Sonic ethnography explores the role of sound-making and listening practices in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. The book uses a combination of text, photography and sound recording to investigate soundful cultural performances such as tree rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages, events promoting cultural heritage and more informal musical performances. Its approach demonstrates how in the acoustic domain tradition is made and disrupted, power struggles take place and acoustic communities are momentarily brought together in shared temporality and space. This book underlines how an attention to sound-making, recording and listening practices can bring innovative contributions to the ethnography of an area that has been studied by Italian and foreign scholars since the 1950s. The approaches of the classic anthropological scholarship on the region have become one of the forces at play in a complex field where discourses on a traditional past, politics of heritage and transnational diasporic communities interact. The book’s argument is carried forward not just by textual means, but also through the inclusion of six ‘sound-chapters’, that is, compositions of sound recordings themed so as to interact with the topic of the corresponding textual chapter, and through a large number of colour photographs. Two methodological chapters, respectively about doing research in sound and on photo-ethnography, explain the authors’ approach to field research and to the making of the book.
Race Talk is about racism and multilingual communication. The book draws on original, ethnographic research conducted on heterogeneous and multiethnic street markets in Napoli, southern Italy, in 2012. Here, Neapolitan street vendors worked alongside migrants from Senegal, Nigeria, Bangladesh and China as part of an ambivalent, cooperative and unequal quest to survive and prosper. A heteroglossia of different kinds of talk revealed the relations of domination and subordination between people. It showed how racialised hierarchies were enforced, as well as how ambivalent and novel transcultural solidarities emerged in everyday interaction. Street markets in Napoli provided important economic possibilities for both those born in the city, and those who had arrived more recently. However, anti-immigration politics, austerity and urban regeneration projects increasingly limited people’s ability to make a living in this way. In response, the street vendors organised politically. Their collective action was underpinned by an antihegemonic, multilingual talk through which they spoke back to power. Since that time, racism has surged in Napoli, and across the world, whilst human movement has continued unabated, because of worsening political, economic and environmental conditions. The book suggests that the edginess of multilingual talk – amongst people diversified in terms of race, legal status, religion and language, but united by an understanding of their potential disposability – offers useful insights into the kinds of imaginaries that will be needed to overcome the politics of borders and nationalism.
NAPOLI HAS BEEN a significant location for arrivals and departures throughout history. Everyone from holidaying European nobility to foreign invaders and emigrating southern Italian peasantry has settled or passed through the city and left their mark there. In Mediterranean Crossings , Iain Chambers argued that the city’s ‘creolised past’ complicates the narratives of Italian nation-building that emerged over the coursed of the nineteenth century because Napoli’s political, economic and geographical culture continued to be infused by a Greek, Byzantine
. The Porta was then assembled in the artist's native Paduli in southern Italy, ninety minutes inland from Napoli, in the province of Campania, after which it was transported to Lampedusa for installation. The potential fragility and archaic nature of the artist's material repertoire underscores his interest in making a non-monumental work. The Porta has faded and eroded over the years. The glazes have faded, some of the terracotta slabs have been replaced, and ceramic objects have detached and broken off of its surface. The work has deteriorated so much that in
Basilicata are no longer involved in agriculture, wheat festivals continue to be actively practised and indeed since 2010 both the number of festivals and attendance have been on the increase. Multilayered arrays of candles are created for the purpose of making offerings to the local saints in many parts of southern Italy. In past times, however, candles were an expensive commodity that was not within everyone’s means. Peasants would instead create these arrays by tying ears of wheat together using a similar wooden frame but without the candles. Thick with ears of wheat
Anglophobia in Fascist Italy traces the roots of Fascist Anglophobia from the Great War and through the subsequent peace treaties and its development during the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime. Initially, Britain was seen by many Italians as a ‘false friend’ who was also the main obstacle to Italy’s foreign policy aspirations, a view embraced by Mussolini and his movement. While at times dormant, this Anglophobic sentiment did not disappear in the years that followed, and was later rekindled during the Ethiopian War. The peculiarly Fascist contribution to the assessment of Britain was ideological. From the mid-1920s, the regime’s intellectuals saw Fascism as the answer to a crisis in the Western world and as irredeemably opposed to Western civilisation of the sort exemplified by Britain. Britain was described as having failed the ‘problem of labour’, and Fascism framed as a salvation ideology, which nations would either embrace or face decay. The perception of Britain as a decaying and feeble nation increased after the Great Depression. The consequence of this was a consistent underrating of British power and resolve to resist Italian ambitions. An analysis of popular reception of the Fascist discourse shows that the tendency to underrate Britain had permeated large sectors of the Italian people, and that public opinion was more hostile to Britain than previously thought. Indeed, in some quarters hatred towards the British lasted until the end of the Second World War, in both occupied and liberated Italy.
liberated Italy. Traditional assessment of Allied occupation of Southern Italy has been negative.50 Della Volpe wrote that, just a few weeks after the liberation, any enthusiasm for the Allies had already vanished. Already in October, Della Volpe wrote, all the delusions born out of Allied propaganda had been erased by the indifference and lack of interest of the Allied administration, the AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories). The catastrophic conditions of the population, the unrest, the protests and decay were ‘invariably repeated’ as the Allies
In this work, we focus our attention on the role of sound in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. Through a combination of text, photographs and sound recordings, we will concentrate on soundful cultural performances, including religious festivals and collective events meant to promote cultural heritage, as well as more informal musical performances. Throughout the book we will listen to tree rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages and archival sound recordings, to understand how in the acoustic dimension people mark space
creation of preconceptions as much as they were creating communities. Many records of southern Italian music, for example, were full of references to the Sicilian Mafia (Fugazzotto 2010 ). The importance of musical practices and sound recordings for maintaining identities in diasporic communities is even more crucial wherever the connection with the country of origin is less clearly defined and the imaginary component is more pronounced. A good example is provided by Shelemay in her work on Syrian Jews: it is a musical genre, the Pizmon, that is crucial to preserving a
dexterity. But those who could not were often disregarded and blamed for the mistreatment they experienced on the part of people in the street, the police or local organised crime groups. Some of the same Neapolitans who spoke melancholically about their subordinated status in Italy as southern Italians – a status that I have argued was frequently tied up with speaking Neapolitan – also called for migrants to assimilate linguistically in order to survive and be accepted in Napoli. At this point hierarchical ‘language attitudes’ about Neapolitan were invoked to excuse an