Raccomandazione

Clientelism and Connections in Italy

Dorothy Louise Zinn

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789201987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective – as a morally ambivalent social fact – and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

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 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 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 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 “agro-towns” 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. Certainly 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 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 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 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 major...