Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [50]
Rome is an ideal location for studying these issues. Its citizens' conviction (or convenient article of faith) that theirs is a "southern" culture, the long history of northern aristocrats' as well as the Vatican's involvement in the management of the city's administration and social life, and Romans' ambivalence toward their role as the citizens of a national capital together produce a "mixed" culture with its own cultural specificities. Romans would certainly agree with Putnam's emphasis on historical explanation, as when they discuss their stereotypically "un-southern" avoidance of conflict in terms of the need to adapt to a harsh and pervasive papal regime that controlled every aspect of civic life; but that explanation then becomes a back door through which complaisance with underworld activity, bribery, and extortion enter as readily as do micro-political alliances, civility of social interaction, and practical expropriation of the structures of church administration.
In that Monticiani like to imagine their neighborhood as a village (paese~, they create a specific version of southernness based on preformed images of peasant sociality. In this they reproduce with arresting accuracy what Maria Minicuci has observed for Italian anthropologists, who, she says, "presume [a fixed image of] the south and within it study the world of the peasantry," confirming the continuity of perception between intellectuals and others that anthropologists today ignore at their peril.20 In short, these Romans see themselves as part of a cultural world whose values they feel they know and understand; but within that world, they also try to identify what makes them different from other southerners. Not only does the pattern that emerges confirm Minicuci's emphasis on the internal variety of social forms in any supposedly southern society,21 but it underscores the importance of Scandurra's insight that embracing conflict, without essentializing it as "southern" or "inefficient," poses a serious conceptual challenge to dominant idioms of governance by stereotype.
Romans largely reject the ideal-typical models of civic virtue espoused by writers like Putnam. Yet they do not do so because of some persistent strain of "southern" venality, although they may claim it as an excuse; and this is a key point. It is true, as we see in the vivid portrait that Palumbo has painted of a Sicilian community,22 that claims of a southern identity can serve to justify actions that, while they are of practical benefit to the entire community, are explicitly recognized as illegal-and, indeed, rest on the assumption that following the law simply cannot work in such a society. In this vision of southern culture, the pragmatism of everyday life rejects formal legality as a surrender to bureaucrats' delaying tactics and intransigence. In an imperfect world, so the reasoning goes, both humanity's fallen condition and its warm familiarity are amplified in the tactical skills that are the enabling condition of secular life.
While many Romans do resort to such schematic self-justification over particular actions, however, they do not categorically reject the hypothetical model of a civic life based on good management and fair play. Rome was long the site of a particularly strong tradition of rotating credit associations, the institution that Putnam especially invokes to exemplify the concept of "social capital" that, as he argues, is an absolute prerequisite for effective civic life.'' On the other hand, Romans do not assume that such perfection