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By Root 538 0

need not collectively bear the brunt of all its denizens' sins. The moral economy thus follows existing principles of social relationship. The proliferation of shrines in such areas as Monti can perhaps be explained in terms of the district's relative autonomy from ecclesiastical supervision, both through its resistance to papal command in the sixteenth century and through its perpetuation of its self-image as a lowlife backwater. Wickedness, no less than good, can be refracted through such earthly distinctions-especially in Rome, where the fusion of cardinal virtues with what we might describe as cardinals' vices is a recurrent refrain.

Micro-quarter organization and ground-level social relations thus reframe and subvert the ideals of a unified as well as an eternal city. An artisan who has been particularly active in local civic affairs remarked that the ideal of civic life should be "a healthy sociability" (una socialitd sana), a social world in which he could casually encounter precisely those people, the "bad" )cattivi) in particular, with whom he otherwise preferred to avoid more intimate contact. Intellectuals similarly recognize the importance of not avoiding the conflict-laden quality )conflittualita) of many social interactions-even, perhaps, of building upon it.3 Conflict becomes a cultural "property" in its own right, an intimate facet, as the Italian anthropologist Berardino Palumbo has sagely noted, of the local community as it challenges the rigid uniformity urged by official state and municipal discourses.4 Viewed as a sign of backwardness by outsiders, and sometimes used by officials as an excuse for denying local interests a serious hearing, this roiling fractiousness actually signals a lively degree of local self-appreciation, indeed of cultural intimacy, in the face of massive and often externally imposed regulation and change.

Thus, Enzo Scandurra, an urban planner at the Monti-based department of urban planning at the University of Rome-I ("La Sapienza") who is deeply engaged in resisting the official cooptation of cultural diversity and especially of citizen participation,5 reminds us that residents' needs include "fraternal love, the desire for relationships, but also envy, jealousy."' Such ethically generous stances are not only stereotypically Roman acts of accommodation; they also, and concomitantly, acknowledge social realities and resist as inhumane the bureaucratic tendency to reduce all social experience to a legalistic and conformist separation of good from evil.

The destructive presence of envy has long been taken as especially characteristic of southern Italian society, at once a consequence and a product of an endemic inability to cooperate for the collective good. This cultural determinism has had a long history in Italy; instantiated by the charge of "amoral familism" leveled by Edward Banfield and historicized and modulated by Robert Putnam, it has also become something of an article of faith among Italian scholars, although a younger generation has begun to question it.' Putnam's treatment represents a significant departure from earlier work; rightly acknowledging the panoply of cultural factors and historical forces entailed in the emergence of civic transparency and engagement, he nonetheless incorporates, not the judgmentalism of Banfield's approach, but certainly the assumption that a lack of associational life signifies the absence more generally of all forms of cooperation among families and other groups. The somewhat schematic north-south divide that emerges from his work is also partly a result of its dependence on surveys, in which respondents evidently share the researcher's prior assumptions and embed them in "officializing" answers, reflecting positions sometimes shared by foreign scholars and local intellectuals alike.8

No anthropologist could reasonably take exception to Putnam's assertion that the moral values of local communities account for differences in the implementation of state-initiated practices of local governance. Indeed, I would go further; local practices