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7. Tolerance of noise is strikingly selective. A woman who came out of her home at 3 a.m. to protest the loud noise emanating from a bar was beaten up by the owner, who was never prosecuted for either the attack or the public nuisance, whereas another woman whose birthday party went on until r a.m. was fined half a million lire. Such discriminations raise the unverifiable but locally plausible suspicion that the new intruders are protected politically.

8. Pardo (1996, 114-15) reports that the Neapolitan poor see banks as more bureaucratic if slightly cheaper sources of loans than the more reasonable usurers. My Roman informants rarely credited banks with the slightest accessibility, and felt that even those artisans who might have persuaded a bank manager to lend them money faced a joyless choice between the avarice of illegal moneylenders on the one side and the banks' legalized usury-for so they perceived it-on the other. Obviously some did succeed in obtaining bank loans. The overall perception of banks, however, was almost uniformly unforgiving.

9. The allusion to Africa is inspired by Ferguson 199o.

to. Others include the urbanist Enzo Scandurra, two architects engaged in the Angelo Mai project, another who has been surveying all the historic buildings of the center of Rome, and even another foreign anthropologist-a Uruguayan student (Adriana Goni Mazzitelli), an activist with the Network. I talked with at least three resident architects, one linguist, two economic historians, and an archaeologist, none of whom are regulars at the Network's meetings. Two waiters turned out to be, or to have been, students of anthropology. The lines between local and academic knowledge are truly blurred today. See also the discussion by Palumbo (2003, 11-13), who himself once lived in Monti. Cellamare (2008) offers an innovative analysis of planning and activism in Monti.

CHAPTER THREE

i. On the formal gifts that marked this arrangement, see Holmes (1989, 98). In Italy such obedience meant devout Catholics long followed the dictates of the church in casting their votes exclusively for the Christian Democrats in post-World War II elections and for thirty years after Unification did not vote at all) (Putnam 1993, 107). Obedience and "acceptance of one's station in life" (Putnam 1993, 107) reproduce the dictates of religious doctrine as class structure. As Sabetti (2000, 231-34) points out, however, this does not mean that civic institutions can never flourish where the church is strong.

2. See the interesting-if too generic-discussion of this development by Putnam (1993,107-9).

3. The tradition extends from Banfield (1958) to Putnam (1993); some foreign commentators have been significantly resistant to, or ignorant of, the trenchant critiques of such ethnocentric judgmentalism (see, e.g., Faeta 2004; Lai 2002; Minicuci 2003).

4. Campbell 1964; see also du Boulay 1974, Herzfeld 2004. See Herzfeld 1992 for an exploration of the extension of this idea to the secular realm of Greek culture. For a parallel from a Catholic culture (Portugal), see de Pina-Cabral 1986.

5. Pardo 1996, 113-19. The harsh Neapolitan judgment reported by Pardo excludes truly evil humans-especially the more merciless usurers-from any hope of redemption. Like Pardo's Neapolitan informants, however, Romans sometimes recognize in the less relentless usurers the redeeming quality of a useful social role-in Rome, bringing hope to those whom the banks have callously abandoned to their fate.

6. For a comparable account of popular refractions of doctrine in Hindu morality and manners, see Prasad 2007.

7. Lukken 1973, 167.

8. Mueller (2001) shows how medieval preachers, by using the language of credit and debt to explain theological matters and especially those pertaining to original sin, could not free their cosmology from the logic of the usury they sought to condemn.

9. "This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology" (Marx 1976,