Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily PDF
Preview Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily
STUDIES IN SOCIAL DISCONTINUITY Under the Consulting Editorship of: CHARLES TILLY EDWARD SHORTER University of Michigan University of Toronto William A. Christian, Jr. Person and God in a Spanish Valley Joel Samaha. Law and Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of Elizabethan Essex John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf. The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century John R. Gillis. Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770 - Present D. E. H. Russell. Rebellion, Revolution, and Armed Force: A Comparative Study of Fifteen Countries with Special Em phasis on Cuba and South Africa Kristian Hvidt. Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants James Lang. Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas Stanley H. Brandes. Migration, Kinship, and Community: Tra dition and Transition in a Spanish Village Daniel Chirot. Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider. Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily In preparation Michael Schwartz. Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890 Dirk Hoerder. Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily Jane Schneider City University of New York New York, New York Peter Schneider Fordham University New York, New York ACADEMIC PRESS New York San Francisco London A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers For Ben and Julia COPYRIGHT © 1976, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. Ill Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24/28 Oval Road, London NW1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Schneider, Jane. Culture and political economy in western Sicily. (Studies in social discontinuity series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Sicily-Economic conditions. 2. Sicily-Social conditions. 3. Sicily-Social life and customs. I. Schneider, Peter, Date joint author. II. Ti tle. HI. Series: Studies in social discontinuity. HC307.S5S33 1975 309.ΐ'45δ'209 76-18286 ISBN 0-12-627850-4 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For Ben and Julia COPYRIGHT © 1976, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. Ill Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24/28 Oval Road, London NW1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Schneider, Jane. Culture and political economy in western Sicily. (Studies in social discontinuity series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Sicily-Economic conditions. 2. Sicily-Social conditions. 3. Sicily-Social life and customs. I. Schneider, Peter, Date joint author. II. Ti tle. HI. Series: Studies in social discontinuity. HC307.S5S33 1975 309.ΐ'45δ'209 76-18286 ISBN 0-12-627850-4 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Preface For many centuries Sicily, particularly western Sicily, exported wheat to foreign cities and imported manufactured goods; it served as a bread basket for expanding metropolies in Italy and Spain. In the nineteenth century, however, on the great plains of the United States and elsewhere, technological change revolutionized wheat production with the result that Sicilian wheat ceased to be competi tive in foreign markets. Since 1900, in place of wheat Sicily has exported people—millions of migrants in search of work in foreign economies. The nineteenth century, 1860, also marked the unification of Italy, and Sicily's incorporation into a national state. Partly in response to the imminent presence of state institutions and partly in response to the decline of wheat, local cliques—or mafias—formed to protect the interests of those who controlled the large estates on which wheat was produced in rotation with pasturage: principally rentiers, brokers, and those who owned livestock. This book is about the relationship between the early colonial period (during which Sicily exported wheat and animal products) and IX X PREFACE a later neocolonial period (during which manpower is the principal energy loss). It traces the rise and development of mafia to these con ditions. In addition, it analyzes cultural codes which are especially salient to contemporary social organization—codes which celebrate honor, cleverness, and friendship. We seek the origins of these codes in early adaptations of the Sicilian people to externally generated political and economic forces, and suggest that similar codes may have played similar roles in other pre-nineteenth-century colonial regions. In other words, like emigration and mafia, culture is held to be the product of determinant historical processes—processes of dominance, subordination, and local reactions to dominance in relations between Sicily and more powerful populations, going back hundreds of years. The emphasis that we place on Sicily's early and continuing dependency vis à vis outsiders will be familiar to those who have already encountered Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World- System (1974). Wallerstein uses the concepts "core" and "periphery" to describe relationships between the various regions of Europe as they developed from the mid-fifteenth century. In particular, his analysis of Poland—which was also a wheat-exporting peripheral region—helped us to clarify our own understanding of western Sicily. Yet we did not have the benefit of his work until 1974, and were led to a similar "world-system" perspective by a somewhat different route, namely as a consequence of anthropological field work conducted in western Sicily from 1965 to 1967 and again during the summers of 1968 and 1971. We did not begin our field work with that perspective. Our initial intent was to examine the structures through which peasant commu nities are articulated with the nation-state. Yet we soon discovered the importance of labor migration and the ways in which it connected our field site not only to the state, but to an international labor market as well. Almost everyone we met told us of their emigrant relatives in Australia, Argentina, Venezuela, Canada, Chicago, Brooklyn, and in all the countries of western Europe. For many, ties to Brookolino were as significant as ties to Rome. We also soon discovered the importance of the past. The history of western Sicily is etched in the eroded and deforested mountains, in the architecture of the hillside towns, in the barren quality of unin habited valleys once dominated by large estates, and in the proverbs and parables of the people. Above all, it was the people who impressed upon us their poignant sense of their own place in space and time, and the forces of history which had brought them there. This was manifest in the parish priest who talked about "our late no- PREFACE XI blemen and their charitable works"; in the reminiscence of a contem porary baron who traced the vicissitudes of his family's vast holdings; and in the Communist peasant who explained at length the conse quences of such holdings for peasant land tenure. Indeed, the people themselves insisted that we put the island's predicament in a world geopolitical and historical perspective. They were truly our collabora tors and not our subjects. Acknowledgments We are grateful for the support of several institutions and many individuals. We received financial assistance from the University of Michigan Project for the Study of Social Networks in the Mediter ranean Area; the Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship Program (a grant to Jane Schneider); the City University of New York Urban Studies Program; the Fordham University Faculty Research Council (a grant to Peter Schneider); and the City University of New York Faculty Research Award Program (a grant to Jane Schneider). Eric Wolf's early encouragement, his visit to us in the field, his own work, and his criticism of ours were indispensable to the project from beginning to end. Wolf must also be counted among those teachers at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s who effec tively resisted the narrowing of intellectual horizons which accom panied the growing disciplinary specialization in social science. Pursu ing degrees outside of anthropology (Jane Schneider in political theory, Peter Schneider in social psychology), yet drawn to the research strategy of ethnography and the study of peasant society, we Xlll XIV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS were the beneficiaries of this resistance. Others who contributed breadth to our intellectual perspective were James Meisel in political science, Amos Hawley and Morris Janowitz in sociology, Daniel Katz in social psychology, and Marshall Sahlins in anthropology. People whose good advice and guidance helped prepare us for field work and for Sicily were Jeremy Boissevain, Constance Cronin, Leonard Moss, William Schorger, and Tullio Tentori. Annabella Rossi was especially kind to us on several occasions in Rome. In Sicily, first and foremost there was Pasquale Marchese, publisher, connoisseur and collector of books, and a cherished friend to many students of the island. He was an invaluable source of knowledge, introductions, good fellowship, and level-headed advice and his contribution to our work has been enormous, We are grateful to Professor Gabrielo Morello of ISIDA, and Professors Carmelo Schifani and Antonino Simetti of the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Palermo, who put the libraries and other resources of their institutions at our dis posal. We also remember with pleasure our visits with Professor Giuseppe Montalbano of the University of Palermo, and Danilo Dolci and his co-workers at the Centro Studi in Trapetto. Anton Blok of the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, was already engaged in field work in Sicily when we arrived there in 1965. We met him during our first days in Palermo (at Marchese's of course), and shortly afterward settled to do our work in a town not far from his. We were often together during the succeeding year and a half, talking about our mutual interests. It is difficult to express our gratitude and respect for his collégial friendship. Blok also read and carefully criticized an early manuscript of this book. As consulting editor for the "Studies in Social Discontinuity Series," Charles Tilly provided a detailed analysis of the manuscript which was the inspiration and guide for its final revision. Rod Aya and F. G. Bailey also read it and made many useful comments. Colleagues who read our work and contributed many suggestions were Jeremy Beckett, Ernestine Friedl, Edward Hansen, Shirley Lindenbaum, Mervyn Meggitt, Joyce Riegelhaupt, Roger Sanjek, and Sydel Sil- verman. Laura Nicolosi accompanied us to Sicily during the summer of 1971 as a research assistant. Nicola Scafidi of Palermo offered several of his excellent photographs as illustrations, including the photo that appears on the book jacket. Robert Glasse also helped reproduce photographs and taught us an effective method of notation for transcribing geneaologies. And, although we have never met them, we wish to acknowledge our debt to Denis Mack Smith for his valua ble two-volume history of Sicily (1968a; 1968b), and to E .J. Hobsbawm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV whose book, Primitive Rebels (1959), first stimulated our interest in the region. To protect the privacy of the many Sicilians who let us participate in their lives we have used pseudonyms for the towns and people of the immediate region in which we worked. We have also altered some details of the illustrative examples to make it difficult to identify the individuals involved. Everywhere in Sicily we were struck by the generosity, warmth, and hospitality of the good people who live there. Were it not for our respect for their privacy, we would thank them by name.
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