Legacies of Violence is an engaging exercise in the historical contextualization of ethnographic images and their local genesis. Around the village of Orgosolo on the island of Sardinia, itself a somewhat marginalized and at the same time romanticized outlier of Italy, various myths and stereotypes of uncontrolled Sardinian violence have coalesced into a portrait that inspires fear and contempt among urbane Italians even while it is contested at home.
In some ways, Antonio Sorge’s rehabilitation of older concepts—the Mediterranean as an area of shared cultural values, the Redfieldian distinction between Great and Little Traditions, the association of pastoralism with violent masculinity—shares with the villagers’ dilemmas of modernity the sense of a struggle to find positive ways to channel ideas that have damaged the standing of the place and of the discipline. In part, he achieves this by investing those models with nuance that they did not originally display. On honor, for example, he remonstrates with prevalent stereotypes that portray honor-based societies as necessarily violent; on the Mediterranean, he pushes back effectively against the all-or-none style of classification that made the idea of a Mediterranean culture area ever harder to maintain as a model in the face of increasingly rich and varied data. Here, however, his ability to project new possibilities onto older and cruder Mediterraneanist models leads him, ironically, to dismiss the critiques that in the 1980s cleared the ground for such helpful re-readings as “unfair” (156). Sorge’s own revisionism certainly delivers real insight. For example, his reading of Redfield suggests an urban tradition of civility that infuses local rural ideas about identity and thereby generates an evaluative cultural hierarchy; in that hierarchy, the degree of approximation to the urban ideal becomes the measure of virtue and modernity. Such intelligent re-reading is immensely refreshing because it engages older ideas and shows them to have enduring generative value.
His choice of Orgosolo, moreover, allows him to treat the local ethnographic situation in a wider historical, cultural, and comparative set of frames. Orgosolo itself is a locus classicus in anthropological writings on Italy—a highland village that has metonymically, if erroneously, been treated as typifying what makes the Sardinian highlands exotic and dangerous in the eyes of more self-consciously urbane Italians. The masculine ideology of balentia, aggressive valor, infuses that stereotype and reproduces (and often caricatures) its main characteristics “on the ground.” The community’s long association with banditry and the deeply resentful and suspicious stance that its traditionalists adopt toward the Italian nation-state have given it a special place, as Sorge shows, in the exoticizing imagination that continues to fuel popular recyclings of nineteenth-century Italian “criminal anthropology”—an imagination, evolutionist in origin and content, that also fuels the critical perspectives voiced by co-villagers committed to modernizing the community.
Sorge’s treatment of that older anthropological literature places Orgosolo, and more generally the Sardinian badlands, nicely within the dynamics of the difficult relationship this part of the world has always had with the Italian state and with the country’s intelligentsia, and he shows how that dynamic plays out in social relations within the community as well. In citing Tracey Heatherington’s Wild Sardinia (University of Washington Press, 2010), also an ethnography of Orgosolo, he echoes her account of how the state bureaucracy’s automatic and simplistic assumptions about the impact of traditional pastoralism on the local ecology spring from similar prejudices. That observation also strengthens his useful, if brief, comparison of Orgosolo with southeast Asian highland societies, a move that further complicates his loyalty to Mediterraneanist models and concomitantly makes one wish for a more extensive, detailed engagement with Heatherington’s and other recent ethnographic research on highland Sardinia.
Sorge attributes the derogatory phrase vu cumprá, the term for Senegalese and other itinerant migrant street vendors, to their allegedly poor Italian (104). But the phrase is also a phonetic Neapolitan rendition of an inappropriately familiar but grammatically correct phrase. This detail reveals an Italian double cultural hierarchy that grants low cultural status to southerners, a category usually understood to include Sardinians, while relegating immigrants to a still lower level; it thereby corroborates Sorge’s sophisticated recognition of the complexities of Italian identity. On the other hand, given his portrayal of Sardinian feuding as potentially infinite in its lack of restraining mechanisms (despite a brief allusion to conflict resolution [45]), his broad-brush assumptions about Mediterranean societies seem slightly at odds with the extensive and elaborate conciliation rituals that, for example, I found among those Cretan highlanders he paradoxically also cites to argue for cultural commonality.
His book is especially useful for its honest recognition of such complexities and of the challenges they pose to assumptions held by anthropologists and Italian elites alike. It does not really pull us back into the older, generalized image of “Mediterranean society,” precisely because Sorge is too good an ethnographer to hide the messiness that makes every community distinctive. Sorge’s Orgosolo is especially interesting, moreover, because of the way he shows how local arguments engage with those evolutionist themes of traditionalism and modernity that have long shaped anthropological thought—including criminal anthropology, one of the discipline’s most embarrassing antecedents.
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[Review length: 842 words • Review posted on November 1, 2016]