Abstract
In 1954, the American political scientist Edward Banfield traveled from Chicago to Chiaromonte, a small village in southern Italy. Banfield’s goal was to discover why the villagers’ lives had been so poor—and so unchanged—for centuries. After nine months of research, Banfield concluded that the family was at the center of life in Chiaromonte—to the detriment of every other institution. It was the family that guaranteed assistance and emotional support, the family that functioned as the economic center of production and consumption. As the only environment in which trust and respect reigned, the family also operated as the starting point for all social relationships, vital to everything from meeting new people to finding a job. But there was a steep downside: this attitude of “Why trust a foreigner?” blocked all external forms of solidarity and cooperation. The singular emphasis on family inhibited the development of a modern society, which Max Weber characterized as anonymous, rationalized, bureaucratic, and capitalistic. In contemporary terms, the family blocked the creation of social capital; the villagers’ amoral familism, as Banfield called it, condemned the society to backwardness.1
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Notes
Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958).
Sydel F. Silverman, “Agricultural Organization, Social Structure, and Values in Italy: Amoral Familism Reconsidered,” American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 1–20.
John Davis, Land and Family in Pisticci (London: Athlone Press, 1973).
Thomas Belmonte, The Broken Fountain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: Sharecropping, Wage Labor, and Coresidence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984);
Donald S. Pitkin, The House That Giacomo Built: History of an Italian Family, 1898–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Alesina Alberto and Ichino Andrea, L’Italia fatta in casa: Indagine sulla vera ricchezza degli italiani (Milan: Mondadori, 2009).
Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000).
Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000);
Agostino Giovagnoli, Il partito italiano: La Democrazia Cristiana dal 1942 al 1994 (Rome: Laterza, 1996).
David W. Ellwood and Gian Piero Brunetta, eds., Hollywood in Europa: Industria, politica, pubblico del cinema 1945–1960 (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1991);
David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
James M. Utterback and William J. Abernathy, “A Dynamic Model of Product and Process Innovation,” Omega 3 (1975): 639–56.
Tersilla Faravelli Giacobone, Paola Guidi, and Anty Pansera, Dalla casa elettrica alla casa elettronica: Storia e significati degli elettrodomestici (Milan: Arcadia, 1989), 52.
Banca d’Italia, “Reddito risparmio e struttura della ricchezza delle famiglie italiane nel 1966,” Bollettino 4 (1967); Banca d’Italia, Risparmio nel 1975 (Rome: Banca d’Italia, 1976);
Carmela D’Apice, L’arcipelago dei consumi: Consumi e redditi delle famiglie in Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi (Bari: De Donato, 1981).
A.M. Banchieri, “Avremo la cucina elettronica!” La Cucina Italiana, May 1958, 459.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
See also Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1996).
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987).
Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
Stefano Follesa and Anna Nuzzacci, “Storia della cucina componibile in Italia,” accessed May 15, 2010, http://divisare.com/lesson/37.
Francesco Zurlo, Makio Hasuike (Milan: Abitare Segesta, 2003).
Ibid. See also Adam Arvidsson, “The Therapy of Consumption Motivation Research and the New Italian Housewife, 1958–62,” Journal of Material Culture 5 (2000): 251–74.
Francesco Alberoni, Consumi e società (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964).
For the symbolic value of cars, see Federico Paolini, Storia sociale dell’automobile in Italia (Rome: Carocci, 2007).
For the cultural and social meaning of consumer culture in this period in Italy, see Emanuela Scarpellini, Material Nation: A Consumer’s History of Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125–222.
For more on the washing machine, see Enrica Asquer, La rivoluzione candida: Storia sociale della lavatrice in Italia (1945–1970) (Rome: Carocci, 2007).
Goffredo Fofi, L’immigrazione meridionale a Torino (Milan: Aragno, 1964);
Franco Alasia and Danilo Montaldi, Milano Corea: Inchiesta sugli immigrati (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960);
Alessandro Pizzorno, Comunità e razionalizzazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1960).
For more information on women in particular, see Anna Badino, Tutte a casa? Donne tra migrazione e lavoro nella Torino degli anni Sessanta (Rome: Viella, 2008);
Laura Minestroni, Casa dolce casa: Storia dello spazio domestico tra pubblicità e società (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996).
Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine; Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel and Arwen Mohun, eds., Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia: Seconda serie, 1956–1965 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1966), 75–6.
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Scarpellini, E. (2015). Americanization and Authenticity: Italian Food Products and Practices in the 1950s and 1960s. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_6
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