3–4, n.1)

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Italy nonetheless has had its own crusaders who conduct the battle, even without the benefit of direct pressure from the international anticorruption community. Mario Monti´s neoliberal technical government, which brought a brief if sobering contrast to the bawdy legacy of Berlusconi, passed new, more stringent anticorruption legislation in October 2012. Two other longtime anticorruption crusaders were precisely two of the parties most strenuously opposing Monti, Italia dei Valori (IdV) and the Lega Nord. IdV was led by its founder, Antonio Di Pietro, a prominent magistrate in the Tangentopoli corruption scandal and a former minister. In late 2008, Di Pietro’s son Christian was implicated in raccomandazione practices within a Neapolitan corruption scandal (Sconfini.eu 2008), and in the autumn of 2011, Di Pietro had to defend himself from accusations of nepotism (that is, intrafamily raccomandazioni) for Christian´s candidacy in Molise regional elections (Il Fatto Quotidiano 2011). Until recently, by virtue of what we might call his anticorruption perception capital, Di Pietro continued to enjoy a certain following among people disenamored with other center-left parties. However, from late October 2012 on, Di Pietro’s party underwent a steep fall from grace (and in the polls), since an investigative reporting broadcast raised questions about his family’s property holdings. Right on the heels of that, a leading representative of IdV in Lazio, Vincenzo Maruccio, was arrested on the charge of misappropriating public funds for campaign financing to the tune of over €1 million. The misappropriation of public campaign funds was also at the heart of the colossal scandal that rocked the Lega Nord in the spring of 2012, a party that has traditionally billed itself as “hard and pure,” in a masculinist negation of “female” corruption.15 According to investigators, public funds for election reimbursements to the party were utilized to finance the questionable personal expenses of members of party leader Umberto Bossi’s family. Some purges within the party took place at the time; there is now a new generation of leaders, and previous questions of “amoral familism” within the party have been deflected by an aggressive political entrepreneurship of the question of migration. Finally, since it was founded in 2009, comedian Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle [Five Star Movement] has also profited from disillusionment with the traditional political parties and calls for transparency and ethics. Even this antipolitical party, however, has had to reckon with accusations of impurity. For example, an investigation is currently underway of suspected corruption involving the building of Rome’s new stadium, for which a highly placed consultant within the Five Star Movement, Luca Lanzalone, has been placed under house arrest. As the cases of IdV, the Lega, and the Cinque Stelle show, even the most dogged quests for

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transparency would seem inevitably destined to succumb to discourses of doubt (West and Sanders 2003). Returning to my book, despite the fact that the journalistic distortions continued, I more or less managed to clarify my intentions and repair my relationship with the local community in the end.16 Furthermore, not all of the press moved in the wrong direction: if a few commentators accused me (paradoxically) of re-proposing stereotypes of the South, others instead commented favorably that I went beyond commonplaces. In addition to my attempts to insist on the de-essentialization of my Americanness, I regained local sympathies by entering into the game of parochialism on the side of the Bernaldese. The decisive episode took place during the book´s presentation in the neighboring (and historically rival) town of Montescaglioso, after the controversy over the book had been going on for some months. During the discussion, the president of Basilicata Region at the time, a montese, panned the audience with a wide grin before he offered this treat to please his townsmen: “Dottoressa Zinn, there is no problem here if you want to bad-mouth the Bernaldese.” To which I replied, “Yes, Signor Presidente, I know about the historical tensions between the two towns, but you know, the Bernaldese say that they really can’t be considered the ‘capital of raccomandazione,’ inasmuch as they have never had a townsman become president of the region.” There was a split second of astonished silence before the public roared with laughter, and the president’s face turned beet red. Several more months had passed when a woman from Bari spoke of me in a letter to the director of the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, disparaging the “moralism of foreigners” and the fact that I “had decided to place bad local customs in the square and make them public.” Even so, the calm had returned to my relations with the local community.

A Key to Understanding Corruption A year and a half after the book came out, I received a phone call from a certain Donato Linzalata, who introduced himself as an artist from a small town in Basilicata region, Genzano di Lucania. Linzalata told me that he was inspired by Bruno Vespa’s Porta a porta show to create a bronze sculpture, which was to be installed on the main street of Bernalda at the end of that month. The work was a monumental key, 4 meters high and 1.8 meters wide.17 “There are also erotic overtones,” he added, “because I always place male and female elements in my work.” The artist invited me to the inauguration of the sculpture, which I did attend, and on that occasion he gave me a signed copy of one of his catalogues.

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Figure E.1. The Key Sculpture. Photo by the author.

Once again, the author of a text (this time, in the nonverbal language of sculpture) had not read my book, and it is precisely for this reason that I take the liberty of speaking of his work without a great competence in art criticism, with the risk of misrecognizing his work as much as my own has been misrecognized. I believe, however, that, oddly enough, Linzalata’s reading of my book is perhaps closer than that of many others to my own intent. Planned specifically to occupy

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a space along Corso Umberto I, in the heart of the town where I had conducted fieldwork (and where my sentimental and professional lives became irreversibly intertwined), the key sculpture visualizes the ambiguous morality of raccomandazione, a “generalized informal functioning” of the state (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006), bolstered by desire and intimately linked to social reproduction. In the catalogue that Linzalata gave me, there are photos of a number of his other sculptures, all in wood and featuring a common totemic style. Regarding his art, he speaks of the influence of “primitive Mediterranean cultures, with the figures of the great Mother, Mefite, African Venuses,” but he also mentions the reading that his wife did when she studied anthropology in the 1970s. As the artist states, “With totemism I have celebrated the union between male and female subjects; I have depicted love, the symbols of temptation and desire” (Nigro 1999). I like to think that, in the end, using an artistic language that is a European appropriation of African forms, Linzalata interpreted the same idea that I present at the book´s conclusion: that is, as the Italian saying goes, tutto il mondo è paese [people are the same the world over]. Akhil Gupta (2012: 113) has observed that narratives of corruption move in time and space, and on the level of emotion they move their readers. My own work on raccomandazione, related to the classic Mediterranean trope of patronage-clientelism, traveled in unforeseen ways through the Italian public sphere, provoking contrasting emotional reactions among its readers, but also, and especially, among its nonreaders. If, as Torsello has argued, ethnography should serve to counter media representations of corruption—which comprise, he says, “a literature . . . that is as loquacious as it is superficial” (Torsello 2009: 179)— the case I have presented here provides evidence that such an optimistic hope may not be well substantiated on the ground. It was certainly my responsibility to face the local community where the fieldwork began and to respond to journalists; even so, my attempts to get across messages based on the complexities of anthropological research met with mixed results, to say the least. Nonetheless, looking back reflexively upon this postpublication experience, I take solace in the fact that it constituted a bona fide ethnographic coda to the fieldwork proper, and by drawing my own embodied being as a social scientist directly into the picture, and by reflecting on how my own narrative became part of a wider discourse of corruption, it directed me to further nuances in understanding the ambiguities and ambivalences of corruption.

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Notes This epilogue is a reworking of an article that was first published in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22(2); it is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publishers, the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. 1. A parallel ambivalence is treated by Tidey (2013) in her ethnographic study of Indonesia. Tidey demonstrates that anticorruption “transparency” may well lead to a hyper-attention to a formal adherence to “the rules,” while actually reproducing corruption and allowing for new forms of it to arise. The effect is, paradoxically, a simultaneous strengthening and emasculation of anticorruption discourse. 2. Robertson (2006: 11) does offer a rare, candid reference to his own participation in bribery practices in the field. 3. I was first invited to reflect on these issues for the conference “Politiche delle istituzioni e pratiche pubbliche” organized by Maria Minicuci and Mariano Pavanello at the Università La Sapienza in Rome in 2009. The analysis was further developed as a contribution for the subsequent EASA MedNet Workshop in Venice in November 2011, where conveners Jutta Lauth Bacas and William Kavanagh sought reflexive contributions on fieldwork. 4. As Davis says of her experience in Terranova, Canada, “My book became a kind of mythological ‘Rorschach’” (Davis 1993: 32). 5. A recent article repeated this apocryphal version, adding the following embellishments: that new mothers use raccomandazioni with hospital nurses in order to be able to hold their newborns a few minutes longer than permitted, and that raccomandazioni can be used to obtain “a better funeral” (Francesco Piccolo in Corriere della Sera, 2 November 2012). 6. A journalist from Il Giornale described me as follows: “perfect water-diviner of string-pulling, following the vibrations of her bifurcated wand, identifying every possible source of raccomandazione. An impure water . . .” (Materi 2001: 16). This qualification is particularly interesting in light of the frequent references in the anthropological literature to analogies between corruption and witchcraft. 7. Greenberg (1993) instead points to a commercial interest in examining the sensationalist approach used by journalists to treat his book. 8. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Cesare Lombroso’s school of criminal anthropology was highly influential on an international level (Gibson 1998, D’Agostino 2002). Lombroso asserted correlations between physiognomy, biometrics (especially cranial measurements), and “innate” tendencies to deviant or criminal behavior. One of the effects of this racializing science was the stigmatization of Southern Italians as a population. 9. The journalists naturalized me in this way, roundly glossing over the fact that the Italian state has “naturalized” me as one of its own citizens. 10. The woman was referencing the scandal around former president Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, at that time fresh in the mind of global public opinion. 11. This suspicion confirms what I have noted in my book regarding the ideological aspects of raccomandazione, which is also in line with studies on the relationship between corruption and witchcraft and conspiracy theories (West and Sanders 2003). 12. As one journalist wrote in Manifesto regarding the Porta a porta television show, “To speak about raccomandazioni on an RAI channel is like talking about the noose in the home of the hanged man.”

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13. For example, sayings such as “It’s not what you know, but who you know,” and the extensive ethnosemantic range of terms regarding “clout,” “influence,” “connections,” “string-pulling,” etc. 14. Like corruption in Transparency’s CPI, the debt crisis is also all about perception: the perception of these countries’ credibility becomes quantified and reified through “spreads,” agency ratings, market reactions, and so forth: an economy that fetishizes belief itself—perception—quantifying, monetizing, and commodifying it. In a curious twist of this economy of belief, in February 2012, German chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to cancel an important debt-crisis meeting in Rome with Italian premier Mario Monti in order to deal with a corruption scandal that finally led to the resignation of German president (and Merkel ally) Christian Wulff. Despite this, the Wulff affair did not seem to make much of a dent in Germany’s perception capital as a “clean” country. 15. The Lega long promoted its secessionist claims for Northern Italy by disparaging “thieving Rome” [Roma ladrona]. 16. This follows a local narrative aesthetic of “all’s well that ends well,” or in the local expression, si finisce a tarallucci e vino [things end up smoothly over some wine and crackers]. 17. One of the Italian euphemisms for raccomandazione is the image of a key; as the expression goes, the raccomandazione is “the right key to open the door.”

Glossary

arte dell’arrangiarsi

the art of making do

autoraccomandazione

a raccomandazione that is not explicit but borne by virtue of family privilege or a high social position

bustarella

a bribe, literally a “little envelope”

Carabinieri

a branch of the Italian armed forces with many national police functions

fesso (fem. fessa)

idiot or fool, often used in contradistinction to furbo

furbizia

cleverness, cunning, slyness

furbo (fem. furba)

a sly or crafty person

latifondista

owner of a landed estate, a member of the traditional agrarian elite in Southern Italy

latifondo

latifundium, a large landed estate

lavoro nero

literally “black work,” unreported (off-the-books) labor

mazzetta

bribe

Mani Pulite

“Operation Clean Hands,” the investigation that uncovered the Tangentopoli corruption scandal in 1992

Meridione

a designation for Southern Italy (adj.: meridionale “Southern”)

Glossary

231

meridionalismo

a body of research and theories to explain the peculiarities of Southern Italy with respect to the rest of the country

Mezzogiorno

a designation for Southern Italy, literally “midday”

pizzo

payoff or bribe

posto fisso

a permanent job, especially in public employment

raccomandante

the person who offers or carries out a raccomandazione

raccomandato (fem. raccomandata)

the person who bears a raccomandazione or is its object

raccomandazione di scambio

lit. “raccomandazione of exchange,” in which something explicit is given in a short time frame in exchange for a raccomandazione

raccomandazione di simpatia

a raccomandazione bestowed on the basis of fondness or connectedness through mutual friendship, kinship, or local belonging

raccomandazione pagata

a paid or purchased raccomandazione

tangente

bribe, kickback

Tangentopoli

the corruption scandal of 1992 that brought down the reigning political party system

voto

electoral vote, but also a religious vow

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Index

Abruzzi, 67 Africa, xviii, 178, 220 agriculture, xii, 24, 27, 33, 35, 38, 135–36, 138, 156, 158, 174. See also land reform Aiyer, Ananthakrishnan, 223 Althusser, Louis, 65, 68n11, 139 amoral familism, xxin3, 3, 28, 44, 48, 68n1, 185, 223, 224 Anders, Gerhard, 212, 223 Anderson, Benedict, 178, 193 Andreotti, Giulio, 69, 120, 221 Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro, xix Ansell, Aaron, xix arte dell’arrangiarsi, 71–72, 119, 185, 190 authority, 49, 67, 91–92, 99, 103– 104, 197, 199, 200–203 and gender, 205–208 Bakhtin, Mikhail Michajlovič, 6, 62, 65, 73, 81, 83, 85, 99, 108, 168, 203 Banfield, Edward Christie, xxin3, 3, 28, 68n1, 185, 223, 224. See also amoral familism Baratta, Alessandro, 121 Barth, Fredrik, 179, 193 Basilicata (Lucania), 22–28, 30, 34, 53, 118–119, 134, 136, 156, 174, 183, 193, 222 Bendix, Reinhard, 200–203

Berlusconi, Silvio, xii, 221, 224 Bernalda general description, xi–xii, 7, 9, 10, 14, 17–18, 22–39 raccomandazione in, 7–18, 105n2, 108–19, 210 postwar social change, 133–153 reactions to the ethnography, 216–227 Bernardino, San (Saint), 23, 29, 37, 89, 91–92, 182 Bernstein, Basil, 146, 153n6 blat (Russian), xiii–xiv, xvi Blok, Anton, 123 Boissevain, Jeremy, 42, 44, 45, 51, 53, 55, 62, 90–91, 93, 138–139 Bolivia, xix bomboniere, 74–75, 105n3, 105n4 Borsellino, Paolo, 59, 210 Bossi, Umberto, 177, 184, 210, 218, 224 bossism, 44, 49, 123 Bourdieu, Pierre, 75, 77, 146, 223 Brandes, Stanley, 193 Brazil, xix, 81, 102 Brettell, Caroline, 214, 215 bribe. See under tangente bricolage. See arte dell’arrangiarsi Brković, Čarna, xvii brokers (brokerage), 39n3, 44, 50, 52, 53, 58, 123, 125, 139. See also mediators

248

bureaucracy, xx, 10, 12, 18, 30, 31, 68n5, 76, 83, 119, 124, 196, 201–202 Bush, George W., 222 Bustarella. See tangente Calabria, 24, 26, 32, 47, 94, 100, 106n13, 120, 124, 129n3 Camarda, 23, 29, 89, 91, 92 Campbell, Howard, 223 Campbell, John Kennedy, 45, 52, 58, 83 capital, social, xv, 108, 154n7 Carabinieri, 116, 140, 153n3, 189, 230 Carnevale, Corrado, 129n3 Carrier, James, 28, 75, 183 Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, 112. See also Mezzogiorno: extraordinary intervention measures Catholic Church, 11, 29, 88 Catholicism, 55, 88, 90, 94, 104, 127 Caton, Steven, 110 Christian, William, Jr., 83, 91, 94, 102 Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), 30, 31, 52, 68n7, 121, 128, 136, 150, 159, 201 citizenship, xviii–xx, 201 civicness, 68n1, 187, 216 class, socioeconomic, xv, xix, xx, 6, 20, 26, 35, 36, 42, 54, 55, 61, 63, 65, 66, 71, 83, 88, 101–2, 123, 131–154 client, 5, 42, 43, 46, 53, 54, 61, 62, 67n1, 68n2, 69, 76, 91, 96, 102, 148, 153n4, 153n5, 200, 204. See also patron-client dyad clientelism. See also patronage clientelism studies, x, xii, xiii, xv, xvi–xx, 40–41, 49, 54, 56–58, 67, 108, 213, 218 definitions of, xvii, xviii, xxin1, 2, 5, 40, 45, 209

Index

explanations of, 50–51, 54–56, 144, 164, 170–71, 180–81, 191, 201, 204, 207 forms of, xxi, 5, 12, 52, 123 and organized crime, 58, 120, 123, 125 Clinton, Bill, 220, 222, 228n10 compadrazgo. See godparenthood Coppola, Francis Ford, xii Cornelisen, Ann, 156–57 Corrigan, Philip, 178 corruption, xix, 2, 63, 68n6, 112, 114, 123, 131, 136, 211, 213, 215, 216, 220, 223, 224, 227, 229n14. See also Tangentopoli anticorruption, xvii, xv, 212–13, 214, 216, 218–21, 224, 228n1 corruption studies, x, xiii–xvi, xviii, xx, xxin1, 212–13, 214, 215, 223, 228n6, 228n11 Costa, Raffaele, 221–23 Craxi, Bettino, 130–31 cronyism, xiv, xv, xvii, xxin3, 44, 45, 47, 50, 54, 58, 70, 87, 141, 148, 196, 207 cultural intimacy, xxin4, 217 DaMatta, Roberto, 87 Davis, John, 42, 45, 48, 55, 57, 162 de Certeau, Michel, 70–72, 95, 119, 125 De Lorenzo, Francesco, 130–31 de Martino, Ernesto, xiii, 96, 100, 101, 104, 106n14 democracy, xviii, xix, 20, 125, 128, 136, 139, 142, 148, 186, 187, 199, 201 Democratic Party of the Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra, PDS), 30, 31, 111 De Spirito, Angelomichele, 98 Dino, Alessandra, 58 Di Pietro, Antonio, x, 188–90, 224 Di Pietro, Christian, 224

Index

Donato, San (Saint), 23, 89, 91, 92 Douglas, Norman, 21n7 Durkheim, Émile, 96 Eisenstadt, Schmuel Noah, 46, 49–50, 68n3 emigration, xii, 25, 37–38, 41, 116, 157, 169, 190 employment (work, jobs), 34, 36, 37, 39n1, 138, 140, 153, 156, 157, 162, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175n1, 185. See also unemployment posto fisso, 136, 138, 158–160, 167 unreported work (lavoro nero), 156, 170 enchufe (Spain), 41 Europe, xi, 2, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 50, 135, 138, 171, 174, 194–95, 200, 203, 208, 211, 223, 227 Eastern Europe, xvi, xvii, 211 Northern Europe, xii, xv, xvi, 7, 25, 38, 41, 49, 50, 56, 64, 71, 128, 136, 145, 157, 177, 185, 192, 194, 208, 216, 223 Southern Europe, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 105n3 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 178 Evolo, Natuzza, 100 extortion, 17, 79, 111, 114, 117, 119, 120, 122, 141 Fabietti, Ugo, 181, 194 Falcone, Giovanni, 59, 121, 122, 123, 126, 210 family. See kinship; amoral familism Fantozzi, Piero, 144, 153n1, 180, 191 Fascism, 26, 133, 210 feudalism, 24, 51, 201 flex groups, xvii Foley, Douglas, 146, 153n6 Forza Italia (party), 221 Foster, George M., 51, 67n1

249

Foucault, Michel, 176, 199–200, 205 friendship, 12, 14, 17, 44, 45–46, 57, 67n1, 74, 86, 88, 114, 115– 16, 119, 122, 128, 134, 137, 151, 152, 181, 191, 204, 207 Friuli, 48 furbizia, 15, 21n8, 21n9, 58, 122, 125, 188, 190, 192 furbo/fesso, 190, 192–93, 208, 210 Fustel de Coulange, Numa-Denys, 50, 68n2, 91 Galante, Giacomo, 144 Galasso, Giuseppe, 94, 99 Galt, Anthony, 12, 21n8, 42, 58, 68n5, 68n8, 115, 153n4, 153n5, 171, 192 gender, xx, 7, 38, 49, 61, 182, 184, 191–92, 193, 197, 205, 206, 208. See also under authority Giannini, Giancarlo, 72 gifts and gift-giving, xiv, 8, 16, 17, 21n10, 72–79, 81–87, 90, 92, 94, 95–96, 99, 104, 105n2, 105n4, 105n9, 114–16, 119, 122, 129n4, 133–141, 143, 146–48, 150, 153n2, 153n5, 186 Gilligan, Carol, 206 Gilmore, David D., 41, 46, 48, 54 Godbout, Jacques, 76, 86 Goddard, Victoria, 28, 53 godparenthood (compadrazgo), 44, 45, 57, 68n9. See also kinship: spiritual Gramsci, Antonio, 65, 66, 68n11, 132, 144, 178, 180, 184 grazia (divine grace), 11, 93–96 Graziano, Luigi, 58, 123, 170–71 Greece, 33, 41, 45, 105n9, 183, 223 Gregory, Christopher, 75 guanxi (Chinese), xiv–xv, xxin4 Guglielmo il Dentone (film), 82 Gupta, Akhil, xx, 227

250

Habermas, Jürgen, 211n1 Hall, Stuart, 65, 66, 139, 143 Heath, Shirley Brice, 146 Hechter, Michael, 179–180 hegemony Christian Democrat, xi, xiii, 159, 201 Gramscian, 6, 65–6, 67, 131, 139, 145, 152, 191 Henig, David, xxin6 Herzfeld, Michael, xx, 21n5, 47, 50, 60, 67, 68n10, 68n12, 71, 129n2, 176, 178, 183 Hetherington, Kregg, xv Heyman, Josiah McC., 223 hierarchy, 6, 24, 55, 63, 87, 127, 139, 140–42, 148, 165, 166, 173, 206, 207–8, 210, 211 Hilgers, Tina, xvii–xviii Holmes, Douglas, 48 Hutson, Susan, 171–72 identity, 49, 59, 66, 67, 92, 128, 170, 176, 178, 179, 182, 183, 194–5, 197, 203. See also Southern Italy: identity campanilismo (parochialism), 182 disemia, 183 ideology, 65, 91, 94, 127. See also meritocracy of hierarchy, 87, 142, 148, 165, 173, 197 of patronage-clientelism, 47, 52, 55, 76, 132 of raccomandazione, x, xx, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 38, 54, 58, 61, 64–67, 68n11, 102, 108, 122, 131, 138–43, 145, 171, 173, 176, 179, 192, 203, 208 illegality, 11, 112, 117, 119 immigrants (foreign), 30, 38, 174, 186, 210 India, xix, xxin4 inequality, xvii, xx, 43, 44–45, 148, 164, 202, 206, 214

Index

informal economy, 35 informality, xvi irrationality, 7, 100, 104, 125, 139, 144, 181, 184, 199, 201, 206, 208 Italia dei Valori (Party), 224 Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), xiii, 30, 31, 35, 136 Italy clientelism and corruption, 2, 18, 41, 58, 161, 164, 177, 189, 191, 212, 213 First Republic, x, xi, 70, 210 Northern, 25, 50, 64, 68n6, 71, 128, 145, 164, 177, 186, 191, 229 representations of, 49, 50, 129, 141, 194, 195, 208, 210, 216, 223 Second Republic, 2, 31, 211 social conditions, xi, xiii, 28, 29, 31, 38, 81, 142, 174, 180 Jakobson, Roman, 60 Japan, 49, 50 Jenkins, Richard, 171–72 Jones, Kathleen B., 205–08 Kenny, Michael, 55 kickbacks. See under tangente kinship. See also amoral familism and patronage, 14, 45, 46–47, 57, 68n12, 69, 86, 114, 119, 181 and the private sphere, 202, 207 spiritual, 46, 57 (see also godparenthood) Laclau, Ernesto, 65, 68n11, 139 landowners (latifondisti), 15, 24, 36, 66, 132, 133, 135, 136 land reform (agrarian reform, riforma fondiaria), xxin3, 24, 30, 33, 52, 129n5, 132, 136 Latin America, xiii, xvii, 43, 48, 49

Index

Ledeneva, Alena, xiii, xiv, xvi Levi, Carlo, 26, 27 Liberal Party (Partito Liberale Italiano, PLI), 130 Li Causi, Luciano, 55, 68n4 Linger, Daniel, 76, 102, 103 Löfgren, Orvar, 195 Lombroso, Cesare, 201n1, 228n8 Lombrosians, 3, 218, 223 Loy, Nanni, 71 Lucania. See Basilicata Lupo, Alessandro, 98 Madonna (Mary), 11, 29, 88, 89, 90, 93–95, 102, 106n13 mafia, 18, 19, 27, 55, 58, 59, 70, 79, 107–11, 119–28, 129n8, 187, 189, 191, 196, 198, 205, 211. See also organized crime Basilischi (Lucania), 120 Sicilian, 56, 58, 59, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129n7 Camorra (Naples), 58, 124, 188 ’ndrangheta (Calabria), 120, 129n3 Sacra Corona Unita (Apulia), 120, 127 and state, 123–126 magic, 62, 71, 72, 95–101, 104, 106n12, 218 Makovicky, Nicolette, xxin6 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 96, 98 Malta, 41, 53, 93, 138, 139 Mani Pulite (Operazione [Operation Clean Hands]), x, 2, 18, 110, 111. See also Tangentopoli market market economy, xiv, xvi, 64, 70, 72–77, 86, 108, 111, 119, 123, 125, 143, 198, 211, 229n14 labor (job) market, 9, 10, 36, 53, 79, 81, 156, 161, 173, 174, 214 Marxian theories, 65, 66, 139 Massari, Monica, 127

251

Mauss, Marcel, xiv, 1, 69, 73, 75 mediators, 44, 62, 84, 87, 94–97, 100. See also brokers Mediterranean descriptions of, 46, 47, 48, 50, 94, 105n3, 213, 223, 227 honor, 27, 44, 47, 48, 49, 67n1, 105n3, 122, 129n6 patronage-clientelism, xii, xiii, 48, 49, 195, 212, 227 meridionalismo, 3 meritocracy, xi, xiii, 1, 5, 20, 68n5, 72, 73, 78–80, 82, 102, 105n6, 110, 147, 167, 171, 173, 187– 88, 201, 203, 216, 222 Metaponto, 12, 13, 23, 26, 27, 34, 35, 120, 160 Mexico, xvii, 41, 44, 67n1, 223 Mezzogiorno (Meridione), xii, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 103, 177. See also Southern Italy extraordinary intervention measures (intervento straordinario), 30, 33, 52, 112, 135 Milan, 37, 110, 117, 160, 162, 184, 185, 187, 188–190, 194 Mi manda Picone (film), 71–72, 81, 82 Mingione, Enzo, 174 Minicuci, Maria, xxin3, 47 Monti, Mario, 224, 229n14 Mouffe, Chantal, 68n11 Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), 224 Muir, Sarah, xviii, xx Mussolini, Alessandra, 105n7, 210 Mussolini, Benito, 133, 210 Mutti, Antonio, 178–9, 198–199, 202, 205 name, semiotics of, 72, 81, 85, 86, 90, 92, 104, 105n7 Naples, 1, 23, 51, 53, 59, 71, 112, 131, 185, 190 National Alliance (party, Alleanza Nazionale), 210

252

nepotism, 16, 45, 47, 54, 58, 70, 79, 163, 196, 224 North America, xii, 5, 64, 75, 145, 216, 222 Northern League (party, Lega Nord), 50, 68n6, 177, 180, 181, 184, 195n4, 210, 218, 224 Nuijten, Monique, and Gerhard Anders, 212, 223 organized crime, 5, 32, 58, 59, 60, 63, 119–124, 132, 189, 191. See also mafia Osburg, John, xiv, xv Panetelleria, 12, 42, 115 Pardo, Italo, 213–14 particularism, 178, 193–4, 297, 299, 308 patriarchy, 7, 106n16, 200–01 patrimonialism, xxin3, 7, 51, 91, 92, 119, 127, 140, 199, 200–3, 207, 209, 215 patronage. See also clientelism development of patronage systems, xiv, 44, 47, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 63, 102, 138–9 patronage studies, xxin6, 6, 40–3, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63–64, 67, 76, 141, 153n6, 213 political, 6, 30, 44, 49–50, 52, 53, 60, 63, 66, 91, 132, 141 religious, 11, 55, 62, 83, 91, 93 “traditional,” 42, 43, 44, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 63, 66, 69–70, 83, 141, 212 patron-client dyad, 5, 57, 62, 67n1, 83, 148 personhood, xviii, xix, 5, 84, 171. See also subjectivity Petrusewicz, Marta, 21n1, 195 Pio, Padre (Saint), 11, 29, 89, 92, 93, 100, 106n13

Index

Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 41 pizzo. See extortion poetics, cultural (social), 54, 59, 60, 63, 71 of raccomandazione, 16, 62, 69– 104, 146 Poland, xvi, xvii post-Socialism (post-Communism), xiv, xvi, xvii, xxin6 power North/South relations of, 3, 6, 41, 50, 56, 64, 67, 194–95 patronage relations and, 6, 41–42, 45, 54, 56, 64, 86, 97, 102, 111–14, 139–41, 148, 153n4, 192, 207 political, 31, 41, 133, 136, 141 relations of scholars, 31, 50 public/private distinction, xx, 205–6, 208, 209 Putnam, Robert, 68n1 raccomandazione autoraccomandazione, 8, 9, 16, 21n3, 42, 62, 74, 76, 81, 85, 87, 95, 104, 137, 142, 149, 150, 196 as communication (see poetics: of raccomandazione) and exchange (raccomandazione di scambio), 16, 17–18, 19, 43, 73, 82, 94, 97, 114, 116, 118, 119, 123, 129n5, 130, 131, 136–37, 141–43, 145, 147–48, 150, 152, 153n4, 196 parental/emphatic raccomandazione, 102–03 purchased raccomandazione (raccomandazione pagata), 17, 62, 63, 77, 78, 79, 115, 145 (see also under tangente) raccomandazione di simpatia, 16–17, 18, 19, 74, 76, 86, 143, 150, 154n7, 196, 220

Index

rationality, xiii, xv, 7, 70, 71, 89, 101, 108, 109, 119, 125, 198, 206 formal and substantive rationality, 125–29, 141, 202, 209, 211 rational-universalism, xiii, 7, 19, 20, 64, 67, 73, 110, 145, 178, 179, 197, 199, 205, 208, 209 religion. See also Catholicism divine grace (grazia), 11, 93–94, 95, 96 prayer, 94, 95, 98–9 religious devotion, 5, 29, 88–95, 97–101, 106n13 saint cults, 62, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94–5, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 and secular patronage, 93, 101, 106n12 vow (voto), 11, 89, 94–5, 106n12 riforma fondiaria. See land reform Robertson, Alexander Foster, 214, 228n2 Romans, 71, 89 ancient Romans, 22, 23, 51, 68n7, 91, 102, 183 Roniger, Luis, 46, 49–50, 68n3 Royce, Anya Peterson, 179 Russia, xiii, xiv, 2, 211 saints. See under religion Santi Medici (Cosma and Damiano, Saints), 29, 89, 90, 92, 93, 106n13 Santino, Umberto, 121 Sarakatsani (people, Greece), 45, 83 Sardinia, 48, 178 Sayer, Derek, 178 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 214 Schneider, Jane and Peter, 21n8, 21n9, 51, 56, 116, 122, 124, 129n6, 192, 223 Sciolla, Loredana, 194 Shakow, Miriam, xix Shore, Cris, 48, 201

253

Sicily, 21n9, 42, 49, 56, 58, 91, 122, 124, 126, 178, 192 Siebert, Renate, 58, 129n8 Signorelli, Amalia, 55, 91, 157, 164–65, 171, 173, 197–98, 209 Silverman, Sydel, 42, 48, 53, 57, 58, 61, 64 Smart, Alan, xv Sordi, Alberto, 82 Southern Italy. See also Mezzogiorno identity, x, 3, 6, 19, 64, 67, 71, 139, 143, 144, 153, 164, 176–195, 196–7 Southern mentality, 143, 144, 163, 181, 183, 185, 186–87, 191 Southern Question, xii, xiii, 3, 41, 65, 130–32, 177 stereotypes, xii, 20n1, 27, 49, 71, 189, 225 Soviet Union (USSR), 49, 50 Spain, 33, 41, 55, 93, 102 state, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxin5, 65, 126, 189, 198, 199–200, 202, 203, 205 and civil society, xx, 51, 221 mafia and, 108, 121, 123–24, 126, 189 and patronage-clientelism, 15, 30, 51, 52, 54, 55, 64, 70, 76, 86, 108–10, 112, 119, 126, 136, 138, 143, 181, 210, 227 Southernization of the Italian state, 182, 187 subjectivity, xi, 6, 20, 62, 66, 67, 101, 143, 171–3, 191, 203–5. See also personhood tangente as bribe/kickback, 2, 18, 31–32, 84, 111, 113–14, 134–37 as genre, 5, 17, 76–79, 107–19, 125–28

254

and mafia (see extortion) morality of, 18, 87, 112, 114, 141 relationship to raccomandazione, 18, 58, 70, 109–18, 185, 202 Tangentopoli, x, xi, 1, 2, 3, 18, 30, 334, 48, 59, 110, 111, 131, 144, 151, 152, 159, 187, 188– 90, 210, 212, 213, 224. See also Mani pulite Taranto, 7, 24, 32, 34, 36, 120, 135, 153n1 Tarrow, Sidney, 31, 51, 55 Tidey, Silvia, xix, xxin4, 228n1 Transparency International, 212 Umbria, 42, 48, 53 unemployment, xii, 1, 10, 13, 15, 19, 25, 32, 121, 124, 133, 164, 169, 171, 173–4, 187, 201 youth unemployment, 1, 7, 10, 37, 59, 136, 156, 167, 169–172, 197 unions, labor/trade, 31, 52 United States (USA), xvi, xviii, 4, 5, 7, 16, 25, 38, 49, 50, 74, 75,

Index

81, 105n4, 111, 133, 157, 167, 172, 182, 208, 222, 223 Vespa, Bruno, 221, 225 Vetters, Larissa, xix, xxin5 Volosinov. Valentin Nikolaevich, 19, 65, 109, 146 Wade, Robert, 34, 132, 180 Waterbury, John, 45 Weber, Maximilian, 91, 107, 108, 124, 125–28, 146, 193, 196, 197–99. See also rationality; authority weddings, 27, 74–75, 77. See also gifts and gift-giving Wedel, Janine, xv, xvi, xvii Weingrod, Alex, 48, 52, 54, 56 Willis, Paul, 171 Wolf, Eric, 44 Yang, Mayfair, xiv, xxin4 Zavoli, Sergio, 191 Zuckerman, Alan, 48