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By Root 589 0

reminiscent of the idealized tribal structures of certain African and Middle Eastern peoples,34 is neither necessarily tied to the structure of unilineal lineage systems nor incompatible with centralized forms of government, especially when the latter are relatively weak, and it is certainly not unknown in Europe.3S One dramatic instance brought a lineage-based society into confrontation with the Italian nation-state at arguably its most ideologically unified moment: the colonial war between the Bedouin of Cyrenaica and the Fascist Italian government of Mussolini. Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist who did most to emphasize the importance of this phenomenon as a form of social organization, brilliantly demonstrated how the emergence of the Libyan nation-state was in large measure the result of a process of segmentary fusion as the warring tribes united behind a religious leader to confront the menace of the Italian invasion." The Romans' collaborative attacks on Napoleon's occupying troops represent a small-scale version of this process. More recently an Italian anthropologist, Marino Nola, has invoked the same principle, explicitly derived from Evans-Pritchard, to explain the nesting-box structure of devotional loyalties and political geographies in Naples.37

In invoking this model to analyze Roman social arrangements, I do not wish to impose a formal model on a dramatically informal idiom. Romans are not typically organized in unilineal clans, although some underworld elements certainly are and the grand families of the Renaissance and later who gave modern Rome something of its baronial structure represented that tendency.3S But a social ideology of compromise produces a remarkably similar effect: groups form and disband with sometimes alarming rapidity, around interests that from one moment to the next may be defined as held in common and then as mutually conflicting. Again there is the echo of that curious symbiosis of vice and virtue: Romans acknowledge that factionalism is both destructive and morally reprehensible, but they often openly enjoy the drama it brings to everyday interaction even as some of them decry it as incompatible with civic management.

Throughout Italy, moreover, patterns of factionalism are often based on districts or quarters, as in the famous palio of Siena; in many Italian settings they are often also expressed as "wars" between patron saints or even between images of a single saint.39 In such cases, the unity of the church and its images is refracted through the social turbulence of everyday life; the relative autonomy of individual parishes and confraternities contributes a religious authority to sometimes quite bluntly material causes.

In pre-World War II Rome this relativity of hostile relations began early in life. Children learned the principles early, throwing watermelon rinds at each other while their parents dined in the open air on the street. But when they graduated to stone-throwing, matters became more serious; one could "get hurt." And it was here that the segmentation began to emerge in earnest: "When I went out of our home I'd quarrel with my neighbor. Then together we'd fight with those of the floor below ... and then together with them with those from the house [literally, door] right opposite.... And together we'd fight with those of the next street." Eventually such fights would spread to even more inclusive levels-Lower Monti against the Celio hill, for example-until they eventually erupted between representatives of entire districts. It was not so much that children's play determined the shape of future social relations as that the play provided a context early in each resident's life for learning just how relative loyalty and solidarity could be.

In this guise, localist factionalism emerges as central to the political organization of everyday life; the idiom in which it is expressed is spatial, relative, and often tied to the notion that particular segments of the city were under a specific saint's protection or associated with a particular relic or holy image. The