Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [107]
The members' social solidarity and collective amity were maintained by a series of dinners, usually in a local restaurant; one can still occasionally see such gatherings. Of one such group that I observed, entirely composed of men, the head cook at the restaurant quipped that their wives had told them not to eat and drink too much but that they were now taking care to do just that. The occasion certainly seemed both highly convivial and dramatically public. It contrasted with the memorable occasion, many years ago, when a group agreed to meet for Sunday dinner, only to discover in the morning that the restaurateur, who was also the manager of the association, had carted off all his tables, closed the restaurant, and disappeared forever with all the association's accumulated funds.20
In theory any member could leave an association at the end of the twoyear cycle. Sometimes it was too late; especially when an organizer absconded with all the cash, safe in the knowledge that no one would openly admit to having participated in such an illegal activity, the association collapsed. In general, the risk of such collapse-as well as the potential profit for all as long as the members remained honest-increased with the size of each association; widening the circle, which could only be done under strict supervision of all those who were already members, meant going beyond the immediate confines of neighborhood and kin group, and this introduced categories of relationship that were considered to be less reliable by definition. With such expansion, it became harder to control the members' covert activities; when, for example, those who borrowed single units would not necessarily realize that another had borrowed five and then re-loaned four of the five units to a third party, a practice that was prohibited by the associations' shared rules and traditions. If the miscreant was unable to recover these secondary debts-a common occurrence in the tight economy of the local community-the entire association could go under.21
Even in the light of such relatively frequent misdemeanors, people were reluctant to accept the legalistic view of these associations as speculative conspiracy: "It's not a matter of usury," as one man remarked. By the closing years of the twentieth century, however, sudden economic pressures opened the way for genuine usurers to operate on an individual basis; the older ties had already weakened beyond the point of no return; and the rotating credit system began to disappear. Having operated along the segmentary principles of local social life in general, collapsing when they exceeded the range of a group of intimates but recoalescing around emergent new groups of kin and neighbors, they were ill equipped to survive in the face of competition from a free-for-all market and within the regulatory practices of a centralized bureaucratic state. Today, the sums people need to run a business are vastly larger than the tiny financial emoluments from membership in a rotating credit association, the status of an unofficial accountant carries little weight, and even the faintest smell of illegality scares clients away. At the same time, the intensifying pressures of the new economy push the less competent into the grasping hands of freewheeling usurers. Political opportunism can also blur the distinction between the associations and straightforward usury. At one meeting a leftist district councilor denounced a club frequented by some of the more racist elements in Monti as a lair of usurers-meaning, it was clear, that it was a