Modern Italy (November 2004), 9(2), 263-280 | ^ Carfax Publishing Taylor & Francis Croup The family, honour and gender in Sicily: models and new research* IDA FAZIO This article shows how the latest research into Sicily's social and economic history calls into question certain well-established interpretations of the history of the family and its structures, the paradigm of Mediterranean honour, and the theory of familism. This new appraisal also highlights the major significance of the history of women and gender identity. The history of the family and of codes of honour are often connected through the history of women and gender identity. In the context of Sicilian historiography, the themes of family and honour have generated a rich crop of recent writings in which models and paradigms have spread rapidly and been equally rapidly reappraised. The earlier and more circumscribed group of studies, with their basis in the history of law, dealt for the most part with matrimonial customs, norms of inheritance and folklore, and were focused almost exclusively on the behaviour of peasants and workers. But in the 1970s this field felt the powerful impact of Cambridge historical demography and anthropological studies of Mediterranean society—an impact that had three aspects: the need to classify into larger structural systems material which, so it seemed, had hitherto been fragmented between specific disciplines or research subjects; the wish to come to terms with more modem and innovative systems of theoretical study and methodology; and the possibility of opening up a field, barely explored previously, which promised to be very rich and productive. We now know that, precisely because of the novelty of these aspects, there was to be a close connection between acceptance and criticism of the new paradigms, and that the use and the revision of models were to be similarly related—at times coinciding with different phases in the work of individual researchers. An interesting aspect of this process has of course been the way recent historical research into family and honour has had the opportunity to engage in a meaningful discussion about the development of theoretical and paradigms and keys to their interpretation, rather than remaining on the fringes of scientific discussion or playing a merely reactive role. Now that researchers can conduct an ever-more immediate and rapid dialogue with each other across intemationai frontiers, they can make wide-ranging and valuable comparisons using such techniques as quantitative analysis or the reconstmction of families before or Ida Fazio, Faculty of Training Sciences, University of Palermo. E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 1353-2944 print/ISSN 1469-9877 online/04/020263-18 © 2004 Association for the Study of Modem Italy DOI: 10.1080/1353294042000304992 264 I. FAZIO after adopting the methods and theories of historical microanalysis or gender history, or the infiuence of social history, historical anthropology, economic anthropology and network analysis. In order to illustrate this perspective, I shall concentrate on three issues that have generated an extensive range of systems of analysis, historical accounts and social anthropology; these are areas, furthermore, in which studies on Sicily have had a considerable impact. The first issue relates to the existence of pattems typical of the 'Mediterranean' family and to the predominantly stmctural characteristics of such patterns in marriage and family life. The second issue concems honour as a social constmct bound up with the sexual behaviour of women. The last issue is familism: in the social sciences, this interpretation of the central role played by the southem Italian family in generating social mores which, so it is claimed, are typical of a backward society, is both deeply rooted and enduring. As will be seen in what follows, these three issues are inter-connected; but as I am about to demonstrate, a critique of them hinges above all on reconsidering female roles so as to take account of gender as 'a constituent element of social relationships, based on a deliberate differentiation between the sexes [which] is a primary factor in power relationships'.' The Mediterranean family: structure and models For a long time it has been a received tmth—historiographical or otherwise— that in peasant societies the extended patriarchal family was the preponderant form of co-residence and that, in the transition to modem times, the family has become more nuclear, links between family members have been loosened and individuals have gone their separate ways.^ T'his received wisdom is finnly based on authoritative sources: we find its roots in the 1860s, when Burckhardt (and later various historians and experts in the history of law with an interest in the Italian family in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance) placed this transition in the Renaissance era; also in the 1860s, Le Play traced the roots of the transition back to a much later period, the years of industrialization and urbanization.^ Most sociological studies of the family for the next century were predicated on this second estimate, which was later shared by Parsons as well as by Durkheim.'* We turn now to two sets of studies: those carried out by the Cambridge group on the structure of English and, later, of European families, and those by John Hajnal on different pattems of nuptiality. These were almost contemporaneous and gave further impetus in the 1960s and 1970s to the correlation between the complex patriarchal family, early marrying-off of women, absence of paid labour and economic backwardness.^ (This infiuence, it should be said, was somewhat insidious, since the research was based on sophisticated methods of historical demographic analysis such as back-projection.) The areas where this type of family and nuptiality were found were indeed backward ones, namely Eastem Europe and the 'Mediterranean' area. In the 1960s and 1970s, moreover, this 'Mediterranean area' was also portrayed from an anthropological perspective: Mediterranean Family Structures, the book put together by Peristiany, was published in 1976.^ However, the crop of studies that emerged as these new techniques of retracing the characteristics of families appeared (although the studies then THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 265 related to a family that would subsequently be defined as 'static', because researchers had not yet fully understood the changing nature of families and their life-pattems^) revealed two things: that not only (i) families in the so-called 'Mediterranean' area were not linked by any strict homogeneity of stmcture, but also (ii) that these families were for the most part nuclear—a finding that contradicted what the models purported to show. In short, the supposedly complex and patriarchal Mediterranean family was not a valid model for southem Italian families, in particular Sicilian families.^ In fact studies of Sicily—of which there have been a great many, almost all of them produced in the 1980s—have all demonstrated that a nuclear and neolocal family is preponderant.' Thus, as new theoretical models and methodological practices were brought into use in order to constmct Laslett's paradigm, that paradigm itself has been radically questioned. The presence of the nuclear family in Sicily appears to date a long way back: at least to some point between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; and this fact is deduced from various sources, including censuses, records of individuals and property, records of wheat harvests and very occasional status animarum. In Sicily as in the rest of southem Italy, if we disprove the correlation between the complex family, the mral world, the Mediterranean area and economic backwardness, then the general reliability of Laslett's model becomes problematic—as does Wdgley's reading of it, which identifies demographic transition and the infrequency of large households as the decisive elements which permit economic development and industrialization.'" If the nuclear family were the prerequisite, and not merely the consequence, of economic development, there would be no explanation for the persistence of economic backwardness in areas, such as Southem Italy and Sicily, where the nuclear family represents the dominant example of domestic stmcture. Benigno has explained the ideological slant of the Cambridge quadripartite model, particularly in relation to the possibility recalled above that economic development was triggered off in the demographic conditions found in England from the sixteenth century, well before industrialization." Such an interpretation of demographic data would in fact have reasserted the logical and historical pre-eminence of the British path to development, not only in respect of relationships and production methods but, as Wrigley seemed to recall and as McFarlane certainly indicated, in individualism and preventive checks.'^ The neo-Malthusian model drawn up by Wrigley also stressed how the age of females at marriage was a cmcial variable that could be used to identify customs relating to marriage, and hence also to families. Thus, as Richard Smith and later Robert Rowland argued, nuptiality could be seen as the regulatory element in demographic changes.'^ The culturalist emphasis of this reading implied that only by abstinence from marriage or by marrying late could demographic pressures on resources be kept at a low level; therefore behaviour that diverged from this norm could implicitly be taken as 'primitive', based on a lack of sexual self-control and, accordingly, by process of induction, commensurate with societies that were economically underdeveloped. Clearly such a line of reasoning is put in serious doubt if, in Sicily and Southem Italy, there are nuclear families and women marry at an age that is not always young and even sometimes quite advanced.''* In a later essay on 'gender mortality', Benigno used nineteenth-century Sicily 266 I. FAZIO to point to a need to establish correlations between a range of factors: male and female mortality, division of labour by gender and the way production and population distribution are organized.'^ According to Benigno, demographic variables—rates of marriage, birth and death—needed to be related to gender in order to explain the plurality of demographic and familial models. He thus placed the data relating to the female marriage rate outside the mainly cultural context into which it could have slipped and instead put it into a primarily demographic context. In a context of this sort, the rates of the different variables were made to interact, and gender-based mortality had concrete effects on remarriage: the presence or absence of this practice was not determined solely by social norms and/or cultural prohibitions. Instead, Benigno argued, it was determined by the 'effects of the different proportion of males in various age groups in a segmented marriage market such as that of the ancien regime. If there are precise limits to opportunities for marriage—that is to say, if matrimonial choice can come about only between a restricted number of possible partners—then the death of each one of them becomes a cmcial element in the demographic system, producing important consequences for age at marriage, rates of celibacy and, indirectly, fertility'.'^ When mortality differentiated by gender is examined in this way, with its repercussions on nuptiality, it leads us to consider ecological and production contexts and the relationship between these and the organization of male and female labour. Benigno's work on Sicily suggests that one should go beyond the confines of historical demography as it is strictly understood. Starting in the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s the most interesting research from various perspectives converged on this point of view. Among this research was the work of Gerard Delille on the Kingdom of Naples which identified, alongside two Southem Italian demographic models, very close correlations between systems of residence, family stmcture, modes of marriage, transmission of houses and land to men and women, work customarily carried out by males and females, and territorial mobility.'^ Worthy of note was also the work by Giovanni Levi and (again) Delille which accorded heuristic importance to the life cycle of the rural family and to its fiexibility in connection with the relationship between consumers and workers.'^ (These insights drew in tum on research by Chajanov— after it had been translated into English.'') Then there was the infiuence of Jack Goody's social and economic anthropology: in Production and Reproduction and in The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe, Goody compellingly affirmed the very close links between nuptiality, methods of agriculture, the demographic system and assignment of property (which he identified through the comparative aggregation of data from the Ethnographic Atlas).^° Last, but not least, this research agenda was carried forward in the papers from the Past and Present Conference published in 1976 under the title Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1900. Significantly, this volume was edited by an agricultural historian, Joan Thirsk, a social anthropologist. Jack Goody and by E. P. Thompson, at that time the social historian who was the most receptive to historical anthropology.^' Indeed, Thompson noted that the assignment of property was a 'grid' through which to observe mral society.^^ The strategies underpinning the assignment of property betrayed the infiuence of gender distinction first and foremost: dowries, wills and ways of managing the transmission of property between generations through males and THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 267 females seemed to have just as strong an infiuence in shaping marriage and family models as did other elements. Of all the systems for transferring property the dowry is the most manifestly gendered form. It is a juridical phenomenon, formulated as part of the corpus of Roman law, abandoned and then revived and manipulated in a thousand ways according to the interests of a variety of historical agents. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, the women historians who put the dowry in Italy at the centre of a significant debate emphasised above all that the dowry exposed a series of tensions—some of them political—inherent in society.^^ Such tensions could be perceived through the proprietary role of women within social classes and groupings and through the strategies deployed by the women themselves, together with or against their families, in a highly eloquent gendered dialogue. A number of occasions for social tension which were related in particular to the assignment of property and rights presented researchers with opportunities to revisit earlier models that had ended up by excluding the possibility of change from the picture. Two examples could be when women acquired different types of property, buildings, land or money, either in the form of a dowry, or by inheritance, or as property free of the kind of restrictions that normally came with dowries. Another instance could be the presence or absence of an exclusio propter dotem succession clause; yet another could quite simply be a woman's greater or lesser freedom to dispose of property in practice, and not only within the letter of the law. In Sicily, too, it was the position of women in the mechanisms of property transmission that highlighted the characteristics of at least three forms of family grouping, linked to three different types of economy and settlement. These forms showed wide variations in residence, gender-based division of labour and roles within the family, opportunities for marriage and family size.^"* And these three models can also be applied to different layers of society if we replace the concept of 'goods' with that of 'resources' as a way of including non-material wealth made up by family networks, relationships with relatives and forms of organizing the family economy (based on the authority of the head of the family in relation to both male and female family members, or else on casual labour by individual men and on the segregation of male and female economic roles). In essence, inheritance and dowry systems that favoured males were linked to a number of things: first, the way men managed more complex resources; second, the involvement of women (through their own work or because of their value as wives) in constructing the family economy; third, to a lower level of demographic pressure; and, fourth, to a higher age at marriage and a proportion of unmarried people. These are factors that can be seen at work both in the higher echelons of society and in the less impoverished areas of Sicily where settlement pattems were more diffuse and agriculture was based on fmit and vines.^^ On the other hand, a different pattern could be found among the lower classes of wage-earning agricultural labourers and tenants subletting very small plots—as it could in geographical areas where these figures were preponderant in the economy. In other words, in the Sicily of the cereal-growing latifondi there was a substantial equality of inheritance between male and female offspring, houses were handed down to wives through the dowry system, families were more often nuclear and in any case smaller, marriage tended to happen at a younger age, there was a smaller number of unmarried people and the distinction between economic roles was gender-based (that is, either the exclusion or the greater 268 I. FAZIO autonomy of women). When Sicily was compared to central and northem Italy, one could identify at least two pattems, within the overall variety of forms, into which family behaviour tended to cohere. These pattems are distinct from a strictly geographical typology; we should work instead according to categories of classification. What is needed is to identify broadly similar responses to qualitatively similar problems, we can define as ones based in particular types of environment (whether demographic or related to production, juridical stmctures or social relationships). The content of these problems is not necessarily identical in each case, but the similarities relate to wider conditions: the complexity or the simplicity of the agrarian economy; the restrictions on or inclusion of women in the family economy; the role played by gender in the transmission of property. We now tum to the question of the supposed coexistence of the nuclear family, in southem Italy and Sicily, with economic backwardness. The analytical approach outlined above centres on seeing elements such as demographic pressures, family stmcture, age at marriage and even the juridical norms conceming assignment of property as being dependent on the broad pattems of ways in which social agents engaged with their economic context by drawing on a range of economic and relational strategies. Taking an approach like this does not imply attributing economic backwardness to demographic perameters rather than to relations of production. Indeed Maurice Aymard in the 1970s explained both how the 'feudal' Sicilian system was functional to the intemationai market in raw materials, especially cereals, and how the very early arrival of a market in land and labour on the island was related to this economic dependency.^^ Within this system, the large landowning aristocracy appropriated a surplus by sub-letting small plots which the day-labourers hired to work on the latifundia depended on to supplement their income. And it was just such a system that shaped conditions of life for day-labourers and smallholders, in other words the two overlapping social groups that tended to be found in the same places as the nuclear family. It was a system that was subordinate to the intemationai trade supplying the economic core areas of north-western Europe. As such, it reinforced, rather than undermined, the status quo as far as economic relations of production were concemed, and thus it also ensured that the nuclear family would persist as the most adaptable, simple and fiexible unit. Quite simply, the nuclear family was best suited to coping with a situation characterized by precarious short-term labour contracts and by plots of land that were scattered far from each other across the large estates and that had to be worked by people who were both day-labourers and smallholders. But there are still unanswered questions conceming the social isolation that could be associated with the nuclear stmcture of the domestic unit—an isolation that made even the simplest economic or social strategy impossible or at least very difficult. This is an issue with important implications, which we shall examine more closely in the third part of this study insofar as it concems networks of relationships between individuals (relatives, friends, neighbours, professional associations). At this point, we shall instead recall the importance of the networks that are woven around institutions and used strategically to support the daily lives of individuals and families. Studies in this field in Sicily and indeed elsewhere in Italy have tended to concentrate more on women as the THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 269 main protagonists than on families. Focused as they are on the ideal subjects to be disciplined and punished, on objects singled out for both major and minor forms of imprisonment, studies on women in Sicily have offered numerous pointers—in addition to a well-established dialogue with the corpus of historiography on gender history and the history of women—towards understanding women's interaction with institutions. These organizations include, under the ancien regime and in particular during the Bourbon period, the charitable and penal institutions which came into being to re-create a symbolic but also marketable resource: the honour of women and families. The purpose of these policing and ecclesiastical institutions was to check and regulate sexual transgressions and prostitution: that is, to make laws and pass judgement. When women (and, through them, their families) came into contact with these institutions, they derived benefits from them: the restitution of their honour, a dowry, or simply the maintenance of orphans or other types of assistance;^^ in the case of institutions responsible for abandoned infants, or municipal supervision of wet-nursing, women obtained moratoria and subsidies in times of major family difficulties.^' But they also received penalties, patenti d'infamia (licences to practice prostitution in public), imprisonment and corporal punishment.^" Furthermore, their relations with the institutions were not set in stone; they changed over time. Women's bodies became indicators and served to demonstrate the modemization or otherwise of social control and criminal law, and even political confiict between local and national institutions.^' At the point where women became the objects of governmental intervention, access to institutions seems to have been focused on marriage and female sexual behaviour. There was therefore good reason for contemporary researchers to focus their attention on issues that dominated the interests and actions of people within the institutions at the historical moment in question. But the emphasis on the social norms that affected women and their sexual and matrimonial role, which seemed a bit strained in the context of demographic studies, needs to be examined in an appropriate analytical context. Honour and the 'vigilance of virgins' This kind of analysis puts the influence of legal norms into a new perspective by demonstrating that they provide a framework for social behaviour that is less rigid than a simple examination of the prescriptive mles might lead one to suppose. Female sexuality thus appears as a key aspect in our present capacity to understand the social flexibility of families, their capacity to interact dynamically with their environment and to constmct and negotiate diverse forms and solutions with local societies and authorities. In an essay in Social Anthropology written in 1996, Giovanna Fiume drew attention to the increase in 'quasi-families', that is to say informal family groupings and cohabiting unmarried couples, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sicily.^^ These situations were for the most part accepted by urban and mral communities within which the stable family authorized by church and state was not, therefore, the only possible arrangement to satisfy the affective, sexual and economic needs of the individual. (Indeed there were other, similar situations elsewhere under the ancien regime.f^ As late as the 1920s and 1930s, Charlotte Gower Chapman discovered in Milocca that family situations were accepted where the illegitimacy of the children was seen 270 I. FAZIO as a merely technical matter: they were children bom to the new partner of a man who had been abandoned by his wife and who was not free to marry. Gower Chapman even found that the community approved of the faimess of Dr Caliari, a well-off bachelor who made his four servant-concubines his joint sole heirs: he had not married any of them because there was too great a difference of class, but he did not wish to leave them without support in their 'widowhood' and wanted to provide them with a dowry for a possible future marriage.^'* In the 1960s, the Schneiders shrewdly underlined the fact that, while there were strict prescriptions for sexual behaviour, this degree of rigour coexisted with a fair amount of tolerance, as evinced by the acceptance of different forms of cohabitation and sexual relations between men and women. In Villamaura, 'not all cuckolds became murderers'.^^ One should accordingly refiect on the function of such an appreciable gap between rigid precepts and permissive practices, or between the forms of redressing a wrong and of mediation within a community. Indeed the honour of women, their menfolk and their families could be seen as a 'field of possibilities' within which centre and periphery, particularism and universalism, rules and exceptions, are held in tension. The anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has stated 'that honour is a false concept, a construct of the academic imperatives of anthropologists, which has little or nothing to do with the concepts, ideas and actions of Mediterranean people'.^* That assertion has been challenged by John Davis, who nevertheless regards it as a 'healthy reaction to the work of his predecessors'. Davis also gives a sense of just how pervasive and infiuential the concept of Mediterranean honour has become: it is now so widely used and yet so shapeless that it can be applied to heterogeneous forms of behaviour that are categorized very differently from different viewpoints by those involved—to the extent that many deny that 'honour' is at stake at all. It is, however, possible, through the most convincing studies making up the comerstones of the massive bibliography that has grown around this topic, to single out two main interpretations which have become established and which, from our perspective, have also proved to be useful to historians.^' The academic debate has centred on whether honour should be defined, on the one hand, as a prized possession, a mark of distinction and a confirmation of social standing or, on the other, as a concept linked to female sexual behaviour (this applies to masculine honour). And as a result of that debate, the notion of honour has come to be seen as a very versatile form of social language. Honour is a concept based in public value judgement, an assignment of value by the group a person belongs to; its character is essentially relational and refers back to social subjects within the well-identified communities that pass those judgments. In this sense the internal qualities that go to make up honour need also to be accepted in the eyes of others; they need to be publicly acknowledged, widely known ... Thus it is true that a family's loss of honour can indicate the vulnerability of its women and therefore the failure of its menfolk to stand up to public attack on these grounds. But the fact that there can be forms of reparation for damaged honour, and that loss of honour need not be irrevocable and that it can be restored, testifies to the fact that the honour of an individual is negotiated and renegotiated continuously in social praxis.^* Honour, as John Davis explained in his People of the Mediterranean, is the THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 271 capacity to carry through the role conferred on you by the community's accepted social hierarchy: whether you are a man, a woman, rich, poor, a local person or a stranger. When therefore we assume, from an historical point of view, that change and evolution are fundamental and constituent parts of the social life of a community (rejecting the static form visualized by functionalists), we can likewise state that notions of honour change over time, through social evolution and contact with different social groups and different value systems. So not only can these different ideas of honour evolve within the same cultural system, which is dynamic and not always stable; they can also evolve—and, indeed, change substantially—through contact and friction between one social environment and another: their ways of changing are themselves subject to change. There are analyses of Sicily that have clearly demonstrated as much. It is well known that Sicily has been regarded since the days of the Grand Tour as a fragment of an 'other' society close to the heart of Europe; hence it has been the object of particular analytical attention, especially from anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s. Sicily was viewed as being a backward society on a frontier between two worlds, and regarded as different and 'primitive' by observers. This status meant that it was the place where many questions were asked which later, after decolonization, would be asked by the anthropology of African countries, by sociology and network analysis—questions, that is, about social and political change in societies that came to participate, albeit with limited rights, in political communities and value systems that had hitherto excluded them. But even prior to the Second World War, 'othemess' had fully permeated what was perceived as an encounter, indeed a clash, between the Italian south and the politico-administrative culture of an Italy profoundly influenced by Piedmont at the conclusion of the Risorgimento and, later, in the 'nationalization of the masses' within the framework of the unified state.^' 'Altro che Italia!' (Some Italy!)' mns the famous quotation from a letter by Luigi Carlo Farini, a minister in the Cavour govemment and later a lieutenant in Naples after Garibaldi's famous meeting with Vittorio Emanuele II at Teano. 'This is Africa: the Bedouins are paragons of civilized behaviour compared with these caffoni [peasants, oafs]."*" Although Farini was referring to the peasants of Molise and Terra di Lavoro, his outburst is a good example of an attitude shared—even if not always expressed in these terms^by a large proportion of the goveming class who after unification came into contact with a reality they often saw as incomprehensible. Italy's mlers experienced the post-unification period in terms of a profound ethnic clash in which Sicily, whose institutional history was in many respects very different, played a prominent part. Contact between the two worlds would come to be characterized by episodes of extreme violence, long periods of negotiation and idiosyncratic social and political discussions. Anton Blok was later to encounter these aspects when he formulated a definition of mafiosi as social and political mediators and situated them within a process of state-building that had not yet achieved a monopoly of violence."' The problem of mediation comes back in a completely different context in connection with the first people to confront the gap between the culture of post-unification Italy's institutions and the systems and cultural expectations that shaped local societies. I have in mind here the middle-ranking officials, especially in the administration, police and judiciary who, in the course of their careers, encountered the social systems and values of a world that they found 272 I. FAZIO disconcerting and worrying, and so portrayed those systems for this very reason as 'other' and inferior. A cmcial component of the picture thus painted was the sexual conduct of the lower classes. The magistrates who sent responses to Abele Damiani at the time of the 1885 Inquiry portrayed mral Sicily as a nest of ignoble fomication and incest, a place where men pimped their own wives, and women were unfaithful, dirty and mendacious as well as lascivious and promiscuous. Villages in the interior, abandoned during the week by day-labourers who went to work on the large estates, became—so it seemed—centres of illicit pleasures once the menfolk had gone away.''^ In contrast to this portrayal, which makes sense as part of the 'barbarity' censured by the new mling classes, was the picture described from inside the communities in question. Yet still, as late as the 1960s, anthropologists persisted in seeing a picture in which women were segregated, rigorous codes of honour and shame were strictly observed, and women's sexual mores were obsessively supervised. Today we can decode both of these perspectives as corresponding in part to factual reality, while at the same time being constructed in the misleading language of power—whether govemmental, or more generally patriarchal. To some extent, as has been said, the officials who censured sexual anomie in Sicily merely refiected their own inexperience when faced with real-life situations that seemed chaotic. Nevertheless, these extemal observers cannot simply have invented all the sexual transgressions they mentioned in their reports. So the behaviour they noticed is evidence that the sexual reputations of women, men and families was not maintained or lost once and for all by certain acts. Rather, honour was manipulated through languages of reparation and restoration that rendered theoretically forbidden conduct acceptable within the community. Altematively, honour could be defended ('honour crimes') in a calculating and pragmatic fashion, 'as a means of allocating and distributing resources and exchanging goods in the market, starting with the marriage market'."^ We know furthermore that the surveillance and punishment of such behaviour by the judicial authority was based on a distinction between the public and the private domain, the latter being less dangerous in regard to the maintenance of social order and therefore as a place where transgressions could more easily be tolerated.'*" Private vice and public virtue: in the grey area of what was tolerated by the state and its institutions and allowed by the mles of the community, the language of honour grew up and was manipulated each time by those involved on one side or the other. But such manipulations of the language of honour were not always resolved in a traditional or one-sided fashion, through the restating of past precepts. In the same period, which saw phases when cultures were refashioned and contaminated and completely new social models were constmcted as a result, honour did not merely stand for a flexible and versatile concept to be used in negotiation and mediation: it was also postulated as the cornerstone of fresh perceptions closely correlated with new social identities. The most famous case is that identified in Sicily by Jane Schneider conceming the segregation of women and their exclusion from work outside the home."^ Schneider indicates in an unusually acute fashion the features underlying a process—an historical process—through which a condition specific to one social class (the upper middle class, or civili, who in some senses were imitating the aristocracy) is elevated to something that is universally desirable and seen as almost timeless. Schneider unmasks the THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 273 segregation of women and the 'vigilance of virgins', shut up within the walls of their homes to embroider a trousseau that is to become 'a treasure', by demonstrating why this condition had its particular attractions. Its significance was the protection of women from the threats to their physical and sexual integrity that could have menaced them if they had worked outside the home;''* and at the same time it was a source of honour for their menfolk, demonstrating that they were affiuent enough for their women to be freed from the need to work and therefore from the dangers threatening their chastity. Schneider's study of the 'invention of segregation' emphasises the close correlation between cultural paradigms, social and economic status (or, more accurately, the processes of social mobility and redefinition of one's position within the social hierarchy) and the consequent emergence of suitable forms of self-representation. Beyond familism: networks and strategies Nuclear families were preponderant in Sicily from the start of the modem age. As we have seen, this simple fact has had research implications from the perspective of demography and strategies linked to the relationships of individuals with institutions. One other feasible implication could be the implicit reconfirmation of the 'amoral familism' paradigm. This expression was coined by the American social scientist Edward Banfield in 1958 during his research in Montegrano, the fictitious name of a small community in Lucania. The phrase is intended to describe the system of social relations practised by Montegrano's inhabitants."^ According to Banfield, they were unable to establish widespread co-operation among themselves; this failure was a function of behaviour aimed at maximizing benefit for one's own restricted family circle, in the nuclear model: in short, there was positive reciprocity within the family, negative outside it. This familism was branded as 'amoral' because it lacked any public morality and because there was an absence of any community ethos or 'moral' social relationships with individuals outside the family and in the public arena. Against Banfield, numerous commentators and critics have tried to demonstrate that backwardness does not stem from the behaviour of families but from historical marginalization, class-based dependency and a backward agricultural system. Indeed all of these criticisms were used to dismantle Banfield's thesis as a scientific tool of appraisal. Nonetheless, the phrase 'amoral familism' has lingered tenaciously in attempts to explain and depict southem Italian societies, to the extent that one can trace the signs of its ahistorical influence in Putnam's model from the 1990s.''^ Paul Ginsborg himself, though he criticizes the stricter and more schematic significance of familism, draws a connection between the strength and cohesion of the Italian family and the possibility of using it as a substitute for inadequate institutions; this, he claims, explains the failure to develop a civic consciousness when the family provides such an accessible, strong and widespread substitute. Thus 'amoral familism' has given rise both to cmde explanations and more appropriate deliberations among experts. Yet it remains a strong explanatory category, a 'powerful stereotype', as Gabriella Gribaudi has defined it.'*' Now, if a direct correlation is postulated between structural typology (the nuclear family widely discovered in Sicily) and behavioural typology, the 'powerful stereotype' makes a comeback, or rather never 274 I. FAZIO fades away. Banfield—I am still following Gabriella Gribaudi's line of argument—tumed on its head the most widespread interpretation of Weber's paradigm according to which 'in contrast to the asceticism, the solitude, the individualism of the Protestant entrepreneur we have the image of the Mediterranean man ensnared in a tangle of family ties that inhibit his attempts to achieve self-sufficiency'—and, a fortiori, economic development. (This, incidentally, is precisely the line of reasoning, according to Benigno's work on which I have already commented, that can be seen in the background of the 'Anglo-Saxon models'.) But for Banfield, Gribaudi continues, 'individualism becomes a negative value and the main problem of southem society is on the contrary singled out as its inability to build up stable social solidarity of the type associated with the extended family'.^° One could venture to comment that in Laslett's background is the homeland of rights-based individualism; with the American Banfield, by contrast, there is the infiuence of a kind of community co-operation that has to interact with a different type of individualism, the American model of the frontier spirit. The implications of the amoral familism paradigm clearly need further analysis in the light both of recent research and of the way methods of studying the family in history have changed. Benedetto Meloni, in his introduction to a collection of historical, anthropological and sociological essays arising out of the conference on 'The southem family without familism: economic strategies, networks of relationship and kinship', notes that thirty years of research in this field show that the southern Italian nuclear, neolocal family can exist, has existed and does exist only insofar as it is not isolated.^' This kind of family is fiexible in the way it organizes its economic and relational resources and constmcts networks for this purpose—networks of collaboration in the workplace, among customers, of strategic alliances when dealing with institutions, but above all with relatives, friends and neighbours; to sum up, this kind of southem family enjoys multiple and fiexible forms of reciprocity. Familism was thus, firstly, not a real way of organizing social relationships focused on the family; secondly, it was not even an effective tactic for organizing in order to access resources. Important social networks go beyond and supplement the limits imposed by the nuclear stmcture of co-residence and by the community's isolation. The research agenda related to kinship stmctures in Sicily is not yet exhausted. But there are chronologically scattered data that offer particularly interesting pointers conceming the bilateral nature and the 'cognatic nuances' of Sicilian kinship, whether in the context of modes of living together, organization of labour or transmission of property. These 'cognatic nuances' were identified over a long period by Henri Bresc in his wide-ranging study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sicily, with particular reference to the population of Palermo;^^ they were found more recently by Igor Mineo to have already been prevalent in the Sicilian elite of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.^^ Partly for legal and historical reasons, families—including those who were later to become feudal families—had little agnatic genealogical depth precisely because of the bilateral way inheritance was organized and the bilateral way in which kinship and ancestry were conceptualized. So this was a trait that lasted for a very long time and spread and modified in line with social stratification. The agnatic principle was adopted more and more frequently by elite families, whereas the bilateral THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 275 principle, which is more fiexible and adaptable in that it gives an opportunity to more than one kinship tie, was gradually used by other social groups. If we move forward several centuries, we find more signs of open-endedness in urban family groupings. The residents of the Palermo parish of St Ippolito at the beginning of the eighteenth century were happy to accept male servants, lodgers, nieces and nephews, and children from a previous marriage by one or other or both spouses into the nuclear household.^'* They often organized themselves into groups of unmarried men or women; single women of more than one generation, not always related to each other, would often live together; while single parents who had outlived their spouses or stayed in the town after a spouse had abandoned them or emigrated would look after the children. Relationships with neighbours, even if they were fragile and short-term in the comings and goings of city life of the ancien regime, became very important for the support of individuals. These connections are very difficult to trace, as Delille has noted, remaining as they do outside the 'logic of the sumame' that lets us distinguish kinship and neighbourhood by an onomastic criterion. The Schneiders researched the economic meaning of marriage between first cousins among day-labourers in nineteenth-century Villamaura and found that tracing bilateral kinship was clearly becoming more and more difficult, less obvious, more chancy or indeed possible only with the aid of recollections from descendants or other qualitative sources.^^ (This meant that, whether they were written or oral, the sources were themselves the product of choices made by the subjects of the study.) Women do not pass on their name, so historians can recognize kinship immediately and reliably only from one side: that of patrilineal descent. This is a further demonstration of the 'power of agnation'. Men with the same sumame and married brothers in Villamaura were recognized by the Schneiders as being those massarioti or moderately rich peasant landowners who (once again giving the lie to the supposed isolation of Sicilian peasant families) joined forces to run complex and diversified estates and found it more efficient to continue working together after the death of their father, with consequences that can be imagined for relationships between relatives as well as for the transmission of property. The network analysis approach in its connections to micro-history presents itself as one method of overcoming the impasse of familism. Sicily has been the research field where such analysis has been employed in one of its most famous versions, with the work of Anton Blok on the mafia in a community in western Sicily. In this instance, individuals were placed within multiple relationships and diverse loyalties to social spheres and cultural norms; at the centre of analysis were the forms of mediation in operation at the points where those various relationships converged. These forms of mediation included chains of clients and the violent, legal or para-legal control of territory; they were connected to the unsuccessful process of state-building and were run entirely by violent intermediaries or mafiosi: the monopoly of violence, the elimination of competitors, political alliance-building, protection rackets and a levy on resources. Blok reconstmcted the origin and the entrenchment of mafia allegiances among inter-family relationships, enemies, allies and friends of friends in the context shaped by the flawed management of the transition to a unitary state within the complicated stmcture of local society. The Schneiders and Blok both concern themselves with wider issues, as micro-analysis typically does: while the 276 I. FAZIO Schneiders address the themes of what was known at that time as 'modemization' and the emergence of what became known as 'broker capitalism', Blok observes a spatially circumscribed situation that nevertheless leads to a reinterpretation of more general phenomena, in this case the special aspect that the process of nation-building has assumed in Italy. In both cases, it is mediators who are the focus of attention and the study of the family remains subordinate to this main objective. If we tum to more recent research on Sicily, we find great emphasis on the organization of kinship networks, but couched in such a way that historical techniques derived from network analysis as it is strictly understood leave room for wider questioning and more flexible methods.^^ The network remains in the background as a metaphor used to stress the importance of points of social intersection and of individuals with many allegiances who are involved in forming links with more than one party. A network-based perspective is combined with micro-history to identify the strategies employed by individuals when they form relations that sustain the family by going beyond it—or, on the other hand when they use the family in a wider area of targeted relationships: matrimonial alliances, inheritance and dowries, the reproduction of political and symbolic capital. New meanings for otherwise static definitions emerge from all this: for example, the study by Igor Mineo (see n. 33) demonstrates that, in order to constmct an aristocratic identity and forms of behaviour for themselves, families adopted a strategy based on agnatic selection in the matter of dowries and inheritance—which was in tum based on the division of property and the differentiation between heirs on the basis of gender and rank. In the process, these families gradually abandoned practices characterized by bilaterality and family co-ownership that put spouses and offspring on an equal footing. From Mineo's study, membership of an aristocratic class emerges as a dynamic process based on actions and representations. Family politics can also be traced in the devotional 'spaces' (altars and ceremonies) of the 'devout community' of a seventeenth-century confraternity in Palermo.^^ Through the names of persons connected to each other as patrons or clients, benefactresses,^^ usurers^' and saints^" we can also detect the existence of 'spiders' webs of relationships' between peasants, doctors or up-and-coming men; these relationships, in tum, shed light on a politics of prestige and power, 'team games' involving a number of social actors and the management of large or small symbolic or economic patrimonies. But the family conceived of as a crucial hinge between interests and emotions does not entirely exhaust the contribution made by this new research. In La Santa dei Tomasi, Sara Cabibbo and Marilena Modica point to the personal memorabilia—diaries, letters, testimonies—of a future saint, of her fellow nuns, of the clerics who knew her, as well as of her relatives: these reveal both masculine and feminine peculiarities in relationships of this type.**' In doing so, they demonstrate that family strategies cannot be viewed as pre-determined successes or failures independent of individuals' desires, suffering and choice. In La vecchia dell'aceto, on the other hand, Giovanna Fiume, by means of the women's networks (but not only these) which grew up in eighteenth-century Palermo around a female poisoner, her 'clients' and their victims (husbands), traces 'anti-family' strategies that should be put in the framework of the more unusual meanings that family relationships acquire when we examine cases where normal standards break down and transgressors are punished.*^ The lives THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 277 of spouse-killers and their associated networks of complicity and pervasiveness in city life tell us that the everyday criminality of women as found in the kitchen, the street and the more disreputable working-class areas of an ancien regime city may have been exceptional, yet they show up the normality of family relationships.*^ They show us that families are not always created harmoniously from a balance of demands and desires, in which mediation and the sharing out of work and roles is operative. Families also comprise discordant expectations and plans, initiatives undertaken and courses of action embarked upon both through courage and through cowardice. These are aspects of family life that we can no longer judge as incidental or marginal or even exceptional: it would be worthwhile to test them again through new research. Notes * 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Translated from the Italian by Jennifer Radice. J. Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', American Historical Review, 91, 5, 1986. Cited by G. Gribaudi, Donne, uomini, famiglie. Napoli nel Novecento, L'Ancora, Naples, 1999, p. 89. But the first Italian edition of Burekhardt's book The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy was published in 1876. Le Play's La reforme sociale came out in 1867. For a discussion of the 'great transformation' of the Westem family, see M. Barbagli, Sotto lo stesso tetto: mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo, II Mulino, Bologna, 1984, pp. 3 1 ^ 4 . The chronology is as follows: P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, Methuen, London, 1965; J. Hajnal, 'European Marriage Pattems in Perspective', in D.V. Glass and D.E.C Eversley (eds). Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, Amold, London, 1965; P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds). Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972; J. Hajnal, 'Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation System', Population and Development Review, 8, 1982; R. Wall, J. Robin and P. Laslett (eds). Family Forms in Historic Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. J. C. Peristiany, Mediterranean Family Structures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1946. L. Berkner, 'The Stem Family and the Development Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenthcentury Austrian Example', American Historical Review, 1972. For Italy, G. Delille, 'La famiglia contadina in Italia', in A. Burguiere, C, Klapiseh Zuber, M. Segalen and F. Zonabend, (eds). Storia universale della famiglia, Mondadori, Milan, 1988, and the discussion between Delille and G. Levi, 'La famiglia nel mutamento', Passato e Presente, 7, 1985. Cited from the works of G. Delille, Famiglia e proprieta nel Regno di Napoli, Einaudi, Turin, 1988; G. Da Molin, La famiglia nel passato: strutture familiari nel regno di Napoli in eta moderna, Laterza, Bari, 1990 and (edited by the same author). La famiglia ieri e oggi: trasfonnazioni demogrqfiche e sociali dal XV al XX secolo, Laterza, Bari, 1992. The earliest attestations of neolocality were considered by Henri Bresc in Un monde mediterrane en: economie et societe en Sicile, 1300-1450, Palermo, 1986. On the preponderance of the nuclear family, see A. Di Pasquale, Palermo nel 1480: la popolazione del quartiere della Kalsa, Palermo, 1975; F. Benigno, Una casa, una terra: ricerche su Paceco, paese nuovo della Sicilia del Sei e Settecento, CUECM, Catania, 1985; F. Benigno, 'Un'analisi della coresidenza: Noto nel 1647', in Ultra Pharum: famiglie, commerci e territori nel Meridione modemo, Donzelli, Rome, 2001; here, the author also cites investigations carried out in Militello, Val di Catania and in Acireale; M. Grillo and S. Raffaele, 'Butera nel Setteeento: dinamica demografica e struttura della famiglia', Le Forme e la Storia, 1, 1980; M. Grillo, 'Demografia e societa ad Acicastello fra Settecento e Ottocento: evoluzione e permanenze', in La Sicilia del Settecento, Messina, 1984; S. Raffaele, // censimento siciliano del 1831: Viagrande, CUECM, Catania, 1993; S. Raffaele, Dinamiche demografiche e struttura della famiglia nella Sicilia del Sei-Settecento, CULC, Catania, 1986 and Famiglie e senza famiglia: strutture familiari e dinamiche sociali nella Sicilia moderna, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Naples, 2000; P. Travagliante, // censimento siciliano del 1831: Zafferana Etnea, CUECM, Catania, 1990; M. Aymard, 'Un bourg de Sicile entre XVIe et XVIIe siecle: Gangi', in Conjoncture economique, structures sociales: hommage a Ernest Labrousse, La Haye, Paris, 1974; L. Giovinazzo, Lo stato delle anime della parrocchia di sant'Ippolito a Palermo nel 1714, degree thesis written at the Faeolta di Lettere e Filosofia at the University of Turin during 2000-01; on the numbers of people in a household, see also G. Raffaele, La Guardia allegra e giojosa, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli, 1993 (Giojosa Guardia); I. Fazio, 'Famiglia, lavoro, trasmissione della proprieta: ipotesi di lavoro a partire dal caso siciliano', in B. Meloni (ed.), Famiglia meridionale senza familismo: strategie economiche, reti di relazione e parentela, Donzelli, Rome, 1997 (Capizzi, Cesaro, Taormina, Santa Lucia). E. A. Wrigley, 'No Death without Birth: The Implication of English Mortality in the Early Modem 278 I. FAZIO Period', in R. Porter and A. Wear (eds). Problems and Methods in the History of Medicine, Croom Helm, New York, 1987. IL F. Benigno, 'Famiglia mediterranea e modelli anglosassoni', Meridiana, 6, 1989. 12. A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1978. 13. R. Rowland, 'Sistemas matrimoniales en la peninsula iberica (siglos XVI-XIX): una perspeetiva regional', in V. Perez Moreda and D.S. Reher (eds). La demografia historica en Espana, Ediciones Arquero, Madrid, 1986 and 'Nupeialidade, familia, mediterraneo', Bollettino di Demografia Storica, 5, 1987. 14. On the age of marriage in Sicily, see G. Longhitano et al., Studi di demografia storica siciliana, Soeieta di Storia Patria per la Sicilia Orientale, Catania, 1979 (Bronte, Leonforte, Pietraperzia, Sortino, Melilli); Fazio, 'Famiglia, lavoro, trasmissione della proprieta'; I. Fazio, Alia greca grecanica: donne famiglia e propriety in Sicilia, Gelka, Palermo, 2000 (chapter IV); Benigno, Una casa, una terra; C. Mazzeo, Oliveri dal 1820 al 1849: indagine demografica, degree thesis written at the Facolt^ di Lettere e Filosofia at the University of Messina in 1985. For a discussion, see Fazio, 'Famiglia, lavoro, trasmissione della proprieta' and F. Benigno, 'I dannati del primo sole: ipotesi sulla mortalita di genere', in Ultra Pharum, p. 203 and 'Famiglia mediterranea e modelli anglosassoni'. See also R. Rettaroli, 'L'eta al matrimonio', in M. Barbagli and D. I. Kertzer, Storia della famiglia itaiiana 1750-1950, II Mulino, Bologna 1992. 15. Benigno, 'I dannati del primo sole'. 16. Ibid., p. 203 17. G. Delille, Agricoltura e demografia nel Regno di Napoli nei secoli XVIII e XIX, Guida, Naples, 1977; Famiglia e proprieta nel Regno di Napoli, Einaudi, Turin, 1988 (original edition Famille e propn'ete dans le Royaume de Naples, Ecole Franjaise de Rome, Rome-Paris, 1985). 18. G. Levi, Famiglie contadine nella Liguria del Settecento, in Centro e periferia di uno Stato assoluto, Rosenberg & Seilier, Turin, 1985 (1973); 'Famiglia e parentela: qualche tema di riflessione', in Barbagli and Kertzer, Storia della famiglia; Delille, 'La famiglia contadina in Italia', and 'La famiglia nel mutamento'. Berkner, 'The Stem Family'. 19. A. V. Chajanov, On the Theory of Peasant Economy (eds D. Thomer, B. Kerblay and R.E.F. Smith), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1966. 20. J. Goody, 'Strategies of Heirship', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1, 1973; Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976; The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983. G.P. Murdock, 'Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary', Ethnology, 6, 1967. 21. J. Goody, J. Thirsk and E.P. Thompson (eds). Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976. 22. E.P. Thompson, 'The Grid of Inheritance: A Comment', in Goody, Thirsk and Thompson, Family and Inheritance. Ti. For a bibliography, see the volumes of Storia delle donne in Italia published by Laterza: I. Chabot, Risorse e diritti patrimoniali and R. Ago, 'Oltre la dote: i beni femminili', in A. Groppi (ed.), // lavoro delle donne, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1996 and I. Fazio, 'Percorsi coniugali nell'ltalia moderna', in C. Klapisch-Zuber and M. De Giorgio, Storia del matrimonio, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1996; see also I. Fazio, 'Valori economici e valori simbolici: il declino della dote nell'ltalia dell'Ottocento', Quaderni Storici, 78, 1992 and 'Complicita coniugali: proprieta e identita nella Torino napoleonica', Quaderni Storici, 98, 1998; G. Calvi and I. Chabot (eds), Le ricchezze delle donne: diritti patrimoniali e poteri familiari in Italia (XIII-XIV secc), Rosenberg & Seilier, Turin, 1998; D. Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime, II Mulino, Bologna, 1991 and S. Seidel Menchi and D. Quaglioni (eds), Coniugi nemici: la separazione in Italia del XIV al XVIII secolo, II Mulino, Bologna, 2000 and Matrimoni in dubbio: unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIU secolo, 11 Mulino, Bologna, 2001. On the political nature of the tensions revealed by a focus on dowries, see particularly G. Calvi, // eontratto morale: madri, figli e stato nella Toscana moderna, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1994. 24. Fazio, 'Famiglia, lavoro, trasmissione della proprieta'. 25. Fazio, 'Valori economici e valori simbolici'. 26. Fazio, Alia greca grecanica, p. 196. On family types, see especially M. Barbagli, Sotto lo stesso tetto: mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo, 11 Mulino, Bologna, 1984; on the roles of women in connection with work and inheritance, see M. Palazzi, especially 'Famiglia lavoro e proprieta: le donne nella societa contadina tra continuita e trasformazione', Annali dell'Istituto A. Cervi, 12, 1990 and Donne sole: storia dell'altra faccia deU'ltalia tra antico regime e societa contemporanea, Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 1997. 27. M. Aymard, 'Amministrazione feudale e trasformazioni strutturali tra Cinque e Settecento', in Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale, 1975; 'II commercio dei grani nella Sicilia del Cinquecento', in Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale, 1976; 'La transizione dal feudalesimo al capitalismo', in Storia d'Italia. Annali I, Einaudi, Turin, 1978; 'Economia e societa: uno sguardo d'insieme', in M. Aymard and G. Giarrizzo (eds). La Sicilia, Einaudi, Turin, 1987. 28. For the writings of S. Raffaele, see the bibliography on p. 13 of her Famiglie e senza famiglia; see also I. Fazio, 'Istruzione ed educazione delle donne nella Sicilia degli ultimi Borboni', in Fondazione Lauro Chiazzese, Contributi per un bilancio del regno borbonico, Palermo, 1990. 29. P. Catalanotto, 'Sulla soglia del disonore: gravidanze illegittime e infanzia abbandonata nella Sicilia del THE FAMILY, HONOUR AND GENDER IN SICILY 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 279 Sette-Ottocento', in G. Fiume (ed.), Onore e storia nelle societa mediterranee, La Luna, Palermo, 1989; G. Fiume, 'II diritto della madre, il diritto del figlio non nato e la rivoluzione del parto eesareo', Quaderni Storici, 98, 1998. G. Fiume, 'Le "patenti d'infamia": morale sessuale e igiene sociale nella Sicilia borbonica', Memoria, 17, 1986 and La vecchia dell'aceto: un processo per veneficio nella Palermo di fine Settecento, Gelka, Palermo, 1990. Fiume, La vecchia dell'aceto and 1. Fazio, 'Le donne nei processi penali del Tribunale di Mistretta: ruoli femminili e ideologie normalizzatrici', in La signora dell'oro. La Luna, Palermo, 1987. Catalanotto, in 'Sulla soglia del disonore', analyses the conflict between the authority 'Deputazione delli figliuoli projetti', founded in 1750, and the local magistrates who undertook 'the search for hidden parents' in order to return their abandoned children to them and to relieve the municipality of the expenses of earing for the children, thus running the risk that women wishing to conceal an illegitimate birth would resort to abortion. G. Fiume, 'Cursing, Poisoning and Feminine Morality: The Case of the "Vinegar Hag" in Late Eighteenth-century Palermo', Social Anthropologist, 4, 1996. See also S. Raffaele, 'II caso siciliano: forme altemative di famiglia: adozioni, legittimazioni e riconoscimenti nel secolo XIX', in 'Benedetto chi ti porta, maledetto chi ti manda': I'infanzia abbandonata nel Triveneto (secc. XV-XIX), Canova—Treviso, 1997. M. Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualita a Roma neWOttocento, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1994. C. Gower Chapman, Milocca: un villaggio siciliano. Franco Angeli, Milan, 1985 (1971), pp. 117-22. J. and P. Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily, Academic Press, New York, 1976. M. Herzfeld, 'Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems', Man N.S., 15, 1980. I.Davis, 'Col divorzio c'e diferenza?', in G. Fiume (ed.), Onore e storia nelle societa mediterranee. La Luna, Palermo, 1989, p. 47. J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Values and Institutions in a Greek Mountain Community, Clarendon, Oxford, 1964; J. G. Peristiany (ed.). Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1965; A. Blok, 'Montoni e becchi: un'opposizione chiave per il codice mediterraneo dell'onore', Quademi di Semantica, 2, 1980; I. Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology ofthe Mediterranean, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977; J. Davis, People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative and Social Anthropology, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977; D. D. Gilmore, Honour and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, 1987. Fiume, 'Introduction' to Onore e storia nelle societa mediterranee, pp. 11-12. In this connection, see G. Raffaele, Formare di tutti un gran tutto: la nazionalizzazione delle plebi meridionali tra Borboni e stato unitario. Franco Angeli, Milan, 2001 and P. Pezzino, II paradiso abitato dai diavoli. Societa, elites e istituzioni nel Mezzogiorno contemporaneo. Franco Angeli, Milan, 1992; N. Moe, ' "Altro che Italia!" II sud dei piemontesi (1960-61)', Meridiana, 15, 1992; S. Lupo, 'II grande brigantaggio: interpretazione e memoria di una guerra civile', in W. Barberis (ed.), Storia d'ltalia: annali 18. Guerra e pace, Einaudi, Turin, 2002. On the letter from Farini to Cavour (from Teano, dated 27 October 1860), in C. Benso di Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno: carteggi di Camillo Cavour, III, Bologna, 1959, see Lupo, 'II grande brigantaggio', and Moe, ' "Altro che Italia!" ' A. Blok, The Mafia ofa Sicilian Village (1860-1960): A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs, Harper & Row, New York, 1975. On the Damiani report and the even more pessimistic Lorenzoni enquiry, see G. Raffaele, 'II concetto di onore in alcune tipologie criminali nella Sicilia rurale dell'Ottocento', in Fiume (ed.), Onore e storia nelle societa mediterranee. In this connection, see also Fiume 'Cursing, Poisoning and Feminine Morality' and D. Pompejano, 1. Fazio and G. Raffaele, Controllo sociale e criminalita: un circondario rurale nella Sicilia dell'Ottocento, Franco Angeli, Milan, 1985, pp. 180-7. Raffaele, 'II concetto di onore', p. 221. Fazio, 'Le donne nei processi penali'. I. Schneider, 'Trousseau as Treasure', in Eric B. Ross (ed.). Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism, Academic Press, New York, 1980 and 'Of Vigilance of Virgins', Ethnology, 1971. On the observations conceming the sexuality of women labourers in Sicily, see M. Fiume, 'L'onore femminile neH'agnimeto: lu spassu di lu lumiaru', in Fiume (ed.), Onore e storia nelle societa mediterranee. E. C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Free Press, New York, 1963. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Tradition in Modem Italy, Prineeton University Press, Princeton, 1993. G. Gribaudi, 'Familismo e famiglie meridionali', in Donne, uomini, famiglie, p. 89. Ibid., p. 93 Famiglia meridionale senza familismo: strategie economiche, reti di relazione e parentela, Donzelli, Rome, 1997. H. Bresc, Un monde mediterraneen and 'La famille dans la societe sicilienne medievale', in La famiglia 280 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 1. FAZIO e la vita quotidiana in Europa dal Quattrocento al Seicento. Fonti e problemi. State Archives, Rome, 1986. E. I. Mineo, Nobilta di stato: famiglie e identita aristocratiche nel tardo medioevo: la Sicilia, Donzelli, Rome, 2001 and 'Formazione delle elites urbane nella Sicilia del tardo medioevo: matrimonio e sistemi di successione', Quaderni Storici, 88, 1995. Giovinazzo, Lo stato delle anime della parrocchia di sant'Ippolito. Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Westem Sicily. See, for example, S. Lombardini, 'Family, Kin and the Ou^st for Community: A Study of the Social Networks in Early Modem Italy', in The History ofthe Family, 1, 3, 1998. For the methodology, in the same periodical (1, *, 1996), see B. Wellmann and C. Wetherell, 'Social Networks Analysis of Historical Communities: Some Questions from the Present to the Past'. R. Rosolino, 'Un devoto condominio: spazi rituali e famiglie di una confratemita palermitana del Seicento', Quademi Storici, 97, 1998. 1. Fazio, 'La signora dell'oro: carita femminile, potere e controllo sociale in una comunita siciliana tre Sette e Ottocento', in L. Ferrante, M. Palazzi, G. Pomata (eds), Ragnatele di rapporti: patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne, Rosenberg & Seilier, Turin, 1989. 1. Fazio, 'Trasmissione della proprieta, reti di credito e integrazione sociale in una comunita siciliana dell'Ottocento', Quaderni Storici, 64, 1987. G. Fiume, // santo moro: i processi di canonizzazione di Benedetto da Palermo, Franco Angeli, Milan, 2002; R. Rosolino, 'Le reti sociali della santita: i testimoni al processo di beatificazione di Benedetto da san Fratello del 1625-26', in G. Fiume (ed.), // santo e la citta. San Benedetto il moro: devozioni culti strategie di eta moderna, Marzilio, Venice. 1999. S. Cabibbo and M. Modica, La santa dei Tomasi: vita di suor Maria Crocifissa (1645-1699), Einaudi, Turin, 1989. Fiume, La vecchia dell'aceto. G. Fiume, 'Violenza femminile nella Sicilia dell'Ottocento: la criminalita banale', Incontri Meridionali, 3, 1984.