Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [48]
Where we especially differ, however, is over what I read as Putnam's Weberian assumption that the efficient deployment of democratic institutions for the greatest overall benefit of the citizenry-a civic ethos that Putnam traces back to Tocqueville and others-constitutes the definitive telos of modernity. Here we are back, albeit in a much more sophisticated variant, to the kind of evolutionist thinking represented by Banfield's evocation of a "backward" society. This is the language that James Ferguson has criticized in his account of "development," but that also appears in Norbert Elias's notion of a "civilizing process"-and, as we shall see, it often conflates the civic with the civil, with disastrous consequences for our understanding of political practice in relation to prevalent but changing forms of ethos." The attempt to identify a single, persistent ethos rather than a shifting congeries of practices is one for which anthropologists must unfortunately also bear their share of responsibility; it results in a deterministic reasoning that precludes the possibility of alternative modernities and adjusts the very notion of modernity to an orientalizing discourse: "southern" is reconfigured as "backward," "rural," and, indeed, "oriental" or "African"-a perspective that conflates an impressive range of Eurocentric prejudices and solidifies as science an attitude that already has considerable respectability in everyday discourse in Italy.12 Many Italian critics would gladly accept Putnam's formulation that the north of the country follows the rulebook where the south pays more attention to the pocketbook.13 But to equate civic management with the rulebook entails the questionable proposition that those who are governed more by the pocketbook are less interested in social rules; although Putnam denies that this is a legitimate extension of his argument, it certainly appears to be a commonplace assumption in Italian public discourse.
Moreover, Putnam does appear to endorse Banfield's contention that the defense of familial interests in southern communities is at once "amoral" and "backward." Ethnographic research in the south reveals instead both an intense concern with morality and an emphasis on the value of civility as its performative face (as well as more ramified civic institutions and attitudes than Putnam acknowledges). Romans, as we shall see, express a great deal of skepticism about the efficacy and relevance of formal civic models to the moral conduct of everyday life, but their skepticism is still grounded in a desire for good governance.
The Civic and the Civil
It is vital to build some critical and analytical distance from evolutionist models that are clearly embedded in the logic of colonial and capitalist expansion. The fact that many Italians endorse such models is mainly interesting inasmuch as it shows that social-science discourse is not hermetically sealed off from its objects of analysis. Assumptions about the superior qualities of one intrusive kind of civic ethos should be resisted; the tension between ideals of the civic and the civil, respectively, is masked by the kind of semantic slippage that comes from an excessive sense of familiarity, not unlike what happens when we are careless in translating etymologically linked, cognate terms between Italian and